How One University Uses New-Student Orientation to Talk About Sexual Assault

A young woman sways under flashing strobe lights and thumping music, her eyes bloodshot, clearly intoxicated. A man, about the same age, begins dancing with her and kissing her. She weakly tries to push him away. Eventually, he leads her to her apartment, pulls her into her bedroom, and shuts the door. He begins taking her clothes off, and the scene ends.

The scenario leading up to a rape occurs during a short film that was shown to University of Richmond freshmen and transfer students on Friday night during orientation for new students. The session focused on bystander intervention, training students on how to step in when they see signs of a potential assault. In the video, friends and witnesses look concerned when they see the young man and woman interacting, but they take no action.

Earlier that day, as new Richmond students trekked across the private university’s 350-acre wooded campus in their orientation groups, they were bubbly and excited. They chatted with one another about fall courses, about their roommates, and, of course, about parties. They called out the names of friends in other groups and waved as they walked by.

Starting with the bystander-intervention training, however, new students spend three to four hours over several days engaging with the difficult topic of campus sexual assault. At Richmond, there are three mandatory programs devoted to sexual-assault education at orientation, and the topic factors into discussions at other events for incoming students.

At many colleges, orientation, which often takes place over the summer or just before fall classes begin, serves as students’ introduction to the issues of sexual assault and consent. Those topics have become major priorities for colleges as public attention on their handling of sexual-assault cases has intensified. Richmond is one of dozens of colleges where sexual-violence complaints are under investigation for possible violations of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX.

The risk of assault is especially high for new students during the beginning of the fall semester, so addressing the issue at orientation is important, college officials say. But doing so brings challenges for colleges: They must try to teach students about one of the most closely watched areas of higher education, in a couple of hours, at a time when distractions and other worries abound. And designing such a curriculum isn’t easy; students arrive on campus with vastly different experiences with sex and relationships.

Administrators nationwide say it is important to strike a balance between keeping orientation positive and fun, while making sure students understand the real danger of sexual violence and know how to keep themselves and their peers safe. The hope, they say, is that including discussions of sexual-assault prevention at orientation will inspire students to set in motion cultural change on campuses.

Inspired by the Training

New students’ schedules are packed here on Friday; mandatory events and discussions don’t end until nearly 11 p.m. The bystander-intervention program is one of the last items on their agenda.

About 400 students — half of the incoming class — are in the room at once. Most of the session is led by other students, which is one way the training has evolved since its debut in 2011, says Kerry Albright Fankhauser, interim dean of Westhampton College, the university’s college for undergraduate women. “Before, it was a lot of talking heads,” she says.

Alexandra Abreu, a junior, is one of the students leading the training. She is part of “Spiders for Spiders,” a movement begun last fall by Richmond students that seeks to educate students about sexual violence.

“I think it’s good to have a mix” of students and administrators speaking about sexual assault, Ms. Abreu says. “When you’re at a party, the dean is not going to be there.” But, she says, if a student wants to report an incident, it is comforting to know that Richmond’s staff members “are there for you as well.” The half-dozen student leaders include both men and women.

The 75-minute event starts with a video; popular songs play in the background as students hold handwritten signs of support for sexual-assault survivors, interspersed with some of the more widely publicized statistics on the issue.

New students are asked whether they know someone who has experienced sexual violence; most of them raise their hands. But when asked if they would know how to prevent such an incident, only a handful of students keep their hands up. Much of the program consists of student leaders offering strategies for intervening when they see a drunken friend trying to push away from someone or being led upstairs at a fraternity house.

The new students look weary from the long day, but almost no one pulls out their phones. They applaud at the end of each video. They laugh at one of the student leaders’ ideas for creating a distraction at parties: “Start a conga line!”

Most of the sexual-assault statistics were already familiar to Emily Churchill, a freshman from Lancaster, Pa., who says she has mostly educated herself on the issue. She attended a private high school, where sex was brought up during health classes, she says, but “not quite like this.”

Still, she describes Richmond’s bystander training as “inspiring,” and she plans to get involved in the university’s sexual-assault awareness movement. The session has reminded her, she says, “that you can step in and prevent sexual violence from happening without being the party police.”

Meghan Scharnagl, of Freehold, N.J., says she has had minimal sexual-assault education before now, and “usually you don’t really talk about what to do” to avert such an incident.

Her friend, Jane Irving, agrees, noting that she and other students would have benefited from bystander training during their high school years. Ms. Irving, of Cambridge, Mass., has talked about the risks surrounding sexual assault with her parents, though not in detail. “My dad is always like, Watch out for the frat guys,” she says with a laugh.

Si Thu Tun is at an even greater disadvantage: He has barely discussed sex before, let alone sexual violence. He is an international student from Burma, which he calls “a very religious, closed-minded society.”

Mr. Tun is transferring to Richmond after two years at nearby Lynchburg College, which, he says, offered some education on sexual assault but not as much as Richmond. He says he felt uncomfortable during parts of Friday’s session, though it was helpful over all.

“When I was thinking about orientation, I was thinking about a detailed college tour, how to sign up for classes. I wasn’t thinking about an educational program on sexual assault,” he says.

Jay Davis, on the other hand, says he went into the program thinking that he had already learned about the issue in high school. But Mr. Davis, a freshman from Springfield, Va., says the session taught him, among other lessons, that “consent is a really powerful thing.”

Mr. Davis, like several new Richmond students, has kept up with the controversy generated by an article in Rolling Stone magazine that detailed an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, which surfaced while he and his peers were applying to college. The magazine retracted the story after it collapsed under scrutiny from the news media.

But Mr. Davis says the issue at the article’s core is still important to keep in mind, because sexual assault is happening on many campuses. The bystander session reminded him of his responsibility to help stop such incidents, he says.

Ms. Albright Fankhauser says she hasn’t heard of many colleges of Richmond’s size that include as much orientation programming on sexual assault. The bystander-intervention session reinforces the lessons of an online sexual-violence education program, called Haven, that students are required to complete before arriving on campus, she says.

In addition to the bystander training, orientation events include a performance involving monologues written by Richmond students who have experienced sexual violence. The new students discuss what they see in groups of about 20. They also receive a 30- to 40-minute training about Title IX and associated resources on campus.

Ms. Albright Fankhauser says students’ education on sexual-assault prevention will continue throughout the fall and spring. Students’ engagement with the issue has risen in recent years, she says.

It can be difficult to measure how well orientation sessions on sexual assault really educate students. But Ms. Abreu, one of Richmond’s student leaders, says she hopes the university’s efforts will solidify an expectation that students will learn about these issues and discuss them regularly.

Talking about sexual violence at orientation can be awkward at first, she says, but by the end of the program, “people become more comfortable with it. They’re able to share, This made me feel this way.”