ATHENS, Ohio – The nation’s universities are again open for business this fall. And, again, an epidemic of campus sexual assault starts anew, as it does on many campuses in the first few weeks of the fall semester.

On the campus of Ohio University, for example, in the first four weeks of school, campus and local police have received about a dozen reports of sexual assault.

But this year, in the midst of #MeToo, of admired public figures questioned for their past behavior toward women and when a Supreme Court justice nominee is accused of sexual assault while he was a student, this well-respected university in a small southeast Ohio town has responded with rage and, as importantly, action.

Students have had enough. And, they say, they are going to fix this. They're going to do it with the zeal unique to college students, with campus resources pooling for women to safely walk through campus, with student government on board, with administration attention and their own brand of campus signage.

As you walk down College Street on OU's campus, white bedsheets and banners hang beneath large Greek letters on fraternity and sorority houses.

In previous years and at other universities, those bedsheets have been painted to degrade and sexualize women, particularly on Welcome Weekends and college football game days. With sayings so nasty we can hardly print them here, they’ve encouraged male predatory behavior and female subordination and disenfranchisement.

Last week, in Athens, anyone driving past Greek houses could read, in flapping bedsheet scrawl, “No does not mean convince me,” “Our bodies, our rules,” and “Stand with survivors.”

It’s not just the women who are angry.

“It surprised me that there was a greater need to do something from people who otherwise might not be speaking up,” Mallory Golski, president of OU’s Women’s Panhellenic Association, said as she sat at Brenen's Coffee Café.

It didn’t take long, said Golski, for students to ask themselves, “‘What can I do with my skills, my experience, my story, with my friends or whatever resources you have, how can I utilize that to make a change on campus.'"

While students say the number of assaults reported on this campus seem higher than ever before, they fit into to a national trend. More than half of college sexual assaults annually take place between August and November. Experts call that particularly dangerous time for students the “red zone.”

“My mind immediately thought, 'Wow, I'm so glad people are reporting the sexual assault because I know that they happen every weekend and people just don't report them,'” said Tori Doran, a senior at OU. “Maybe it's not that our campus is getting more unsafe but that we're becoming more aware and more of an activist community.”

Change the paradigm

As students bustled around local coffee shops between classes, sat in the bars they'll be working at later that night and walked through academic buildings they should be studying in, they talked about what they can do to change the culture at their school.

For Kristin Kawecki, chapter president of Sigma Kappa sorority, it was painting that first bedsheet that read “Consent is sexy” with “sexy” crossed out and replaced with the word "mandatory."

For Doran, it was standing up at a sorority chapter meeting and talking publicly about her experience with campus sexual assault for the first time.

“Since the conversation was brought up at the end of my chapter [meeting] I stood up and said ‘I've experienced this myself. I reported it successfully. I'm way stronger than I was then, and I will proudly help you if anything happens to any of you guys,’” Doran said.

For Mary Ryznar and Erin Halpin, it was creating a group chat called Safe Walk Home.

After the fifth assault was reported via a campus-wide crime notification, the two seniors created the group message on GroupMe while sitting in their living room. They invited other female students to join. It’s meant to be a resource for women to get home safely and warn each other about potentially dangerous situations they see on campus or creepy guys at a bar.

Ryznar’s opening message read: “Alright ladies, this is a group chat for girls to text when they’re alone and drunk. No one can walk home alone anymore this s--- (has) gotta stop.”

Within 30 minutes, 500 women joined. Ryznar and Halpin reached out to GroupMe to expand the number of members allowed in a group. Now, there are more than 1,000 female students in it.

The first night it was up, someone sent a message saying their younger sister was scared to walk alone from Baker University Center. Within minutes, other women in the group volunteered to pick her up.

For student body president Maddie Sloat, it was working with her peers in student senate to start hosting forums about the issue and get feedback from students on what safety measures should be implemented.

She's also using the student momentum to put pressure on administrators to secure funding for sexual assault programming and installing more lighting around campus.

Sloat is working on creating an app that students can use to monitor their walk home, contact a friend and/or the police in a discreet way and access a list of campus resources if a sexual assault occurs. The app should be available by the end of the fall semester, she says.

"You want to do as much as you can with university policy," Sloat said, "but we're acknowledging as well that there's only so much that we can push for administrators to change."

Awareness matters

For Golski, Cody Shanklin and vice president of student senate Hannah Burke, it was organizing an “It’s on Us” rally that's scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 27.

Shanklin, a senior at OU, said he got the idea to organize an event after watching his female roommates buying Tasers and pepper spray to protect themselves and researching self-defense moves in case they're attacked.

"I rarely would have to experience something like this and (yet) my best friends could experience something like this every time they walk out the door," Shanklin said. "I was fed up."

About 500 students have already RSVP'd to the event, which is described as a student-led initiative to promote accountability and shut down acts of sexual violence at OU.

For Ellen Wagner, a student reporter covering the police beat, it was writing a story for The Post student newspaper.

"It's making students aware that it's happening," Wagner said. "Students are starting to realize this is a problem and take it upon themselves to fix it."

For Spenser Brown, it was volunteering to stand by a table outside Baker University Center showing support for sexual assault survivors after his fraternity and others put up banners in support of women on campus. OU's Interfraternity Council set up a table for students to pose with statements against sexual assault to post on social media.

For Anthony Ciliberto and his colleagues, it’s providing programming for power-based personal violence, consent education and bystander intervention training.

Ciliberto, a graduate assistant for Better Bystanders, said they've received more requests for training this semester particularly from Greek Life organizations and local bars. They also work with OU athletic teams.

Ohio University president M. Duane Nellis also stepped up when he saw that his students didn’t feel safe on campus by releasing a statement and sending a letter to parents.

"One sexual assault anywhere is one too many. In our community, we will not tolerate such behavior. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.," Nellis said in a Sept. 6 statement. "We know that the victim will be forever changed by this experience. That is a realization that hurts every one of us. We must work together to prevent sexual assault from happening not only on this campus, but campuses nationwide. We will work tirelessly to hold those who commit such crimes fully accountable under the law and on campus. We must treat one another with respect and challenge those who do not. We must look out for one another and raise our collective voices to say no more. Not here. Not anywhere.”

By the end of last week, after OU students had written a raft of tweets about their efforts, the tweets had gone viral. Their signs of protest have caught the attention of students across the country. And while their efforts attempt to tackle a national problem, their actions are mostly limited to their own campus because, they say, that’s where they can make a difference.