All women are beautiful

Shaina Craner

This year on October 19, the National Organization for Women observes Love Your Body Day, a campaign designed to celebrate beauty in all forms, whether that comes in a size two or a size 20.

Every day women all over the world are bombarded with images of skeletal models and actresses. Love Your Body Day is the NOW organization’s appeal to women to disregard Hollywood’s ideal image that urges us to nip, tuck, inject and airbrush until we fit the Vogue mold.

These pressures are not new by any means; real women have had to contend with rail-thin role models for decades, but a more recent development in body-image issues has arisen, one that is targeting girls as young as six years old.

Paper ‘wish cranes’ bring community together

Courtesy of Jasper LaFortune

Ashley Centers

Jasper LaFortune has spent 25 hours folding origami paper cranes since January. He folds them during his classes at Moscow Senior High School, while watching television or whenever he has free time.

LaFortune, founder of Wish Cranes, spends his free time folding cranes to promote healing and peace in terminally ill individuals. He also folds cranes in memory of his own father who died from metastatic brain cancer on November 12, 2010, after a 14-month battle.

“Last July, about 10 months into my dad’s brain cancer, he received a set of 1,000 paper cranes from this elementary school in Colorado. One of the kids was a family friend. It was totally remarkable for him. I mean I was there when we opened it up and we were completely awed by their generosity,” LaFortune said.

Shatter the silence. Stop the violence.

Shaina Craner

The University of Idaho’s 2011 Take Back the Night event held Thursday September 29 in the Agricultural Science auditorium drew a crowd of around 200 students, staff and Moscow citizens.

The event is held annually at the university—and hundreds of locations around the world—with the mission of ending sexual violence in all forms. This year’s TBTN was especially poignant due to the tragedy that occurred at the start of the semester, and the march was dedicated to former UI student Katy Benoit, whose life was lost as a result of a violent relationship.

Help put a stop to sexual violence

Ashley Centers

Program coordinator for the Women’s Center Lysa Salsbury, said somebody is sexually assaulted every two minutes in the United States but only 40 percent of these crimes get reported to the police. Nearly 250 women get sexually assaulted or raped on the University of Idaho campus every year.

“Fear of not being believed, emotional and physical trauma from assault, societal victim-blaming, inadequate prosecution laws that mean that almost 94% of perpetrators will never spend a day in jail for their crime,” Salsbury said.

Students can increase prevention and awareness of sexual assault and domestic violence on campus by participating in ‘Take Back the Night’ at 8 p.m., Thursday in the Agricultural Sciences Building auditorium, room 106.