Category: Sexual Violence

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How do we talk to teens about sex in a world of porn?

Teenage boys’ easy access to violent sexual images is creating a crisis for them – and for women, argues the anti-porn campaigner

Today’s online content is sadistic and extreme, says activist Gail Dines.

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Violence against women is never far from the news, but currently it is high on the agenda – and porn features again and again as a factor. From the murder of Sarah Everard to the paltry sentence handed down to Sam Pybus, the latest man to use the so-called “rough sex defence”, it seems the world is riven with misogyny.

Sarah’s killer Wayne Couzens was attracted to “brutal sexual pornography”, the court heard during his trial. Pybus – who was sentenced to four years and eight months last month for manslaughter after strangling a vulnerable woman during sex – was also known to use violent porn. Tackling porn culture is clearly a key part of tackling sexual violence towards women. I have campaigned to end the sex trade for decades, and am well aware of its role in the sexual exploitation of women.

Last weekend, the very first virtual international conference about how to teach sex education from a feminist perspective and a porn-critical lens took place. Taking On Porn: Developing Resilience and Resistance through Sex Education was organised by Culture Reframed, a US-based NGO founded by the academic and anti-porn activist Gail Dines. Part of it focused on how to help parents to have conversations with their children about what Dines calls the “public health crisis of the digital age”.

Inspired partly by demand from the UK educational world, the conference is responding to concerns from many parents about “pro-porn” programmes running in some schools since relationship and sex education became mandatory in September 2020.

Dines points to one teacher guide that puts forward the argument, “Porn is entertainment, like a film, not a ‘how to’ guide. However, that doesn’t mean people can’t learn things from porn they might not learn in other places. Just as movies can sometimes contain valuable insights, so can porn.”

In this guide, porn consumption is likened to having a sweet tooth: “Porn is a bit like a chocolate cake, it’s nice to enjoy it every now and then but if you have it for lunch every day it’s no longer a treat and becomes the norm, then you’re just in a cycle of eating chocolate cake because you’re too busy eating it to make anything else.”

But, as Dines points out, today’s online content is nothing like the now defunct Playboy magazine. In short, it has become more sadistic and extreme. One influential study found that about 90% of the most commonly viewed heterosexual porn scenes contained aggression and violence towards women and girls.

Online pornography has become the primary form of sex education for young people, and the average age for kids to start accessing it is 11. Porn sites get more visits each month than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined.

Fred Hechinger, left, as porn-addicted Quinn with his father Mark (Steve Zahn) in TV drama The White Lotus.

“Many sex ed teachers feel ill equipped to tackle the issue of porn use among their students,” says Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. For Dines, because porn has become the leading form of sex education globally, the conference is an essential part of bringing sex education up to date. She believes that pornography acts as a kind of cultural script, which exploits women and at the same time limits their free sexual expression and pleasure. Parents have been telling Culture Reframed about how concerned they feel about their children’s viewing of porn, with one saying: “My daughter was bullied into sending a sext by her boyfriend, who then sent it to his friends. Culture Reframed’s online resources not only gave us the ability to help her, but also gave us insights into the ways our hypersexualised culture victimises girls.”

Tom Farr, a UK-based campaigner against male violence, with a particular focus on the harms caused by pornography, and spoke at the conference. His talk looked at the links between porn use and likelihood of committing acts of sexual violence, as well as health issues such as depression, PTSD, and even erectile dysfunction.

“Porn has become the de facto form of sex education for many young men and boys,” says Farr. “They have unfettered access to the most degrading, violent and abusive content imaginable at the click of a button. What are the individual and societal implications of a generation of young people groomed by exposure to hardcore porn?”

Another speaker was critical race theorist and feminist Dr Carolyn West, an expert in violence against African American women and girls, who condemned the racist sexualisation of women of colour in porn.

The UK academic Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, whose work on women’s experience of mainstream online pornography has been included in the development of the Department for Education’s relationships and sex education curriculum, discussed women and porn use. Women do use porn, but often to explore what might be expected of them sexually.

Lilith and Savannah, hosts and producers of the Female Dating Strategy podcast looked at how to build healthy relationships.

I spoke to Adam*, 17, who is writing an essay on his former porn consumption. Adam, who refers to himself as “porn-free”, says he felt pressured into porn use by friends. “It became a habit I couldn’t break,” he says, “and I started looking at girls and imagining them doing the stuff I saw in the videos. I stopped seeing them as human beings.”

