Terriers in Charge: Sindhu Rayapaneni (CAS’24)
Vice President, It’s On Us
Shortly after she arrived at Boston University as a freshman, Sindhu Rayapaneni began to see social media postings for a new campus student organization, the BU chapter of It’s On Us, a national organization dedicated to stopping sexual assault on college campuses. Rayapaneni, a premed student, was interested in learning more.
“A lot of people in my community of South Asians don’t talk about sexual assault, unhealthy relationships, how to have a healthy relationship,” she says. “I realized there was a lot I didn’t know.”
Rayapaneni signed up as a member and soon became the group’s inaugural diversity, equity, and inclusion chair, working to personalize trainings for different communities. She wanted to make the club more inclusive, “not just talking about the mainstream narrative of a male perpetrator and a female cisgender woman victim. I wanted people from other cultures and ethnicities and sexual and gender orientations to be able to feel that they had a voice and feel empowered within the movement,” she says.
As DEI chair, she began partnering with other student organizations and doing training for BU’s preprofessional business and STEM fraternities, as well as traditional fraternities and sororities. The next year, she became the chapter’s vice president, working with groups like the Dean of Students office and BU’s Sexual Assault Response & Prevention (SARP) to facilitate workshops and self-care events.
Today, It’s On Us at BU has approximately 300 members. The group meets every other week to plan events. In addition to bringing in speakers, coordinating self-care and relationship workshops and bystander trainings, and supporting students who are sexual assault survivors, Rayapaneni serves as a liaison with the national organization, which now has approximately 500 chapters at campuses across the country.
“It’s crazy to see how much we’ve become a model for other campus survivor organizations,” she says. She’s met with student leaders from Pennsylvania, California, Florida, and Ohio to talk about the work the BU chapter is engaged in.
As for what she’s learned from her almost four years with It’s On Us, “I now realize,” she says, “how pervasive sexual assault and sexual violence is. It impacts people regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, education, or socioeconomic status. Sexual violence affects women, men, transgender individuals, children, people of every sexual orientation, those who are homeless and disabled.”
In addition to her work with It’s On Us, Rayapaneni is also a certified rape crisis counselor with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. She plans to apply to medical school and to become an emergency room physician, where she can continue caring for and supporting survivors and help train other medical professionals on how best to care for them.
“My work with It’s On Us and the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center has made me realize there are nuances in medicine that are overlooked,” she says. “This work has made me a better person and I want to continue helping people who have experienced sexual assault.”
Find more information about BU’s It’s On Us chapter by following the group on Instagram, or email at itsonus@bu.edu.
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