The reeducation of consent as it relates to sexual violence prevention was the focus of the project. This largely meant that we were able to focus on taking down and replacing the current Sexual Assault training video that the university has required for students because of how triggering and toxic it proved to be too many individuals. Along with offering a new option to the sexual assault training video, we wanted to look into UMBC’s sexual assault policy especially as it relates to student organizations and the specific training that they might receive, particularly sports and greek life.
First, we researched the sexual violence case that UMBC was sued for in 2018. The lawsuit highlighted cases of sexual assault that occurred on campus and/or by UMBC students. These cases were poorly handled and barely acknowledged by the UMBC administration. UMBC was accused of interfering with evidence and discouraging survivors to cover up these crimes committed by their student body. The lawsuit was later dismissed but it still acted as a major sign that change was needed regarding UMBC policy. Students pushed and enforced accountability on administration which led to some initiatives in response; including retriever courage and the sexual assault prevention training.
Recognizing the connection between UMBC’s response to misconduct and the triggering training, we concentrated our further research here. The current program that we use is labeled “Not Anymore” this coming off within itself as problematic because it insinuates that sexual violence was once okay. From here we wanted to look into other alternative videos that were scientifically backed to work as well as those used on other campuses, both the effectiveness from which we can imitate and the ineffective from which we can avoid adaptation of. This led to our discovery of a large company that curates these videos and other training modules called Culture of Respect. What we surprisingly discovered when researching Culture of Respect is that our current program can be found on the website, but soon realized that Culture of Respect has better options available. Some of these options target specific training depending on the audience. The training options were organized on the site by different categories, the most important being level of evidence. Each training was marked with “emerging,” “promising,” or “supported by evidence.” Optimally, the replacement training will come from the latter.
In order to receive feedback from other students to gauge how they felt about the current training, we created a survey and administered it to a slew of people (75 responses). This allowed us to collect our own data and present it to both Ever, the OEI coordinator, and Amelia, from the Women’s Center. Our concerns were both reaffirmed and supported. Within our meeting with Ever, they were very understanding and shared the same concerns. Ever has stated that they were already looking into making their own training. This was positive to hear as OEI is largely in charge of creating and providing this training. With our meeting with Amelia, we talked a lot about consent training with children and how parenting plays into that. An interesting thing that she had said was to respect children’s boundaries, which means if they don’t want to give you a hug that is okay. Not that this idea is revolutionary but it is one simple way to become more aware and prevent rape culture in such a minute way.
Within our survey that we sent out via Group Me and Social Media, we first asked the question of gender identity, just so we can see who is more likely to answer the questionnaire, as well as allowing us to break down the information we gathered further through a gendered lens. So here you can see that we pooled largely a self-identifying female audience with it being 71.2 percent of the people who participated in the survey.
For our next question, we asked the question of whether or not our audience had found the Sexual Assault Training Video to be triggering. We discovered that only 43.2% of people had said no, and 12.2% of people had said no but they knew someone who did, the other 44.6% of people had found the video triggering to some degree. When looking at this question from a gendered lens, dividing the results according to participants' self-indicated gender, the responses indicate that no self-identifying men had found the video to be triggering. This being expected but backing a major point and theme within society in general being that although not exclusively, sexual violence remains an issue that disproportionately affects women. This is likely why the men seem to be less triggered by it.
A helpful aspect of the video that we had discovered when rewatching the video was the feature of the trigger button. When used the assigned key the video blacked out the testimonial of the sexual assault encounter. For this question, we simply asked specifically those who were triggered by the content if they had used this feature. Our findings determined that an overwhelming majority of people had not used the feature, or simply did not know or realize its existence. As most things are only useful if you know about them this meant that this feature though useful was not effective.
Along with our last question we wanted to know how effective the video was in delivering its message, our findings being quite concerning especially after you take a gendered lens to it. Almost 50% of people stated that they did not retain the information of the video. As this video is mandatory that label just speaks to how important the information in the video is. Once looking through a gendered lens it was found that most of these claims came from self-identifying men. This being concerning as it is mostly men who commit acts of sexual violence.
After gathering our data, we found that our current program is in no way reaching the way it should be leaving it overall defective. The last question that we had asked in our survey asked for general feedback from individuals, and we just wanted to highlight some of the responses that we have received.
Highlights of General Feedback we Received:
Having more interaction would help with retaining information and improve the training in general.
Think those who identify as a male should get a more in-depth version of sexual assault training if there was a way to make the information “stick” better that would be great. the length of the modules might have caused people to lose interest as well
Considering some people (especially those who need to hear this information), hardly paid attention to this training, I don’t think it was entirely effective.
The trigger warnings were somewhat helpful, but during the quiet of the video being muted and blocked out, it kinda made me panic because I still knew what they were showing and it still impacted me and made me feel almost sick. I think having a video not quite as graphic but still informative would work, not every informative video needs to SHOW the trauma for students to understand it’s a serious issue.
Here is an infographic that we had made to compile our data. This will be posted on social media to update all that change is coming!
Many of our comments included asking for ways to help, from here we urge you to try joining the Women’s Center, or even asking Ever Hannah the OEI coordinator if they need help making a new Sexual Violence training video! Along with this if you need help, there are some great resources on campus, this being the counseling center, the women’s center, and We Believe You.
Within the question of what we would do different, or what needs to be changed is, going bigger in our approach would mean focusing on a culture change, the hardest thing that we found when trying to figure out how to do this is that by the point people get to college they might have already participated in harmful behavior and are likely “stuck in their ways”. That being said consent education should be a part of the parenting lifestyle, so education needs to happen with that, but along with that consent needs to be talked about and discussed when we start teaching children about sex and genitals. Ideally, this could be solved by implementing an inclusive reoccurring sex/consent education system into schools starting at elementary. It may also require information to be received by the parents of these students as well to make them aware of what they can do in the home to incorporate consent into their lives.