Sarah*, 18, says she is looking to set up a “Girls against porn” group for 16-year-olds and over because she is “disgusted at porn-sick boys sending unwanted dick pics” to her younger sister and her school friends.

Like other feminist campaigners against the sex trade, Dines has been accused of being an anti-sex moralist who wishes to censor sexual expression, but, she says, nothing could be further from the truth. “Any progressive, humanitarian approach should focus on dismantling the porn industry,” says Dines, “and not the continuation of its insidious commercialisation of abuse and misery.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Handling Child Abuse Disclosures

When a child comes to you to talk about abuse they are facing, it is important to listen and act in a way to support the child and keep him or her protected. You have a responsibility to keep children safe.

Types of Disclosure

Disclosures can be direct or indirect. Most likely a disclosure will be indirect, which can mean the child does not share the details of the abuse without being prompted, or does so in a roundabout way. An example of this is, “Sometimes my step‐dad keeps me up at night.” A disclosure can also be disguised, for example: “I have a cousin who is being abused.” In other cases the disclosure can be through hints or gestures, or even through another child “My friend told me…”

The child is hoping that a caring parent or caregiver will get the “hint” they are offering.

Recognize the Clues

It is important to recognize the possible clues so that further questions are asked. Most children who disclose want the abuse to stop. When the disclosure is “missed” they may continue with additional hints, or not.

For many abused children, a class presentation on child abuse prevention is the first time they realize that what happens to them does not happen to everyone. Some children may try to protect the abuser, especially when the abuser is someone they love.

Support the Child

If a child does disclose abuse, never forget how hard it is for him or her to tell someone about abuse. It is hard to hear your child has been abused, and your initial reactions may be to not believe or show shock or horror, but it is important to support the child and help him/her to disclose.

Acknowledge his/her courage in speaking out. If you work with children, have a plan for supporting a child who discloses to you through the reporting period and in the days that follow. Regardless of how the child discloses, recognizing the possibility the child is being abused, believing the child, and discussing the situation with him or her further will, in most cases, bring out further details.

During the Disclosure

  1. Avoid denial. A common reaction to a child’s disclosure is denial. Respect your child by listening to what he/she has to say and taking what your child says seriously. Believe what your child is telling you.
  2. Provide a safe environment. Make sure the setting is confidential and comfortable. Avoid communicating with shock, horror, or fear about anything said, even though what you are hearing is likely shocking and horrifying. Your child may interpret your reaction as you being shocked and horrified by him or her and shut down. The child needs you to be confident and supportive. Speak slowly and maintain a calm demeanor. Tell your child he/she is doing the right thing and that you will do what you can to help them.
  3. Reassure your child. Reassure your child that he/she did nothing wrong and that you believe him/her.
  4. Listen and don’t make assumptions. Listen more than you talk, and avoid advice giving or problem solving. Don’t put words in your child’s mouth or assume you know what he/she means or are going to say. Let your child use language they are comfortable with. Let your child set the pace, don’t rush them.
  5. Do not interrogate. Don’t ask the child a lot of questions, especially leading questions, which means a question in which you provide a possible answer(examples: Did this or that happen? Were you at school? Did your uncle hit you on the leg?). This can be confusing for your child and he/she might shut down. Don’t ask your child for details. This can make it harder for your child to tell you about the abuse.

Listen to the child, letting them explain what happened in his or her own words. Don’t stop your child in the middle of the story to go get someone or do something else. Limit questioning to only the following four questions if the child has not already provided you with the information:

  • What happened?
  • When did it happen?
  • Where did it happen?
  • Who did it?
  • How do you know them? (If the relationship of the abuser is unclear.)
  1. Make no promises. Don’t tell your child that you won’t tell anyone what they tell you. Your child will have fears about what will happen next, so tell your child what you are going to do, what is going to happen next, and who else they will need to talk to. This will help your child feel some control over what happens next within the boundaries of the law.
  2. Document exact quotes. It may be helpful to write down exact quotes of what your child said in case of the involvement of other parties, such as school or child protective services.
  3. Be supportive, not judgmental. Don’t talk negatively. Even though your child may be disclosing terrible things that may have happened at the hands of a family member or friend, the child may still love that person and may only just be beginning to recognize that he/she was being abused. Reassure the child that he/she is not at fault and have done nothing wrong.

