A man has been exposing himself to students on campus. When you think about who would do something like that, you might picture some devious-looking man that seems to radiate evil or perversion.

But the truth is that nothing about him looks evil or perverse. He is a white male, about 5’10, age 25-35, with light brown hair, blue eyes, no beard, and he drives a silver or grey minivan.

These exposures have happened to six students, five females and one male, since the summer, according to Director of Public Safety Ron Stowe. Finding the suspect is important if we want this to stop because, if there have been six incidents, there will likely be more. If there might be more, we as a community should do our best to protect ourselves and each other.

The nature of most of these incidents, as I’m lead to believe, has been the man in his minivan asking students for directions and tricking them into approaching while he masturbates. As you can imagine, this needs to stop.

With six separate incidents, some may be apt to blame Public Safety. Some may question their preventative or protective measures, but is it reasonable to expect that no crime will ever enter Guilford?

Probably not. Public Safety has put up fliers in the resident halls, has filed police reports, increased police patrols through Guilford, and stayed in contact with the detective handling the case.

In other words, we really cannot justifiably blame Public Safety. They are doing their best to put a stop to these acts. But, I think we can do something ourselves.

To start, we need to view these acts seriously and maturely. Guilford is our community. It is our responsibility. Our actions and reactions determine if behaviors like these will be accepted or ignored, discouraged or fought, destructive or constructive.

“But Travis, how could it be constructive?” you might rightly ask.

I absolutely do not mean that these acts are welcomed. Continued, they could likely break down our general communal trust. But, we could, and I daresay should, instead use these them to strengthen our community.

“We make of it what we will,” said Director of Student Judicial Affairs Sandy Bowles, discussing how students deal with sexual assaults.

We could make something of this. We could realize that our close-knit community is not immune to threats. We could see that our outlook on these acts shapes our community. We should talk openly and maturely about how these acts, and others, affect us and what we should do to stop them.

For trying to keep these actions out of our community, our best course of action could be summed up by Stowe: “If you see something, say something.”