that was a real ego boost. i feel like iwas really oversold here. it's a real honor to be here. phyllis isdefinitely one of my personal heroes on this campus. i have great personal andprofessional respect for the really important work that you do here, so i'mvery honored to be invited. thank you so much. i'm going to try and go ratherquickly so that we can get through
sex education in schools, everything today because i have lots ofthings that i want to share with you and not lot of time. we've already goneover some of these things, so i'm going to skip them. just very quickly, oasis is responsible for things like take backthe night, red flag campaign, love your
body day, fem sex workshop, sober sex andvarious presentations on campus, such as this and some fun workshops like ask thesexpert. if you're interested in any of those please contact me. what i'mgoing to do is actually send around an email list sheet, no pressure at all, butif you're interested in receiving emails from us, when we have eventscoming up, if you want, either just participate or volunteer, we're happy toadd you to that and send those to you. i promise we do not barrage you with emails, justa couple a semester, just so you know what's going on. just know that as astudent, you have access to 12 counseling sessions a year at the etsu counseling center,right down the hall. the red flag
campaign is this week and we're wrappingthat up tomorrow. we're going to be out at the pedestrian mall or probably thecave patio because it's going to be raining, but the flags will still be outand we really would appreciate you stopping by and learning how to be anactive bystander, when you see red flags for relationship and sexual violence. interms of learning information more, in regards to the, official etsu and tbrsexual misconduct policies or resources or how to report a violation through thejudicial system, here on campus, you're going to want to go to the etsuviolence free web page and there's all sorts of information on there that youcan access. the education that i provide is
for educational purposes, but if you needinformation on how to get there or you need some advocacy and support i am happyto direct you to the right people and help you through that. let's talk about what sexual violenceis. this includes any sexual act without consent, it is violence not sexuality, notlove, not passion. it's a human rights violation and includes rape, sexualassault, sexual harassment, stalking, fondling and grabbing somebody sexually.important statistics, ninety percent of sexually assaulted college women knowtheir attacker and it's either a classmate, friend, ex-partner oracquaintance. i think this is important
to recognize because culturally, i thinkwe have more of an assumption that people who sexually assault others,are strangers coming out of a bush, yielding a weapon in the dark and thenretreating into the darkness. still a stranger and that very clearly is acrime, based on things like law and order svu, but if nine out of 10 times, in acollege experience, the sexual abuse perpetrated by someoneknown to the victim, that becomes very confusing. that definition gets skewed andsometimes when a person experiences this, they know that something very wronghappened, but they don't even have a word for it. it's really important torecognize that most sexual assault on
college campuses are done by a friend.i should of said this at the beginning, just a trigger warning, some of thethings that we're talking about today can be triggering, upsetting toindividuals, whether something has happened to you or you know someonewho's experienced something, so please do take advantage of our counselingservices, if you need them and we also have a twenty-four seven phone line,called bucs press two, where you just call our counseling center number and can talk tosomeone on the phone any time of day. feel free to leave at any time, if itbecomes uncomfortable or you just have to go. i will not be offended.1 in 4 university women will be a victim
of attempted or completed rate and thecurrent statistics for men is 1 in 16 during college and over the lifespan, it's onein three women and one in six men. most frequent locations of completed, oncampus rapes, are the victims residents, as most often, another residents, or in afraternity. what is sexual assault specifically?it's intentional, committed by physical force, violence, intimidation or threat. ignoring the objections of anotherperson, causing another's intoxication or impairment or taking advantage ofanother's incapacitation, helplessness or other inability to consent. just to beclear here the causes of rape are rapists, that's it.
