Your Voice: The Student’s Agenda | 'Silent Bystanders'

Developed, funded and helmed by Banathi Mgqoboka, Your Voice: The Student’s Agenda is a civic-minded experimental 8 to 10-minute journalistic genre-blending multimedia (video and audio) news report series. This first instalment of Your Voice was produced in partnership with The Oppidan Press at Rhodes University. In a grassroots campaign style, the series’ conceptual communicative ethos aimed to unpack various hard-hitting contemporary sociopolitical issues that affect the communal student experience. Rooted in the principles of Constructive, Engaged and Solutions Journalism practices, the series’ format progressively used a crowd-sourced approach to solicit problem-driven stories from over 7,000 students (via Twitter/X, Facebook and group email lists), whilst applying a solutions journalism approach to news reporting. The series ultimately produced award-winning regional reportage for its pilot episode. Aptly titled Silent Bystanders, the pilot was a social awareness initiative addressing the shortcomings in student policy on the Rhodes University campus by examining the predicament of ‘bystanding’ during occurrences of sexual misconduct towards women students. Crucially, the reportage and discourse of this project prompted Rhodes University’s Student Affairs Office to reassess the directives of its Sexual Offences Policy for Students. The pilot featured contributions from academics in the disciplines of ethics, feminist theory and psychology as well as responses from Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust (NPO), a support and safety organisation dedicated to empowering survivors of rape and other sexual offences.