Today, for the first time since 2023, the Office of Intimate Violence Prevention and Response (OIVPR) is hosting Denim Day events across campus. The events come as the number of reported instances of intimate violence at the College have tripled from last year, according to OIVPR Director Elizabeth Rogers.
“This [Denim Day] is a way to connect … with a wider conversation happening around the globe about how to support survivors, get educated on consent, and end victim blaming,” Rogers said in an interview with the Record.
Denim Day is a worldwide sexual violence prevention and education campaign, hosted annually on the final Wednesday of April. The day gets its name from a 1998 Italian Supreme Court ruling which overturned the rape conviction of a 45-year-old man under the pretense that the 18-year-old victim was wearing jeans so tight that the man could not have removed them on his own, meaning she must have consented to sex. News of the story spread internationally, and the first Denim Day event was organized by the advocacy group Peace Over Violence in Los Angeles in April 1999, according to the organization’s website. To promote affirmative consent and show support for survivors of sexual violence, members of OIVPR hope that all willing students will wear denim today.
“It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing,” Rogers said. “You can be covered up or you can be naked, but that doesn’t give consent. That’s what Denim Day is supposed to show.”
According to Rogers, who joined the College as director of OIVPR in 2025, the College held Denim Day events in 2022 and 2023, but OIVPR is reviving the tradition to bring awareness to the office’s resources as well as healthy practices around consent. “We’re giving students opportunities to reflect on questions like … How do I speak up about my boundaries during sex?’” she said. “We also want students to know the resources available in case harm does happen.”
Denim Day is a student-led initiative hosted by peer educators, students such as Maya Sachs ’27 who run educational programming for OIVPR. “We’re hosting events all throughout Sexual Assault Awareness Month and especially on Denim Day that are really geared towards our age group,” Sachs said in an interview with the Record. “For example, we’re hosting a Love Island themed event to bring awareness to toxic relationship characteristics through a show that a lot of people know and love.”
The revived Denim Day events coincide with an increase in the number of cases of sexual violence at the College that have been reported to OIVPR. Rogers declined to provide specific numbers, but said that the number of cases reported to the office has roughly tripled since last year.
Rogers stressed that this proportional increase, while dramatic, could be driven by increased reporting, rather than more cases of sexual violence. “We’ve been very intentional about doing outreach for the office … and trying to build trust in this office with a variety of different communities,” she said.
OIVPR is confidential, unlike the College’s federally-mandated Title IX office, which shares information about reports of sexual violence on a need-to-know basis. Rogers believes that her work spreading awareness of OIVPR’s confidentiality may have increased the number of reports being made to her office.
According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, which operates the nation’s sexual assault hotline, 13 percent of all students on college campuses and 26 percent of undergraduate women have experienced rape or sexual assault.
According to peer educator Lisa Kogawa ’27, Denim Day activities seek to show solidarity with survivors of instances of intimate violence while also bringing awareness to unhealthy dynamics that often precede abuse. “[Intimate violence] can also look like emotional manipulation, coercion, stalking, and other violations of boundaries,” Kogawa wrote in an email to the Record. “It is important to be able to recognize some of the warning signs. This requires both knowledge and action, which is the gap the OIVPR Office is attempting to fill through our training and workshops on consent and intervention.”