Don’t ask questions that imply the child was at fault –

  • Why didn’t you tell me before?
  • What were you doing there?
  • Why didn’t you stop it?
  • What did you do to make this happen?
  • Are you telling the truth?
  1. Have an understanding about abuse and neglect. Know the four kinds of child abuse: physical, emotional, sexual, and neglect.
  2. Report any suspicion of child abuse and neglect. If you suspect that your child or another child is being abused, report it to the proper authorities. When reporting child abuse to the appropriate authorities, it is important to have the following information: what happened, when it happened, where it happened, who did it and their relationship to the child. You will be asked for some identifying information such as your name, address, where you work, and how the child disclosed. All of your identifying information will be kept confidential.

Remember, it is the responsibility of adults to take action and keep children safe.

References

Smith, M. C. (2008). Pre‐professional mandated reporters’ understanding of young children’s eyewitness testimony: Implications for training. Children and Youth Services Review, 30(12), 1355‐1365. doi:DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2008.04.004

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Ending Misogynoir and Domestic Violence

Leimert Park Los Angeles, 2020

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Over Our Dead Bodies

Audre Lorde once wrote that “there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives”. Lorde was a literary badass who never held her tongue or shied away from calling out how white supremacy and Black sexism led to “scarred, broken, battered and dead daughters and sisters” whose trauma never makes headlines. When I desperately needed Lorde’s voice in my teens and twenties, I became one of those battered sisters, surviving intimate partner violence in a world where “good” Black women did not buck Black patriarchy, the Black church or any other symbol of Black gender orthodoxy. Then, as now, these institutions demanded that survivors remain silent about domestic violence and sexual abuse.

This 21st century culture of silence is especially pronounced when it comes to Black women’s experiences with gun violence in the context of intimate partner violence and sexual violence.

This 21st century culture of silence is especially pronounced when it comes to Black women’s experiences with gun violence in the context of intimate partner violence and sexual violence. As the U.S. marks the grim milestone of 240 plus mass shootings this year, every day, Black men, Black women, and Black communities continue to shoulder the disproportionate weight of normalized death and violence. In April in Chicago, 7 year-old Jaslyn Thomas was gunned down at a local McDonalds, becoming the third child to die from gun violence there this year.

According to Everytown Policy and Research, African Americans “experience nearly 10 times the gun homicides, 15 times the gun assaults, and three times the fatal police shootings of white Americans”. Nonetheless, gun violence in African American communities is marginalized as well as pathologized. It is viewed as a symptom of the racist stereotype that Black folks in the “inner city” are more prone to criminal violence. And it is downplayed in mainstream narratives about the prevalence of gun violence.

Commenting in Essence Magazine, former Ohio Congressional candidate Desiree Tims wrote, “As devastating as it is to acknowledge, America’s gun violence problem particularly haunts Black women; our sons, brothers and fathers are 10 times more likely to die from gun violence than their White counterparts. Equally as troubling, Black women die from gun-related domestic partner abuse at disproportionately higher rates than any other group” and Black women are more likely to die from gun violence than are white men. These two key facts continue to drive a wedge in racial justice activism.

Time and again, Black women across sexuality and gender identity (for example, Black trans women have the highest homicide rates among trans women in the nation) are mowed down in disproportionate numbers, yet the stigma around Black feminist anti-violence prevention education and engagement remains. Despite the fact that domestic and sexual violence affect the bodies of women of color every day, “quietly”, under the radar, domestic violence generally only pricks public consciousness when there is a high profile tragedy against white women or a mass shooting rampage committed by a stalker-abuser.

As the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) noted recently, “Such violence has long been a public health issue and central concern for all women, and Black women in particular. Yet it has been largely overlooked by the public, state, and judicial systems.”

In March, the AAPF released a series of memes on the impact of “private violence” on Black women and girls. Black women are 2.5 times more likely to die by homicide. Be they trans or cis, the majority are killed by an intimate partner or relative. Black women are also more likely to experience sexual harassment at work. Normalized violence, coupled with systemic disparities in wages and health care access, have devastating implications for young Black girls into adulthood.

