A Jewish student at Princeton is one of the driving forces behind a campus initiative to raise awareness about sexual assault and unhealthy social/sexual pressures on campus.

Maital Friedman, a 22-year-old senior from White Plains, NY, is a founder and leader of SpeakOut, which was launched last spring with the support of several university entities, including the Center for Jewish Life / Hillel.

“We’re trying to get people to speak out against sexually dangerous situations,” Friedman said as she sat in a classroom at the CJL with another founder of the group, senior Sarah Erickson of Springfield, Ohio.

The initiative, which is now being run by an association of 18 undergraduate students, two graduate students, and two college administrators, emerged last spring in the wake of several sexual assaults on campus, according to the women.

“There were some assaults and some attempted sexual assaults,” Friedman said. “There was a concern that people weren’t aware enough and self-empowered enough to speak up, and we wanted to provide those tools to people.”

One way SpeakOut is encouraging that empowerment is through a T-shirt campaign that was launched last April, according to Friedman.

“When we had our T-shirt campaign, we wanted to make it as broad as possible,” she said as she pulled a blue-and-white T-shirt from her backpack. “SpeakOut at Princeton,” read the legend on the front. And, on the back, “Be a friend, not a bystander.”

Explained Erickson, “We’re trying to promote social responsibility on campus. If you see something that may be a potential problem, you should say something.”

SpeakOut plans to repeat the campaign this April, Friedman said, and she hopes that the Center for Jewish Life will once again be eager to participate. Last year, Rivky Ross, educational director of the CJL together with her husband, Rabbi Josh Ross, tied her weekly shiur (lesson) on the biblical story of Dina to the SpeakOut campaign.

Everyone at the CJL was happy to participate in the T-shirt campaign, according to executive director Rabbi Julie Roth. “We are one of many campus partners” of SpeakOut, she said. “I think it’s an important initiative.”

Friedman said that SpeakOut is currently planning another big campaign — installing signs in the bathrooms of classroom buildings and dormitories and, she hopes, the CJL as well. The signs, which direct students to campus resources for help, also encourage students to be more safety conscious and aware of the problem of sexual assault on campus.

“This will be a really big campaign,” Friedman said. “It’s a way to reach out across different affiliations.”

A religion major who is a member of the Yavneh House, an Orthodox group at the CJL, Friedman hopes to bring the message of sexual safety home to the Jewish community on campus.

“The need to include awareness in the Jewish community about these kinds of campaigns is really, really important,” she said. “I definitely think that part of repairing the world is repairing oneself in one’s personal and most intimate relationship first.

“We need to be creating a safe environment on campus and in our own, smaller communities,” she added. “It’s really important that we start at home and make our personal and social intimate relationships healthy and safe.”