if you're wondering, i justwanted to clear it up, it's just the whole pie is rapists. just to be clearabout this, i'm going to go over the other ones in a second, but i think it's importantto bring up the statistic, 98% of sexual relational and gender violence, perpetratedin our culture, is perpetrated by those who identify as male. this in no wayshape or form, means that ninety-eight percent of men perpetrate this kind ofviolence. it's actually a very, very small percentage, only 3% of the population areidentify themselves as a serial rapist, through the way that questions are askedin studies, but of that percentage, a very high rate of them identify as male.those people, the people who
perpetrate things like this andoftentimes it is serially done. there are also a small percentageof people, who through studies and interviews have identified themselves ascompleting one rape, regretting it and not doing it again, but again so total,there's a pretty low percentage of people who actually perpetrate thesecrimes. let's talk about these factors that play into rape. slutty clothes, so noone is ever responsible for being raped for what they wear. alcohol, no one is everresponsible for being raped by how much they drink. alcohol is the number onedate rape drug, so it is often used by rapists to facilitate a rape. it isa tool that a rapist might use, nut the alchohol is not responsible, it is
still the person who is assaultinganother person. in terms of minorities, sixty percent of sexual assaults areperpetrated by caucasians. the majority are caucasian. in terms of weather, the only thingthat i could think of was, baby it's cold outside song, which is absolutely anexample of sexual assault. in case you're wondering i actually have a pictureon my door, that has two cute little penguins with scarves and it saysbaby it's cold outside, but i respect your choice to leave anyway. just toaddress that christmas song, that's super creepy. if you listen to the words, shelike what's in this drink, so there's
potentially more alcohol or drug in thedrink, she's coming with all these reasons she wants to leave and it'shurting the person's pride, those are examples of absolutely facilitating asexual assault. in terms of television, i do think that media, advertisements, tvmovies, music videos, all these things in our culture, that we pay attention too, often, absolutely have an influence, over makingrape culture and gender violence culture acceptable, so i do think that mediaplays a huge role in perpetuating issues that are related to sexual assault,but still the person who is committing the crime is the one who is responsible.let's talk about how you can engage
in a healthy, safe sexual encounter. to me,what i usually tell students, is there are two things that i regard in terms ofthinking about what health, safe, sexual encounter looks like and that is one,protection and when we have time we talk about different methods ofprotection and what to know about that because it's important to beeducated about sex and sexual activity and relationships, instead of feedinginto this cultural idea that's very taboo and guilt and shame involved.these are the things that have to be established in order to know thatconsent is happening. both partners are fully conscious and aware. what does thatmean? anybody? what needs to be
happening to know that a person is fullyconscious and aware? or what can't be happening? can't be drunk. yeah. you can learn frommy colleague mina mcveigh who is the alcohol and other drugs coordinator, you canlearn how to count your drinks, you can maintain what she calls the perfect buzzand still be sober, you cannot be drunk. what else? can't be drugged.absolutely or on any drugs because the problem with alcohol, you can measureit to know when you're above or below the legal bac, but with other drugsthere's not a safe way to measure that. what else? anything else?
you can't be asleep. a lot of times studentslaugh at tha, but the reality is we have to have that as part of this conversation.that absolutely happens. both partners are equally free to act, choose and changetheir minds. what does that mean? you can say no at any time. absolutely. what else? you can't be coerced. absolutely and interms of saying no at any time, that means during the encounter, you could bein the middle of doing something and say you know this isn't for me anymore andi'd like to stop or you can maybe agree to something at one point and then laterchange your mind, before it happens, you
absolutely have the right to do that.anything else you can think of? you get to choose the kind of sexual acts, that you're interested in being involved with. ok? in our culture we tend to havethis sort of, really binary idea of what sex is, either you absolutely do nothingand this is also what we call the virgin/whore phenomenon. we think about the way thatwomen are related to sexuality. either you do nothing and you're a virgin or frigid oryou do anything, anything at all that involves, what we imagine sex to be,in our culture, which technically, we think of as specifically, vaginalintercourse. we sort of miss and then then your identified as aslut or a whore or some horrible name like
that and then we forget all of theseother things in the middle, these wonderful things you can do, that arepleasurable and fun and ok. that's sort of how we think about it. they're allsorts of things that you might want to consent to and other things that youmight not want to consent to and that needs to be made clear. both partnersclearly communicate their willingness and permission. what does that mean? whathas to happen? yeah, yeah, how do you make yes happen or an affirmation happen? you talk, you useyour words. absolutely, absolutely, but is that usually what we do in our culture?no, what do we do? what do we usually do to
confirm or deny consent to something?body language. absolutely, absolutely, so were a culture thatdoesn't really talk about these things we just do them and we tend to look fora non-verbal cues to know whether or not a person's okay with doing it and so myargument is if you're not ready to talk about it, if you if you can't saywords like penis or vagina or you know there's a video that we won'thave time for, but john oliver did this great video recently, called sex ed and istrongly encourage you to watch it, it's 20 minutes, it's so funny. they make thisspecial video that says if you still call it a who-ha, you're not ready to havesex. just an example of how we do these