In schools where youth have little to no sexual harassment prevention education, victim-blaming and shaming of Black girls are legion. When there is no attention to the culturally specific ways Black girls are hypersexualized and “adultified” — both by the dominant white culture and African American culture — Black girls are targeted as unrapeable aggressors who provoke violence by flouting respectability. And when there continues to be denial about the gravity of sexual assault, rape, and domestic violence in Black communities, all Black children and Black people suffer.

For example, in California, where homelessness among African Americans has skyrocketed, one in three Black women have experienced intimate partner and domestic violence. Domestic violence is one of the leading catalysts for homelessness among women. Yet, as the Little Hoover Commission recently noted, “California does not have a substantial prevention or early intervention program.”

In April, the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence asked the state legislature for over $15 million from the Department of Public Health to coordinate statewide sexual and domestic violence prevention efforts. Part of that funding would go to prevention education, as well as food, transportation, and childcare for survivors. A core piece would provide assistance to young men and boys who are experiencing domestic abuse-related trauma.

The Partnership’s campaign for greater state funding is especially critical given the grave impact Covid shutdowns, layoffs, and school closures have had on women and girls of color globally. According to a 2021 California Study on Violence Experiences Across the Lifespan (Cal-Vex), reports of physical violence against women, including threats with a weapon, increased from 4% in 2020 to 7% in 2021. Globally, there was a 25% increase in violence against women, while a majority of shelters and DV (domestic violence) providers were forced to curtail or cancel services due to

Covid. Only 22% of all individuals experiencing abuse reported seeking mental or medical intervention. And 8 in 10 Californians support alternatives to incarceration for domestic abusers, and, not surprisingly, fewer Black and Latinx folks believe police are effective in violence intervention (former Assemblymember and current State Senator Sydney Kamlager has sponsored a bill that would institutionalize community-based alternatives to emergency response).

In the midst of escalating racialized state violence and terrorism, the focus on ending rape culture and domestic violence must not dim. Creating culturally responsive K-12 domestic and sexual violence prevention education that examines how legacies of white supremacy, misogynoir, colonization, segregation, heterosexism, and economic inequality shape sexual abuse, sex trafficking, and intimate partner violence is critical.

Ensuring that this curriculum is mandatory for all youth across gender and sexual orientation beginning in late elementary or middle school is essential. Ensuring that boys and young men are trained to be allies in identifying, questioning, and ultimately disrupting sexual harassment and sexual violence is fundamental. Ensuring that queer lived experiences and that of disabled youth of color are valued, lifted up, and made visible, is also essential. Although California passed a sweeping CA Healthy Youth Act in 2016 mandating comprehensive HIV/AIDS and sexual violence prevention instruction for middle through high school grades, most students only receive piecemeal instruction if any.

On June 16th, youth and adult allies from the #Standing4BlackGirls task force and coalition will address these issues at the 2021 annual Future of Feminism conference which is dedicated to spearheading community-based solutions to end sexual violence and rape culture against Black girls and girls of color. At the beginning of the year, the task force spearheaded a wellness initiative fund to provide free culturally competent therapy services for Black cis/straight and queer female-identified survivors in partnership with the BIPOC queer-affirming Open Paths Counseling Center in Los Angeles.

Making this resource accessible to more young women, as well as developing a California state bill that provides mandatory anti-racist and queer-affirming domestic and sexual violence prevention education, are priorities of the task force. Investing in prevention and Black girls’ self-determination will ensure that the deadly reality of “one in three” broken, battered and dead sisters comes to an end.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Know your sexual rights

By Dr. Mary Goebel-Komala

In her book “The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse,” sex therapist Wendy Maltz lists the following sexual rights:

• The right to develop healthy attitudes about sex

• The right to sexual privacy

• The right to protection from bodily invasion and harm

• The right to say no to sexual behavior

• The right to control touch and sexual contact

• The right to stop sexual arousal that feels inappropriate or uncomfortable

• The right to develop our sexuality according to our sexual preferences and orientation

• The right to enjoy healthy sexual pleasure and satisfaction

This list was written with victims of child sexual abuse in mind, but we all could benefit from using it to prompt questions about our own sexual health. Here are some questions to get you
started:

