Victoria University’s queer representative group UniQ recently pulled off the first Day of Silence on campus.
Day of Silence is an international youth movement that seeks to bring attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people.
Students across New Zealand took a vow of silence on September 9 to call attention to the silencing effect of homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic bullying, name-calling, and harassment.
At 12.30pm UniQ representative Dani Pickering gave a speech on the importance of the day, which was followed by a loud group scream to symbolically break the silence.
Pickering—who has been involved in the Day of Silence on many campuses over the past eight years—sees the event as a positive way of “providing validation and hope to participants who have been silenced by issues of homophobic / biphobic / transphobic bullying,” while also creating a space to be “as disruptive as possible in order to draw attention to those issues.”
A second year student who wasn’t aware of the event said, although the screams gave them “a real fright,” and they were prompted to find out what was going on.