things, but we are afraid to even usewords to talk about them and that is absolutely, very important. ifsomeone shakes their booty and winks and you assume that means they want to havesex, which in our culture is technically vaginal intercourse and they're thinkingsomething completely different, like maybe i'm just interested in how youlook and might be interested in getting to know you a little bit better,than we've had a massive miscommunication. that absolutely canlead to sexual assault being perpetrated. both partners are positive and sincerein their desires. im just going to tell you. this is like if someone says they loveyou or they want to be your partner, in
order to get sexual activity from you,that is absolutely not getting consent. it's never assumed, implied, coerced orconvinced, so a lot of times people don't realize, that if they say no and someonemakes them feel guilty or continues to pressure them to say yes and then theydo say yes, they don't realize that actually counts as sexual assault. if a person says no and theneventually they say yes because they are pushed and bothered and prodded, they areabsolutely being assaulted. consent is not the absence of the word,no, so silence does not mean yes. there was no previous campaign, that wastitled no means no and now there's a lot
more focus on yes means yes, againsupporting the idea that you need to be getting clear communication, that yes theperson wants to do something, not silence. consent is the responsibility of theinitiator, when i ask students this, a lot of times they say it's the guy, it's thegirl, it's the parents, that gets a little weird when they say that, but it's actuallythe initiator, so an example of that might be, that a person's pants don'tjust magicallycome off, someone does something to get them on the floor or one activitydoesn't just move into the other without someone initiating that move and so theperson who is initiating that sexual act, the person who is initiating something, is the one who isresponsible for making sure, verbally
that the other person is ok with whatthey're doing. what i also like to say to people is, because i get a lot of questionsabout the legalistic details, like is someone going to accuse me of rape thenext day, you know if i didn't realize that they were drunk or lots of questionslike that. my response to that is, i think it's important to take alook at yourself in the mirror and think if when you were approaching a sexualencounter, the first thing that comes to mind is how can i do this without goingto jail, then we need to kind of rethink our behavior and we need to rethink howwe're engaging, sexually with another person. let's think more along the linesof who am i as a human and who is this
other person as another human. if theperson is just lying there and they haven't specifically said no, and my excuse is, butthey didn't say no, well did you think, that maybe it wouldbe more fun or respectful to check in with the person and make sure they'reenjoying themselves. you're not just thinking about what youwant, out of a sexual experience, did that ever occur to you? how are you interacting withthat person? are you treated them with respect? are you thinking about theirneeds? are you making sure that they're enjoying themselves as much as you are?maybe starting to look at it through a lens of just being arespectable, good person to another
person, instead of legally am i going toget in trouble, if i do this or i don't do this. here are some examples, it seems soobvious when we talk about these things outside of the purview of sexualactivity and when you think about consenting to behavior, or consenting to doingsomething, it seems really silly, when it's in terms of things like, say a movie,so this guy is saying want to watch pulp fiction, to his friend, sure. a half hour laternot really liking this let's do something else, no! you said you would watch themovie, so you're staying until it's done. again the idea of sort of acting,choosing, changing your mind. he's you
making a choice here, it's beenabout a half hour, i'm good, nope got to stay. seems ridiculous with the movie, whyis that so ridiculous with sex? thanks for letting me borrow your car, noproblem. what are you doing? the next week, borrowing your car, you that i could. youcan't take my car whenever you want it. you said i could have it once, i shouldbe able to have all the time. okay so it's ridiculous, to assume thatsomeone can just have whatever they want from you, when it's an object and itcertainly should be even more ridiculous when it's your body. this is an example of taking advantageof someone, while they were sleeping.
unconscious. this is the idea of someone invitingsomeone over, welcoming someone into their apartment or home and feeling likethey're obligated to be sexually active with them, becomes somehow inviting theminto that space and is inviting them into their personal, sexual space and iencounter this a lot with clients who have experienced sexual violence and iwould say a majority, if not every single client that i've had, who has experiencedsexual assault, holds, at least when they start counseling, hold some form of guiltor a personal responsibility for the assault because they invited the personup or because they agreed to go
somewhere with the person. thisis definitely a cultural pressure and definitely gets integrated into aperson's concept of whether or not they were sexually assaulted and who isresponsible. i mean this is sort of the idea of what clothes you're wearing,being you know, asking for something just based on how you look. in terms of the life of acollege student, i'm not saying that in any way, that every college student whocomes to college is getting involved with partying and using alcohol and drugs, but itabsolutely happens and for some students it's the first time they're away fromhome, away from their families and other
rules, that they've had. for people whoidentify as lgbtq, it might be the first time that they have a chance tocome out more comfortably, not a necessarily saying, that, that's the case, but it mightbe. more social networking, that might be different than it was in high school.there is trust and assumptions, you might be making, you're all here forthe same reasons and have the same goals and intentions. you might haveexpectations and desires to be liked, to be accepted socially, to be coupled andyou know, developmentally when you think about the transition from high school tocollege, the way that things work, socially andhigh school can be very different than
college, so you might have thisexpectation, that you have to behave a certain way or do certain things, whenyou first get here, in order to be popular. when in fact, i think for a lotof students, the college experience is very different, once they've gotten used to it andlearned that. you're learning independence for the first time and so what happens to a lot of students for the beginning of the year,especially when they're freshmen, if they are involved in something, like drinkingor trying substances or going to parties, what sometimes happens?
