Archive: 'It's On Us' — The White House Anti-Sexual-Assault Campaign
From the TI archives — originally published September 2014.
On September 19, 2014, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden launched "It's On Us" — a national public-awareness campaign aimed at stopping sexual assault on college campuses, with its sights set specifically on young men.
The campaign's core ask was bystander intervention: notice a situation that could lead to assault, and get in the way before it happens. Don't look the other way; never blame the victim. The White House launched it in partnership with Generation Progress, and it was backed by commitments from companies, social media platforms, and about 200 campus student bodies.
The celebrity PSA did the heavy lifting. Jon Hamm, Kerry Washington, Rose Byrne, Questlove, Common, Connie Britton, Olivia Munn, Kevin Love, Mayim Bialik, Lance Bass, Gina Gershon, Randy Jackson, and others appeared alongside Obama and Biden, telling viewers it was on all of us to stop sexual assault.
The campaign anchored itself in the era's numbers: one in five women sexually assaulted while in college, most assaults unreported, eight in ten victims knowing their attacker.
It's On Us went on to become one of the longest-running campus anti-assault efforts in the country, still active a decade later under Civic Nation. The launch video — the original PSA — remains online.
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