This semester there has been activity by a new group on campus: MOHASA, or Men Of Hamilton Against Sexual Assault. It didn’t quite sit right with us when we first heard about it and it still doesn’t. To be clear, we are fully in support of men being involved in the conversation about sexual assault on campus. Truthfully, in our personal experience as well as in public events recently (take Kavanaugh and President Trump) men haven’t really engaged in this conversation unless it’s arguing that there is no way that they or anyone they know is even capable of sexual assault. In our experience, men who aren’t survivors don’t feel comfortable or confident talking about sexual assault which makes the problem harder to address and is also damaging to male survivors of sexual assault.

We believe that different voices are critical to this conversation in order to educate and understand sexual assault as thoroughly as possible. But what bothers us with MOHASA is that there exists, not one but, two groups on campus dedicated to addressing this problem, raising awareness, starting conversations, and creating change. One is SMART, the Sexual Misconduct and Assault Reform Taskforce, and the other is SAVES, which stands for Sexual Assault and Violence Education and Support. Both SAVES and SMART have made a point to try to engage men in this conversation; both SAVES and SMART use gender neutral pronouns when discussing assault; both SAVES and SMART have worked incredibly hard to create safe spaces for anyone (and, ideally, everyone) to talk about the issue of rape. Because of this, it’s insulting to create a new group that addresses the same problems with the same goals as two existing groups on campus with the only difference being that this third group is marketed towards men. It ignores the fact that SMART and SAVES aren’t just for womxn, they’re for everyone. What’s more, having a group use the word ‘men’ in the name is exclusive to trans- and gender non-conforming members of the community who are also part of the conversation.

We understand that MOHASA was formed specifically to get men involved in the conversation and the group was formed, in part, to market to them. But the fact that it has to be exclusively marketed to men, in order to gain acceptance and members, implies that men wouldn’t join a group run by survivors who work to engage with the entire campus community. (This is evident in SAVES and SMART. There are very few men in either organization.) The thought behind it is troubling. And men starting their own groups in social movements isn’t a new idea. There is a trend in social movements where womxn, especially womxn of color, work incredibly hard on social movements that men later take over. The womxn then end up receiving little to no credit. A relevant example is the gay rights movement.

We know many gay rights activists but people like Stormé DeLarverie, a black lesbian credited with throwing the first punch at the Stonewall riots, and Marsha P. Johnson, the ‘Mother of Drag’ and an early activist for AIDS awareness, have only recently begun to receive the credit they deserve. Forming MOHASA at Hamilton, where SAVES and SMART have been out, active, and pretty visible on campus, is just another example of that happening. SAVES and SMART both have weekly meetings and aren’t gendered. Furthermore, creating a new group for only men that claims to fill a hole in the campus community, when womxn have been working on this and trying to get men to join the conversation, is both insulting and adds to a negative tradition in social movements. The voices of womxn and survivors should be taken just as seriously.

So to the member of MOHASA and all men on campus: there is no reason not to join SMART or SAVES! You clearly have ideas and your desire to get more men on campus involved in this conversation is great. But given that historically a majority of perpetrators of sexual violence have been cis men, a conversation about sexual assault that only happens between cis men probably isn’t productive. We’re not making baseless claims when we say that men commit the majority of sexual violence. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center found that 91 percent of sexual violence victims are womxn. And on one university campus, 63.3 percent of the men who reported that they’d committed rape or attempted rape were serial offenders. That’s one of the reasons why men talking alone about sexual violence doesn’t make sense to us. The organization being exclusive to and led by men puts it at risk for unknowingly allowing an assailant to join, which is detrimental to their stated goals.

We would feel a lot more comfortable with MOHASA if it were self-reflective. Why try to do the same work from a less informed perspective? Why not work on creating conversations about how toxic masculinity affects them? Why not focus on making the spaces they occupy safe for survivors? If their organization is, as it claims to be, based on active listening, why aren’t they coming to the events of survivor-informed groups and bringing all of their friends? Why was their first project raising money for a cause that, while important, does not directly benefit the survivors on this campus? It’s hard to lead meetings that no men attend, and even worse to hear that men are forming a group to create spaces to discuss the same topic but without the direct leadership and input of survivors or womxn.

To us, it seems fitting that their emblem is a male lion. This is a symbol of masculine aggression and an animal that largely relies on the work of their female counterpart to survive.

This is a difficult problem to address because, for so many people — ourselves included — it’s a charged topic. And we hope, upon reading this, the takeaway isn’t that we hate men. There is history and evidence to support our argument that activism to address the problem of sexual assault is best when it is led and informed by survivors. One of MOHASA’s listed values is, “We are committed to educating ourselves with the truths and experiences of women and persons of marginalized identities.” Hopefully they read this piece, with truths and experiences of two women, and take it seriously.