What were the most important influences that shaped my sexual attitudes? Do the attitudes I have lead to sexual behavior that is healthy for me? Do my sexual behaviors put me at risk for adverse consequences? Was I comfortable with the amount of privacy I had growing up? Am I able to get enough privacy now? If not, how can I arrange to have more privacy? Was there someone in my past who invaded or harmed my body? If so, how did others in my life respond when I told them? Am I ready to address this with a counselor now? Do I feel I have the right to say no to touch or sexual contact? If I don’t feel I have the right to say no, why not? What internal attitudes or outside pressures make me feel that I don’t have the right to say no? Have I ever experienced uncomfortable or inappropriate sexual arousal? Did I feel safe stopping the uncomfortable or inappropriate encounter? Do I understand that sexual arousal is a biological process that can happen during any sexual encounter, even an abusive one? Do I blame myself for becoming aroused? Did becoming aroused make me believe I wanted the sexual contact, even though I didn’t? Do I believe I have the right to enjoy healthy sexual pleasure and satisfaction? Do my past experiences or current attitudes hamper my ability to enjoy this aspect of my human experience? How does anxiety affect my ability to enjoy my sexuality?

Examining your personal history of sexual rights violations will help you understand how those experiences influence your current sexual health.

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How ‘sex addiction’ has historically been used to absolve white men

“It is often used as an excuse to pathologize misogyny.”

By Kimmy Yam

While authorities said Atlanta-area spa shooting suspect Robert Aaron Long, 21, told investigators he was motivated by “sexual addiction” and claimed he had no racial motivation, health specialists say the explanation falls short.

Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, said Long — who is accused of killing eight people, six of them Asian women — indicated that the spas were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” However, experts say such rationale has been used before in attempts to exonerate white men. The explanation also discounts racial dynamics and can “cause harm” in the way the public understands these issues.

White men have traditionally been given a pass when they say it — and have the privilege of overlooking how race is a factor, experts say.

“Historically, the term ‘sex addiction’ has been used by white males to absolve themselves from personal and legal responsibility for their behaviors,” Apryl Alexander, associate professor in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of Denver, told NBC Asian America. “It is often used as an excuse to pathologize misogyny.”

The defense of sex addiction itself, Alexander said, is a highly controversial one as those in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sex research continue to debate whether to formally recognize it. Currently, the idea that sex addiction is a disorder is not supported by research, nor is it accepted as a clinical diagnosis, she said.

“A lot of individuals who are doing this kind of self-reports of sexual addiction are having normative sexual behaviors and urges, but they might be excessive. Or for a lot of people, it’s rooted in shame that ‘I’m having these attractions and emotional desires that are normal, but I don’t recognize them as normal,’” Alexander said.

Though the American Psychiatric Association added the concept of sexual addiction to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987, it later retracted the term and has since rejected the addition of the idea to its later editions including the DSM–5, which is widely seen as the definitive resource on mental disorders, on the basis of a lack of supporting evidence.

Alexander said this sexual behavior doesn’t affect the brain in the same ways other addictions, including substance use and gambling behavior, do, either, calling the characterization of Long’s behavior “concerning.”

The self-identification of sex addiction, she said, is often seen in individuals who are raised in conservative and religious environments, “where there’s a high level of moral disapproval of their natural kind of sexual urges and desires.” Many of these populations are overwhelmingly white.

In examining acts of gender-based violence, Alexander said such attacks often occur at the intersection of misogyny, racism, xenophobia and homophobia. She emphasized that contrary to what Long told police, such violence “doesn’t just occur in isolation.”

Richelle Concepcion, president of the Asian American Psychological Association, said accepting the suspect’s rationale in this case erases several colliding dynamics of class, immigration status and gender that impact the communities most at risk for physical and sexual violence.

“Quite frankly, it’s really difficult to attribute the atrocious behaviors to an addiction, especially when you look at the demographics of a majority of those who were murdered,” she said. “Race and gender do play a role in this.”

“It’s really unfair to take his word as there is intersectionality that exists pertaining to the lives taken, especially when one considers that the suspect claims to have gone to these businesses with the intention of eliminating the threat of temptation,” Concepcion added.

Still, sex addiction is a common defense invoked by white men in power.

After a number of allegations emerged last year from multiple women, including several who were underage at the time, accusing comedian Chris D’Elia of requesting sexual favors, he responded with a video in February saying, “Sex, it controlled my life.” He added, “I had a problem, and I do have a problem.”