any ideas? sort of like whenyour kind of repressed, never alowed to do certain things and then suddenly youhave this open floodgate, of no curfew, no parents around, whatsometimes happens? you do everything. woohoo college! you go a little crazy. the hope is that, you know once you'velearned to figure out how to count your drinks, not get so drunk, that you throwup all over the place, you hope that the worst case scenario, for a person isthat they learn from their mistakes, they say whoops not going to do that again. then the next time they make a better choice. this is why the firstday of school, for freshmen, through thanksgiving break, is the most dangeroustime in terms of sexual assaults and
it's actually been termed, the red zonebecause that is absolutely taken advantage of. before a personlearns from their mistakes and wises up, there are people who take advantageof that. in terms of sexual experimentation, it's completelydevelopmentally appropriate, to be doing that during college, but again that canbe taken advantage of as well. then also our cultural assumption, that somehowif someone is sexually active, especially women, are sexually active, that somehowthey deserve what happens to them. i think it's important to talk about whatpsychological characteristics of rape trauma look like, because we tend tominimize and downplay what the
experience of a rape, is for a victim andagain this ties into all that victim blaming, attitude that we tend tohave. as a culture, we tend to view it more as,when someone reports of rape, i feel like a lot of times, i hear these reactions,that are somewhere along the lines of something like, you know you just had aregretful sexual encounter, just move on, it's no big deal, get over it, it's not a thing. where asfor the victim, of this violent crime, it actually, is absolutely, a huge deal andcan affect a person for years, in fact it can affect them for the rest of their lives ,in theway that they treat a sexual encounter,
feel about a sexual encounter, even withsomeone who safe and it usually takes quite a bit of counseling and support toget through tha.t i think that counseling is very, very helpful, in addressing it,but to pass it off, like it's it's just a regretful, sexual encounter andoftentimes, accusing people of false reporting because they regretted it andthey don't want to deal with that, so they blame someone else, that is also i think a big victim blaming, cultural method. there are a lot of people out there,crying rape, the morning after regretting doing something. when in fact, thestatistic, is 2 to 8 percent of reports are false, which is the exact same as anyother crime. ninety two to ninety-eight percent
of the time it's true. some of thesymptoms involved, are things like ptsd or acute trauma, grief, anxiety, depression,shame, some memory loss, a lot of times when a person is traumatized, they mightforget pieces of what happened, also adds to our doubt with our victim blamingattitudes, about whether or not a person is telling the truth, the whole truthbecause they come out with different information later on, when in fact that'sabsolutely a common symptom of trauma or the person had been drinking, so theydon't remember everything that happened. maybe they were blacked out, forpart of it. other examples are loss of control,
shock and numbness. i think it'simportant for us to recognize, that i think we make judgments about victimsbased on, what we expect them to be and again, this is part of this, victimblaming piece, where we are scrutinizing, and questioning and always looking atthe person who's reported the crime versus the person who they're accusing.often times, were maybe thinking, why is this person acting this way, because we have this image in our head of what the perfect victim,should look like, you know so we might imagine someone who's crying all thetime, who gets really depressed or is
showing the emotions that match thesituation, whereas if you are educated about trauma responses, you might notknow, that a very common reaction to trauma is shock and numbness. theperson may not be showing any emotion at all. in addition to that, theymight not remember everything that happened or they might remember thatlater. i think it's important for us to be educated about those pieces, aswell and to think about how we're questioning, who and why because as acultural we can we tend to go to the victim first and we don't do thatfor other crimes. if my house was broken into and god forbid, i was stabbed,is someone going to say, well
you kind of asked for that because youleft your door open, and you should have been wearing body armor and youweren't, so you're kind of asking to be stabbed, that conversation would neverhappen. why is it so different, when it comes to violence, like sexualrelationship and gender violence. victims are often reluctant to report a sexualassault, for multiple reasons. some of which are retaliation, shame, guilt,embarrassment, fear that they won't be believed and lack of support. there's, ithink there's, shame and embarrassment in having to sexual story tell aboutexperiences, especially with people you don't really know. that'sabsolutely understandable, when i work
with victims, i encourage them to report,if they want to and let them know that, that's an option and i absolutelysupport them if they want to, but i don't make them do anything that they don'twant to do, because the last thing you want to do for someone who has beenvictimized, in some way, is to re victimize them or take away more oftheir power and control by telling them what they have to do, but i think thisuniversity is doing a really good job moving forward and figuring out ways tobe transparent and open with students, about avenues for reporting andproviding, appropriate support, including offering them to us at the counselingcenter. there could be additional layers
