Students arriving on college campuses this month will be brought into several conversations about sex, consent, and sexual assault. For many, it will be the first time they discuss such topics in a formal way.
While sexual assault and how to combat it has become a focus of discussion on college campuses, that’s not the case in secondary schools. Yet high-profile rape cases, like the St. Paul’s School trial, illustrate that sexual violence is a reality that many students deal with before they reach a college campus.
In general, high schools are hesitant to talk about sexuality, several experts say. Sex-education classes look different across the country and at different types of schools, but high schools typically shy away from discussions of sexual assault.
But once students arrive at college, they are overwhelmed with information about healthy relationships and sexual assault, while also often living away from home for the first time. And while most students have a solid understanding that “no means no,” the nuances of sexual consent are more difficult for young adults to navigate, said C.J. Pascoe, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
“These kids are coming out of their high schools not really understanding these more complicated dynamics that occur around issues of masculinity and femininity,” she said. “They don’t know how to talk about the gray areas, and we haven’t given them a language to talk about those gray areas.”
That presents a challenge for college educators trying to teach students about healthy relationships and sexual-assault prevention. Ms. Pascoe, who teaches sexuality classes, said many of her students haven’t had basic sex-ed classes before taking her course, so she needs to review those topics before moving on to more mature topics.
Adults “think that anything about sex and sexuality is too dangerous for young people to talk about,” she said. “Instead of teaching high-school students about sex, consent, and assault, we go silent.”
Sexual Activity Precedes Education
While students might not be learning about consent and sexual assault before they reach college, they’re often still sexually active, or could be involved in or witness to sexual violence, said Elizabeth A. Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
More college educators are thinking about how to introduce more of this type of education at the K-12 level and whether questions about sexual-violence histories should be built in to the admissions process.
When students arrive at a college, they may already have a set of beliefs or thoughts around appropriate sexual behaviors. There’s a learning curve, said Laura Palumbo, communications director at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. For many prevention educators, she adds, “it feels like swimming against a very strong current.”
Jane Stapleton, co-director of the Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said she encourages prevention educators to assess how much their students already know. More colleges around the country have been conducting campus-climate surveys, which can help officials identify when to offer risk and prevention trainings.
And often the communities that students are in during high school “normalizes” a culture of sexual violence, which poses an extra challenge for colleges, she said.
“Students who are leaving schools like St. Paul’s or other public high schools are existing in that same culture,” she said. “We’re saying to them, ‘That behavior is not acceptable.’”
But those who are perpetrators of sexual assault in high school aren’t necessarily the same as those in college. Research released last month showed that the majority of men who sexually assaulted someone before college did not also do so when in college.
Kevin Swartout, an assistant professor of psychology and public health at Georgia State University who led that research, said that could be because young men experience their highest levels of “hostile masculinity” at different ages.
Dramatizing Real-Life Experiences
Like many institutions, Vassar College uses skits to portray real-life situations. An outside group performs skits based on monologues that college students have written about their own experiences.
Through those performances — along with bystander-intervention trainings that reference specific parties or dorms on campus, an online course, and peer-to-peer discussions — officials hope to make the risk of sexual assault on the campus seem possible, and preventable, to students. But many students have already been victimized before arriving on campus, said Charlotte Strauss Swanson, coordinator of sexual-assault and violence prevention at Vassar.
On larger campuses, like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the range of experiences and values that students bring to college is broad.
“We try to gauge our programing so that students are able to see their own experience and their own values and beliefs within the kind of work that we do,” said Holly Rider-Milkovich, director of the university’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center. That means not using gender-specific language, and acknowledging that some students haven’t engaged in sexual activity, while others have.
The department also leads training sessions where students can practice giving and receiving consent, she said. While many students understand the concept, most are less confident in practice, Ms. Rider-Milkovich said.
And there’s a focus on discussing consent in a broader way, and not just when having sex.
“We validate that students are making a variety of choices based on their values across the spectrum of decisions,” Ms. Rider-Milkovich said. “All of those choices are valid choices when they are respectful.”