In a recent blog posted on the site The Nation, author Rachel Alexander reflects on her experience at Whitman College addressing rape on campus.  While working for the campus newspaper she had her first assignment writing a piece about rape on campus.  After sending an email to the student body asking for people to share their stories, she was impacted by the replies she received, “And over and over, these women told me the same thing: “He didn’t think he did anything wrong.”
She started to think about the importance of prevention efforts and how we do prevention on college campuses.  Alexander discovers that before we educate about consent and sexual assault we need to begin to talk about sex and sex education.
“The fact that so many women I talked to felt violated by guys who were unaware of any wrongdoing suggests that the education we’re doing about consent is seriously flawed. For all of the talk about rape on campus, we’re culturally still very uncomfortable talking about sex.”
As she comments in her blog post, if colleges and universities want to prevent rape they need to offer holistic sex education to their student body, “including a discussion of power dynamics and socialization in their workshops on consent.” She believes that a healthier view of sex will lead to less sexual assaults.
Do you offer holistic sex education on your campus?