of complications forreporting, if you're talking about if a victim is male. i think that a lot ofthat has to do with our cultural assumptions, about what itmeans to be a real man, and what it means for a male victim or a victimidentifies as male. i also think that there are complications if you identifyanywhere on the lgbtq spectrum because there is potential for having toout yourself. maybe you're not out to everybody and in order to report it, youhave to sexual story tell about something that you're not comfortablewith. there will be additional layers of complication for differentpopulations. absolutely.
the difference between risk reductionand prevention. i think that there is some confusion about or disagreementsabout what view you're taking, if you are in support of things like riskreduction or risk reduction techniques, like using a buddy system or talkingto your friends about where you're going. creating a safety plan or plans withyour friends, like if someone leaves the group or goes off with somebody else,what is the plan, in place for follow-up? drinking responsibly, knowing how tocount your drinks, defining your personal standards and sticking to them, thinkingahead of time about what you're comfortable with, in terms of engagingwith someone relationally or sexually
and sticking to those or if you changeyour mind that's ok, but knowing that you're making that decision for yourself.being educated about what constitutes sexual assault, rape and consent andknowing campus resources like the counseling center, like public safetylike bucs press 2 line and asking for help. if you want that helped tobe confidential and you don't want to report it to the police or studentaffairs, you absolutely can come to the counseling center and do that or callthe bucs press two line. i think that some argue, that these techniques areencouraging people, especially women, to engage in these techniques, isadding to victim blaming. i want to argue
against, that i want to argue it as a both/and situation. i think that it's important to make a distinction,that these are risk reduction techniques, not prevention techniques. it isnot a person's responsibility to prevent their own assault. it is not myresponsibility if somebody assaults me because i didn't drink responsibly orbecause i didn't talk to my friends, that's not on me, that's onthe person who perpetrated the assault. i also think that it's important tobe educated about these things because it can help you in these situations or to help avoid some of these situations and i have examples fromclients, in which this is absolutely
happened. i had a client recently, whotold me that she wasn't as educated about the components of consent, earlierand she wasn't educated about how to stick to her own sexual standards anddesires and so she experienced sexual assault, didn't realize that, that's what it was and did not realize what her optionswere and now that she is educated about those things and now that she doesknow what her rights are and how to communicate what she's ok with and whatshe's not ok with, she has avoided situations in which she would have beenassaulted. it is absolutely, still the person's responsibility, who was pushingher, absolutely, it is not her
responsibility, but those riskreduction techniques did help. in terms of prevention, when we're talking about personally being in the situation, you want toregard your own actions and behaviors. you want to learn to recognize sexes andwhen you see it or hear it. talk about sex with others, with the other personwho you are sexually engaged with and realize that sexual violence isprimarily a men's issue. now i'm not saying that men are the only ones whoare responsible for preventing sexual assault, that's absolutely not true, but becauseso much of this type of violence, in our culture is perpetratedby people identify as male, i think it's
really effective and powerful for men totalk to other men. i feel like there are definitely some occasions in which i'vetalked to groups of men, and its been effective, it's been really good, but i can imagine howmuch better it would be if there was a man in a more peer, related leadershiprole, in that room and how they might have responded more honestly, differently. i think there's a lot to besaid for that. for the sake of time, i don't know if we havetime to watch this video, so we might we might come back to this. if you are ina situation, in which someone comes to you and reports that they've recentlybeen sexually assaulted, these are some
ideas of what you can say. things like doyou need help? are you ok? this isn't your fault. is it ok for me to give yousome information? what do you need? do you want me to call someone for you?who are your social supports? notice that none of these options involvejudging, blaming, or forcing the person to do anything they don't want to do.you're letting them control, you're letting them make the decisions forthemselves. you're just letting them know that you're facilitating support forthem. this is another very effective mode of prevention, it's actually one of thethings that the the white house sexual assault task force has identified,as one of the most effective college
