As part of a campaign to raise awareness about sexual violence on campus, Harvard University Professor Diane Rosenfeld spoke to students Tuesday about coming together and taking action.

Rosenfeld, who previously served as the senior counsel to the Violence Against Women Office at the U.S. Department of Justice, co-produced the film “Rape is …” featuring Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” and other rape survivors sharing their stories.

“Silence and secrecy are the weapons that rapists use to keep their victims quiet,” Rosenfeld said.

The Harvard Law School graduate was approached by the Harvard Coalition Against Sexual Violence in 2001 and has since been spreading the word in an attempt to bring resources, education and discipline of offenders to college campuses.

Her short film played Tuesday afternoon in the Behrakis Health Sciences building for the Northeastern students focused on the way victims reacted to different instances of rape, from an inmate who was raped as a young boy to a woman who was forced to perform oral sex at gunpoint.

Eve Ensler talked about how she was abused as a young girl and spent the majority of her life trying to deal with it.

“Our energy should not be spent surviving and recovering and if we were to get back that energy, I know the planet would be a completely different place,” Ensler said in the film.

Rosenfeld, who also appeared in the film, said, “Rape keeps women occupied in a way that it does not keep men occupied.”

She said that women do not want to speak out about their experiences because they are afraid to be labeled as victims.

She said that only four to 13 percent of all rapes are reported and that of those, only one percent of the offenders are convicted.

“How do you get your voice heard, how are you believed?” she said.

Rosenfeld said that rapists will commonly try to make even their victims believe that the incident never occurred or that it was consensual.

She said that the policy at Northeastern comes close to requiring women to have given affirmative consent for the affair to be consensual, but that in most cases, “We’re assumed to consent unless we fight back and we have bruises.”

Rosenfeld said that the law confirms that women always have the right to say no at any time.

Quoting a friend who appeared on Good Morning America a few weeks ago, she said, “If I invite you over to my house for an hour, and after half an hour I tell you you gotta go, you gotta go. It’s my house.”

The film also focused on how young girls sometimes find themselves on the streets with no money and wind up as prostitutes.

“Usually prostitution is not considered in an analogous form from rape,” she said. “But it is.”

Rosenfeld supports the Feminist Student Organization and Student Government Association Executive Vice President Michael Romano in the belief that a campus rape crisis center would be most beneficial to students.

“Northeastern has to provide support for its survivors,” she said. “The police department is not support.”

Rosenfeld advocated that by getting faculty and students to participate on campus, changes can actually be made to the existing programs designed to deal with sexual violence.

“Student apathy is a big problem, but a lot of it is based on the belief that nothing’s going to happen,” she said. “Numbers make a huge difference.”

Rosenfeld said that the way to make things happen is to get the administration involved.

“If you can change things at Northeastern and make the administration take rape very, very seriously, you’ll have come a long way,” she said. “Administrations have this inherent conflict of interest of wanting to do something about rape cases and wanting to ignore them because they don’t want it to seem like rape happens on campus.”

She asked the students whether they would rather go to a school where one rape was reported or where 10 were reported.

The FSO, who sponsored the event, is working with students and faculty to ensure that more rapes are reported and that victims receive the support they deserve.

“The rape crisis center is definitely the top priority right now,” said Adrianne Ortega, a junior behavioral neural science major and a member of FSO.

Matthew Boucher, a junior history and elementary education major and a member of the International Socialist Organization, also attended the event.

“I am kind of new to hearing about the campaign,” he said. “I think a rape crisis center would be a great step forward and if they are going to go forward, we certainly want to help them.”

Rosenfeld said that just like the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church, nothing will ever be done if no one speaks up.

She said that the only reason action has been taken in the church is because “someone came forward and broke the silence.”