Harvey Weinstein similarly claimed in a 2017 video that he wasn’t “doing OK” and “I’ve got to get help” after numerous accusations of sexual harassment and rape. In a statement provided to NBC News, his brother, Bob Weinstein, described him as “obviously a very sick man.”

And former congressman Anthony Weiner in 2017 broke down in front of a judge after being sentenced to 21 months in prison for sexting an underage girl. Weiner, who called himself a “very sick man for a very long time,” had aimed to avoid jail time after the judge acknowledged that he had sought and received treatment for the behavior.

But controversies don’t end at the diagnosis itself, and treatments have been criticized for insufficiently addressing the role of misogyny in sexual behavior. Ideas, including society’s hypersexualization of Asian women, Alexander said, often go unexamined.

“They often don’t talk about these hypermasculine attitudes or misogynistic messages that individuals are getting, whether that’s from pornography or society at large,” Alexander said. “A lot of these so-called treatment programs often reinforce gender stereotypes. They talk about things like ‘Women are tempting you,’ ‘Women in pornography are trying to seduce you, and that’s why you need to avoid’ instead of talking about your own kind of personal attitudes and behaviors that cause you to marginalize women.”

Such framing of women as “temptresses,” particularly in reference to Asian women, in part shifts the onus from perpetrator to victim, Concepcion said. It plays into a stereotype of women as manipulative dragon ladies, fueling dangerous perceptions that make them uniquely vulnerable to violence. She explained that there’s a tendency to attribute the reasoning behind violence and murderous acts to others’ malicious intent, creating the perception that these victims who were killed intentionally provoked the perpetrator to violence.

“There have been examinations recently of television shows and even movies from years ago that depicted Asian women as temptresses, which appear to prove these stereotypes of Asian women as fact,” she said.

Alexander said larger toxic societal issues need to be unpacked in this context of treatment, in addition to other experiences that may have contributed to such behaviors.

“Those are the things that need to be addressed as underlying issues in this constellation of things that may have led to maybe sexual preoccupation,” she said. “The sexual compulsions or preoccupations are often associated with other types of underlying psychological issues, unmet emotional needs, childhood trauma or, again, power and control dynamics that contribute to oppression.”

But experts stressed that even when people exhibit attitudes that are indicative of oppression and marginalization of others, that does not often lead to committing an act of mass violence. Contrary to prevailing stereotypes, statistics show that roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of violent acts can be attributed to people who have a serious mental illness. In reality, individuals confronting mental health issues are more than 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime compared to the general population.

For people dealing with sexual preoccupation that may be causing them distress, experts recommend help and support that approach the issue with positivity. Treatments that are shame-based are never effective, Alexander said, and mitigating feelings of shame comes with comprehensive sex education. Sexuality is marginalized so frequently in culture and it’s not uncommon that people harbor difficult emotions around the subject, unsure of how to wrestle with it, she said.

“A lot of our sex education is rooted in shame and stigma, that we don’t talk about normative sexuality and how to work through that — that maybe your urges are natural,” she said.

With the resources available to help people living with mental illnesses, Concepcion said it’s never acceptable to chalk this violent behavior up to having a “bad day.”

“Many of us have bad days and yet a majority of us focus on other forms of coping to alleviate the impact of said days,” she said. “It is never justified to take lives or engage in acts of violence when we ourselves have experienced less than ideal days.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Not as simple as ‘no means no’

— what young people need to know about consent

By

A recent petition circulated by Sydney school girl Chanel Contos called for schools to provide better education on consent, and to do so much earlier.

In the petition, which since Thursday has been signed by more than 5,000 people, Contos writes that her school

… provided me with life changing education on consent for the first time in year 10. However, it happened too late and came with the tough realisation that amongst my friends, almost half of us had already been raped or sexually assaulted by boys from neighbouring schools.

So, what core information do young people need to know about consent? And is the Australian curriculum set up to teach it?

What’s in the curriculum?

This is not the first time young people have criticised their school programs. Year 12 student Tamsin Griffiths recently called for an overhaul to school sex education after speaking to secondary students throughout Victoria. She advocated for a program that better reflects contemporary issues.

