IUP student honored with Biden Courage Award for stopping sexual assault

Adrianna Branin says she has never seen herself as a hero; others do.

Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden honored the petite coed with the Biden Courage Award for intervening to stop a sexual assault outside of an off campus party at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Branin, a 20 year-old junior at IUP, said she was walking home from an off campus party last fall with two roommates when she noticed an inebriated young woman standing on a driveway with one breast exposed screaming “I need a cigarette.”

“My initial thought was just keep walking— not my problem, not my problem. Then almost immediately I heard behind me really disgusting cat calling comments about the girl. And there she was at the bottom of her driveway with 7 to 9 men surrounding her. I saw a man with his hand on her breast and the flash of his cell phone,” she said.

Branin said she ran up to the girl, pulled her blouse up and escorted her back up to the house. Then she walked up to the men and began berating them as monsters and predators.

“I was furious. I told them ‘You should have helped that girl. And if you took any photos, you had better delete them. They were not consensual, ‘” she said.

The following Monday she went to the university’s Title IX office and reported what had happened.

“I wouldn’t know the girl if I saw her again. But I wanted them to know if any pictures surfaced they were not consensual.” Branin said.

Biden hoped students would begin to take such steps when he started the It’s on Us movement in 2014 with President Barack Obama. Their goal: to shift the culture around domestic and sexual violence. Later, the Biden Foundation launched its annual courage awards to honor student heroes who step up to halt sexual violence on campus.

“It’s on all of us—not just heroes, all of us. We all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture of this country,” Biden said Tuesday as he honored Branin and Rutgers University senior Vladimir Carrasco at ceremony at New York City’s Russian Tea Room.

Susan Graham, clinical case manager at the IUP Counseling Center said Branin takes such charges seriously. The political science/religious studies major is one of her most committed bystander intervention educators.

Colleges which once cautioned coeds on risk reduction strategies—never walk alone at night, always carry pepper spray or a whistle—pivoted to bystander intervention several years ago as the Obama administration education department began amassing a catalog of complaints of sexual harassment and violence on campuses across the country.

The Green Dot program, a bystander intervention curriculum developed at the University of Kentucky in 2006, has spread to more than 700 colleges and high schools across the country. IUP began to implement it in 2016 using certified student trainers like Branin to spread the word.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, whose administration has distributed $3 million in grants to such programs, congratulated Branin.

“I hope her story inspires others to take action if they come across a situation where someone is in danger of harm,” Wolf said.

“It is a testament to the power of individual choices and moments to make a difference in the culture,” said Kristen Parks, vice president of programming for Alteristic, the organization that licenses the Green Dot program.

Graham, who nominated Branin for the Biden Courage Award, said the young woman who grew up in Philadelphia is fearless.

“Adrianna is barely five feet tall and probably weighs no more than 90 pounds, if that. And she was in heels! The men were much bigger and taller than she was,” Graham wrote.

The daughter of Steven Branin and Lauren Vachon said her parents have always urged her to take a stand for things she believes in and to stand up for the underdog.

They were there in New York last week, smiling as the former vice president honored their daughter.

“I am all over their Facebook pages. But I do believe my bystanding really does come down to my parents. They have always gone out of their way to help people in their community, to help people who need to be helped,” she said.