interventions. can anyone tell me whatthe bystander effect? does anybody know? if your with a group of people and you see thatnobody else is reacting to something that you think is wrong, than you are less likely to react to it. yeah absolutely, it's a sociologicalconcept, that they've done lots of studies on. the more people who arepresent for some sort of crime being committed, the less likely it is that anyone person, will take responsibility to do anything because there's thisinherent assumption, that someone else is going to call the police, someone else isgoing to step in and so the idea bystander intervention, is the oppositeof that. it's taking personal
responsibility, as a bystander andlooking at yourself as not necessarily a potential victim, not necessarily apotential perpetrator, but as a bystander to these crimes, that do happen or abystander to things that happened, that feed into ideas like rape culture andgender violence culture. you want to say something or do something if you see andhear something, that you know is not okay and this is a continuum, i'm not expecting you, ever of course, to be involved with seeing a relationshipviolence situation actually happening, in that moment. i don't expect you to beseeing a sexual encounter happen, that becomes sexual assault, but what you mightdo is, you might hear someone make a rape
joke or you might hear someone saysomething really, degrading, inappropriate about somebody and you have a choicepoint there. you can say nothing, so even if you don't support it and you don'tlaugh or you don't say, that's really funny or that's ok, you're not doinganything and so in that moment the person who said those things, might nothave that opportunity to hear from someone that it's not okay. what i'mencouraging you to do is, on this continuum of hearing these things, to saysomething or do something, when you hear or see them. try to think, if this were my sister, ifthis were my brother, if this were my
best friend, my partner, or a parent, whatwould i want for them? imagine if the person is saying a degrading commentabout them, imagine if they were saying that about your significant otheror about a family member. how would you want someone else to respond if theywere in your shoes? that's your responsibility, in that moment becausethat person is someone's family member, that person is someone's partner, potentially.recognize victim blaming attitudes, start paying attention to theway people talk about things and the way that you think about things. this is the campaign we have going oncampus right now, called buccaneer
bystander intervention and this givesyou all sorts of different techniques, ideas, that you can use to intervene andwe actually have copies of these at the red flag campaign, so you can absolutelycome and pick up one from us tomorrow or you can always email me and i can sendyou a digital copy. i think it's important torecognize the distinction, jackson katz there is a video of him, but i don'tthink we're going to have time, but he came here in january and talked a littlebit about the idea of the bystander approach, that he sort of coined thatterm in the nineties and it's been used by a lot of bystander interventionprograms, to kind of create, the ideas of
the programs and what he says is thebystander approach, the short term goal of it, is to normalize and prevent, sorry,to prevent assaults through an intervention skill set. sort of like those buccaneer, bystander ideas, there is a skill that you canlearn, so that you know how to intervene in those moments, but the long-termapproach is and i quote, to change the underlying belief system and socialnorms, that tolerate or encourage sexist and abusive behaviors, so itdoesn't really help that much to learn a skill set, if you don't genuinely believethat there are these beliefs and social norms that creates problems in the firstplace, so the only real use of those
skill sets are to recognize that this isa cultural issue and that each time we were using these skill sets, we're actually trying to change theculture, we're trying to create a culture that is sex positive and that is aconsent culture versus a rape culture and gender violence supporting culture. i like the way this is termed as well,john damiano, is one of the sexual assault prevention activists atdartmouth college and he is specifically referring to a men's leadership programand so he calls them micro aggressions and i really like the ideaof that. he says that it means that on
campus people set the precedent ofsexual assault is not ok and beyond that, all of the micro aggressions alongthe spectrum of harm, that lead to rape culture, are also not ok and those canrange from a rape joke, suggesting someone was asking for it, based on whatthey were wearing, to cat calling somebody, so these are sort ofthose steps spectrum of harm, i was talking about, in which you aren'tnecessarily going to stop sexual assault from happening in that moment, butthey're absolutely all these little micro aggressions along the way, that leadto supporting someone's belief that what they're doing is completely sociallyacceptable and i think that it is so
powerful when peers rejectsomething, so if we as peers are making rape jokes and are normalizingcat calling people and judging people based on what they're wearing, than whatwe are basically communicating to these really small percentage of serialperpetrators, is that your behavior is totally, socially, acceptable right? ifwe start to say the opposite and that catches on and it suddenly becomes thegroup think, instead of just one individual stepping up, if you canrecruit other people into buying into this and believing this message, thensuddenly the peer group and the culture itself, begins to reject the behavior ofthis person andn i think that, that is the
