UltraViolet Posts Attack Ad

UltraViolet’s advertisement that ran on Facebook

This Saturday, Facebook began to run an attack advertisement from UltraViolet targeting Dartmouth’s purported rape culture.

The advertisement read, “Accepted to Dartmouth? You should know about its rape problem before you attend. Learn more now,” with a picture of a concerned adolescent girl staring pensively at the camera while her hands rest on her laptop.

UltraViolet is a feminist activist group that aims to provide broad support to grassroots causes. Some of their notable past actions include defending abortion clinics in Louisiana, getting Reebok to revoke its sponsorship of rapper Rick Ross, and petitioning for the CEO of AOL to publicly apologize for sexist statements.

By entering the well-trodden social media site and targeting high schoolers using Facebook’s information database, UltraViolet hopes to hit the Dartmouth Admissions Office where it hurts. On their website, UltraViolet instructs Dartmouth to treat sexual assault seriously with a brief collection of paragraphs and a petition. In their paragraphs, they reference the Bored@Baker rape post and last year’s Dimensions protest as illustrative of administrative apathy regarding sexual assault.

Student response was passionate. Many Dartmouth students posted enraged Facebook statuses deploring UltraViolet’s advertisement. The advertisement itself received relatively few likes and shares as of the time of this blog post.

We’ve included a photo of the advertisement for our readers’ perusal.

For a list of actions the Dartmouth administration has taken against sexual assault, see this link.