2008 Woodie Awards
EDITORIAL| Local HIV scare hits too close to home
Amanda Finnegan
Issue date: 2/15/07 Section: News
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Middle-America Pennsylvania isn't immune to controversy.
Just down the road, in the heart of suburbia, Cheyney University, in Cheyney, Pa., is dealing with a bombshell of its own. On Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007, university police arrested 36-year-old Sakinah Floyd, who is facing charges of prostitution, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, according to ABC 6 News.
Floyd admitted to having unprotected sex with at least 10 male students and acknowledged that she is HIV positive, driving the entire Cheyney campus into a nervous frenzy.
Our immediate thought is to think back to who we know at Cheyney, then West Chester University, a neighboring campus, and soon our own campus. We start to retrace our steps, steps of our friends, steps of our partners. Things begin to get a little real and we speculate about people we know and ourselves.
But why does it take something like the events at Cheyney to make us stop and look at our own sexual health? As young adults with our whole lives ahead of us (or so we think), we are prone to think that something like HIV couldn't happen to us.
The events at Cheyney have shown us that it most certainly can.
Only a few weeks ago, Cabrini offered free HIV testing on campus for the first time. Out of 2,300 students, plus faculty, a mere 18 took advantage of the free testing. As the editors of the Loquitur sat around for our weekly meeting and discussed the topic, we discovered that only 2 out of 13 of us chose to get tested, a surprising statistic in itself since the Loquitur advertised the opportunity.
As a Catholic college, we understand that Cabrini is expected to uphold certain values and beliefs. Because of these circumstances, the college is limited in what it can provide with regards to sexual health, but health services is more than a place to go to when you have a cold. While they may not be able to dispense birth control, they are however, there to educate students and help them find the resources that they need in order to practice safe sexual health.
Just down the road, in the heart of suburbia, Cheyney University, in Cheyney, Pa., is dealing with a bombshell of its own. On Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007, university police arrested 36-year-old Sakinah Floyd, who is facing charges of prostitution, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, according to ABC 6 News.
Floyd admitted to having unprotected sex with at least 10 male students and acknowledged that she is HIV positive, driving the entire Cheyney campus into a nervous frenzy.
Our immediate thought is to think back to who we know at Cheyney, then West Chester University, a neighboring campus, and soon our own campus. We start to retrace our steps, steps of our friends, steps of our partners. Things begin to get a little real and we speculate about people we know and ourselves.
But why does it take something like the events at Cheyney to make us stop and look at our own sexual health? As young adults with our whole lives ahead of us (or so we think), we are prone to think that something like HIV couldn't happen to us.
The events at Cheyney have shown us that it most certainly can.
Only a few weeks ago, Cabrini offered free HIV testing on campus for the first time. Out of 2,300 students, plus faculty, a mere 18 took advantage of the free testing. As the editors of the Loquitur sat around for our weekly meeting and discussed the topic, we discovered that only 2 out of 13 of us chose to get tested, a surprising statistic in itself since the Loquitur advertised the opportunity.
As a Catholic college, we understand that Cabrini is expected to uphold certain values and beliefs. Because of these circumstances, the college is limited in what it can provide with regards to sexual health, but health services is more than a place to go to when you have a cold. While they may not be able to dispense birth control, they are however, there to educate students and help them find the resources that they need in order to practice safe sexual health.
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