Since 2003, the crisis in Darfur in western Sudan has claimed the lives of some 450,000 people and displaced some 2,500,000 others. Many observers consider Darfur to be the first case of genocide in the new millennium.

A group of students at Fanshawe won't STAND for it, and they are holding an event on Monday, March 17 to help raise awareness. The event will be featuring Sergeant Debbie Bodkin of the Waterloo Region Police Service, who was part of the Atrocities Documentation Team of the State Department and the Commission of Inquiry of the United Nations, both of which were sent to the region to interview refugees who had fled Darfur.

Sergeat Bodkin is also a recipient of the Law Enforcement Professional of the Year by Ontario Women in Law Enforcement.

These student global citizens who refuse to be silent are part of the Fanshawe chapter of STAND, Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, a student initiative that began several years ago right here in London at The University of Western Ontario and that has since grown to become a national advocacy group here in Canada, as has its American counterpart.

Rich Hitchens, an instructor in the School of Language and Liberal Studies who teaches a course on genocide, has worked closely with STAND Canada over the last few years, including recently holding a national conference in Ottawa, and he has nothing but praise for these young citizens.

“STAND really is the leading voice in Canada on Darfur,” Hitchens explained. “Canadian politicians regularly meet with the leadership of STAND, and a delegation of its founders even met with our former prime minister.”

Hitchens, who is also the founder and president of the Canadian Centre for Genocide Education, is working closely with STAND Fanshawe, which includes many of his own students from his genocide course.

STAND Fanshawe's coming event, which will be held on Monday, March 17, will be taking place at the Wolf Performance Hall of the London Public Library in downtown London. The event begins at 7 p.m. and will go until 9 p.m. The event will begin with a screening of the film, Darfur: On Our Watch”, which follows American movie star Mia Farrow to Africa to help the refugees from Darfur and to help shine the spotlight on the continuing crisis there. Sergeat Bodkin is featured in the film and she will conclude the evening. The event is a partnership of STAND Fanshawe and STAND Western, the school of language and liberal studies, as well as the police foundations program here at Fanshawe, the London Public Library and the Canadian Centre for Genocide Education.

Sergeant Bodkin began her international work earlier in the former-Yugoslavia after responding to a call for police officers to join an international team investigating the mass killings in Kosovo. Motivated more by the desire to see the world than to change it, Sergeant Bodkin jumped at the chance to travel. Sergeant Bodkin assisted coroners as they exhumed mass graves and sorted through bones to identify the remains of victims and determine how they died.

When the State Department put out a call for volunteers to interview refugees from Darfur, Sergeant Bodkin immediately signed up.

But nothing had prepared Sergeant Bodkin for what she was to learn there. Every time Sergeant Bodkin talks about Darfur, she cries. Sergeant Bodkin can never forget the two girls — aged seven and 10 — who had been gang-raped. Upon her return from Chad, Sergeant Bodkin fell into a deep depression, but she believes it was not triggered by the horrible stories she heard, but by her feeling of powerlessness. A counsellor diagnosed Sergeant Bodkin with post-traumatic stress disorder and suggested that talking about her experiences would help. Sergeant Bodkin started to talk to anyone who would listen and she hasn't stopped.