most powerful thing, me coming up hereand telling you that it's wrong and giving you all these statistics, ifsomeone who perpetrates these kind of things serially, they're probably notgoing to hear me in that moment, but what they might hear is if their entire peergroup rejects them, based on those behaviors. i think that the bystanderapproach, is extremely important and can be, potentially, the most effective thing,to addressing things like sexual violence and relationship violence. alright, i have time for one video. tryingto decide which one is the best one to do. i think the consent one is really fun, but i think there's one
that's more important to show you. ifyou're familiar with tony porter, but he has a program called, a call to men, soit's a men's leadership program in addressing things like, gender and sexualviolence. i wanna play a clip from that. it's not loud enough. it's a good clip, to just show the complicationof how gender dynamics and expectations for genders in our culture, play out in termsof this kind of violence and of course this is very much, gender binary, thathe's talking about, so this leaves out people who identify as gender fluidor gender non-conforming, but i think
that it's a common issue in our culture,that is all the time that i have and i want to leave a little bit of time forquestions. thank you so much for your attention and any questions that youhave feel free to ask me at this time. yes, i don't know that's a goodquestion. i think that, its population of the united states. no. yes. yep. yes. that's a good question. i mean sometimes that's the way that i frame it, as ifyou're not emotionally invested in this
issue, you might be fiscally, because itcosts a heck of a lot, violence against women, sexual violence, relationship violence superexpensive. absolutely. yes it was.absolutely, absolutely, so if you're if your primary focus on this campus isretention and student success, you can't be academically successful if you'reexperiencing acute trauma, you just can't and shouldn't be expected to. that's afirst-order concern and it gets in the way. it's absolutely true. yes. sure sure, yeah. i mean, i don'thave any statistics on that in terms of college relationships vs relationshipsafter outside of college, but i do know in
terms of more information onrelationship violence and the dynamics of that and how that plays out, inrelationships over time, the power and control wheel, i think is a really goodvisual to show, all the emotional psychological pieces, that add up toa controlling and powerful relationship. absolutely counts as relationshipviolence, whereas in our culture i think a lot of us think of, that kind ofviolence, as specifically physical or sexual and we have a ton of informationon that at the red flag campaign because the red flag campaign was originallycreated, specifically for dating violence on college campuses, but i i think that itis definitely, sometimes, a factor for
college students as well, especially ifthe person is with someone who can helpprovide some financial stability or some support, and they can use thatto their advantage so the person becomes dependent on them or something like, theysign a lease together ,on an apartment and then the person is stuck in thatlease for the entire year, legally, so they're things like that or they share apet or something like that. absolutely comes up with collegestudents. even with and even if you think ofit in terms of owing someone something in just a sexual encounter or a morecasual relationship in college, you might
have examples of, so i actually havebuttons that i made that have different pictures saying this is not consent and onehas a drink on it, one has a person in a skirt on it and one of them has movie ticketsand popcorn around it because again, like there's this idea that, there's some sortof obligation because someone spends money on you or takes you out to dinneror does something for you, that you owe them something sexually and that'sabsolutely, never true, that's absolutely a pressure that is communicated. because i'm so technologically unsavy, ineed to do my own research and do a lot more around that, because i'm just so outof the loop, but i have, i mean, we've set
around the counseling center one day and accessedyik yak and we're just appauled, some of it was hilarious and some of it wasjust absolutely, appalling and some of the things that people were saying andindicating and talking about each other, really inappropriate, sexually violent,offensive and i think, that the anonymity that social media allows and theinternet generally allows, creates more of a violent response orcomfort, with having more violent responses and sort of like, that conceptthat very much applies to sexual violence and very much applies toviolence just generally in the world, is the idea of dehumanizing someone ormaking them more anonymous or less of a
whole person and then being able to moreeasily enact of violence on them, so that happens when you objectifysomebody, they become less human or they become pieces of a human, but not a wholeand it's easier to be violent toward them and i think sort of in the same way,that you lose the humanity in a way, because you can't see, your not facing aperson or you can be nobody, when you say these things and i think that itencourages it. just like dinner and a drink, it's like amessage, right and having some sort of expectation. that's a really good point.beyond, even saying i'm inviting you to my space,i'm just sending you a message, which
takes two seconds, no effort and thenthere's an expectation, that somehow you were owing the person something, becausethis is a good example of the consent piece, acting, choosing and changingyour mind. just because you have consented one time, doesn't mean that every time they textyou owe them anything. that's absolutely true. just wanted to let everyone know, thatit's one o'clock so you're welcome to stay, we can talk a little bitmore, but if you have to go, feel free it is that time. yes. i don't necessarily have an accurate answer, mydream is that it's because, my
dream about it and i'm just going to saythis because i just want it to be this way, is just because they know more and we'vebeen more open and transparent and there's been more attention drawn to it,more people are talking about it, asking questions, reaching out for the resources, thatwe've been providing all this time, but i also think that, a piece of it is justthe national attention that this issue is getting, so i think that, my guess isthat, for people who are reporting there is probably a combination of factors andthey might include things like, hearing someone else on campus reported and youknow that there was some results or
there was some response to it, hearing people talking about it andfeeling like it's being a little more normalized for them to report itthemselves and in addition to that seen it on the news prettyconsistently, reading it in the paper, hearing about it on social media, my hopeis that the combined factors of that, are making people feel more comfortablebecause this is a conversation that more people are having, than just advocateswho are passionate about the issue. yes making victim blamingassumptions, absolutely, this is still
a huge issue, is people's reaction to,people coming forward and reporting and that's why i mentioned that is,they're absolutely a lot of, again it's asking questions about why didn't theyreport this earlier, why aren't more people reporting if this is actuallyhappening. first of all why are we asking that question? why is thatalways the first question that we ask? the answer is there are lots of reasons, fora person to not want to report, there is still an absolutely, a majority of culturalresponse, that is negative and victim blaming and judgmental and shaming, until i think that, until we normalize sexuality and talking about sexualityand being involved in sexual activity
being ok and acceptable anddevelopmentally appropriate, that's very hard because there's so much guilt andshame and judgment of women when it comes tosexuality, the idea of sex and sexuality. my argument for that, is thatthere needs to be sex education in schools, way earlier than there is and it needsto be actual sex education, not abstinence only or fear tactic educationand that's why i encourage you to watch the john oliver video because there is a lot of research now that's coming out, talking about how differentcountries, like norway and sweden and all
sorts of countries in europe, that areteaching kindergartners, in kindergarten and it continues through because evenkindergartners are starting to be curious about their body parts and ifyou wave away a child's hand from their body parts orsay that's dirty or don't even give it a name, that leaves them with feelings of shame and guilt around those things even as early asfive years old, just continues and gets worse. absolutely could, sort of goes back to the idea that, a lot of times, jackson katz talks a lotabout this, about how we use language,
i think of theidea of you know, sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurtme, is not true. the language that we use and the words that we use, can bevery hurtful and can determine a lot of the ways that we have cultural responses ormake assumptions about things and that includes, by not being very clear aboutwho were holding responsible for perpetrating sexual violence or whatwe're holding responsible for that, instead of just saying, well it's kind of relatedbecause there are two, it was really two people, takes two to tango, you hear thata lot when it comes to life and even the way that you hear it portrayed innewspaper articles and the media, it's
situation gone wrong orsomehow, there's this mysterious thing that happened, but no one specificperson is really being held accountable, just sort of happened to a person, evenjust that passive language, not being very clear, like violence was perpetratedagainst a person by a person and this is who the perpetrator was, but we don't dothat we kind of pull that out of the language that we use or treat itlike, well this person sent a picture back, well she was a nine year old, so howis this not an issue. it's really complicated because what happens is when peoplebecome open advocates they get fired, so
there's tons of research to backup the direct correlation between lack of sex education and teen pregnancyrates. it's absolutely true. presentations i do, i start by askingwhere people learned about sex for the first time and its reallyfascinating to hear people talk about where it is and its almost never intheir sex education and when it is, when someone has had that kind of uniqueexperience everyone is like wow, that's so unique. for the most part, it's liketheir older brother telling them wrong
information about where things go orlike hearing in the locker room or porn. if you've learned that from both
places like which one is right, i'm soconfused. well, thank you all so much for coming. iappreciate it.