Australia’s health and physical education curriculum does instruct schools to teach students about establishing and maintaining respectful relationships. The resources provided state all students from year 3 to year 10 should learn about matters including:

  • standing up for themselves
  • establishing and managing changing relationships (offline and online)
  • strategies for dealing with relationships when there is an imbalance of power (including seeking help or leaving the relationship)
  • managing the physical, social and emotional changes that occur during puberty
  • practices that support reproductive and sexual health (contraception, negotiating consent, and prevention of sexually transmitted infections and blood-borne viruses)
  • celebrating and respecting difference and diversity in individuals and communities.

Despite national guidance, there is wide variability in how schools interpret the curriculum, what topics they choose to address and how much detail they provide. This is further compounded by a lack of teacher training.

A study of students in South Australia and Victoria, along with repeated nationwide surveys of secondary students, have shown young people do consider school to be a trustworthy source of sex education. But most don’t believe the lessons have prepared them adequately for relationships and intimacy.

They want lessons that take into account diverse genders and sexualities, focus less on biology, and provide more detail about relationships, pleasure and consent.

The national curriculum also stops mandating these lessons after year 10 and many year 11 and 12 timetables are focused on university entrance exams or vocational learning opportunities. This means senior students have limited opportunity to receive formal sex education at a time when they really need it.

So, what should young people know about consent?

The term “consent” is often associated with sex, but it’s much broader than that. It relates to permission and how to show respect for ourselves and for other people. Consent should therefore be addressed in an age-appropriate way across all years of schooling.

Younger children can be taught about consent with relation to sharing toys.

The most important point about consent is that everyone should be comfortable with what they’re engaging in. If you are uncomfortable at any point, you have the right to stop. On the other side, if you see someone you are interacting with being uncomfortable, you need to check in with them to ensure they are enthusiastic about the activity, whatever it may be.

In the early years, students should be taught how to affirm and respect personal boundaries, using non-sexual examples like whether to share their toys or give hugs. It is also important they learn about public and private body parts and the importance of using correct terminology.

In later years, lessons should consider more intimate or sexual scenarios. This also includes consent and how it applies to the digital space.

Older students need to learn sexual activity is something to be done with someone, not to someone. Consent is a critical part of this process and it must be freely given, informed and mutual.

Consent isn’t about doing whatever we want until we hear the word “no”. Ideally we want all our sexual encounters to involve an enthusiastic “yes”.

But if your partner struggles to say the word “yes” enthusiastically, it is important to pay attention to body language and non-verbal cues. You should feel confident your partner is enjoying the activity as much as you are, and if you are ever unsure, stop and ask them.

Often this means checking in regularly with your partner.

Young people also need to know just because you have agreed to do something in the past, this does not mean you have to agree to do it again. You also have the right to change you mind at any time — even partway through an activity.

It’s not as simple as ‘no means no’

The most recent Australian survey of secondary school students highlighted that more than one-quarter (28.4%) of sexually active students reported an unwanted sexual experience. Their most common reasons for this unwanted sex was due to pressure from a partner, being intoxicated or feeling frightened.

We should be careful not to oversimplify the issue of consent. Sexual negotiation can be a difficult or awkward process for anyone — regardless of their age — to navigate.

Some academics have called for moving beyond binary notions of “yes means yes” and “no means no” to consider the grey area in the middle.

While criminal acts such as rape are perhaps easily understood by young people, teaching materials need to consider a broad spectrum of scenarios to highlight examples of violence or coercion. For example, someone having an expectation of sex because you’ve flirted, and making you feel guilty for leading them on.

When it comes to sexual activity, we should be clear that:

  • although the law defines “sex” as an activity that involves penetration, other sexual activities may be considered indecent assault
  • a degree of equality needs to exist between sexual partners and it is coercive to use a position of power or methods such as manipulation, trickery or bribery to obtain sex
  • a person who is incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol is not able to give consent
  • wearing certain clothes, flirting or kissing is not necessarily an invitation for other things.

We should also challenge gender stereotypes about who should initiate intimacy and who may wish to take things fast or slow. Healthy relationships involve a ongoing and collaborative conversation between both sexual partners about what they want.

Consent is sexy

A partner who actively asks for permission and respects your boundaries is showing they respect you and care about your feelings. It also leads to an infinitely more pleasurable sexual experience when both partners are really enjoying what they are doing.

It is important that lessons for older students focus on the positive aspects of romantic and sexual relationships.

They should encourage young people to consider what sorts of relationships they want for themselves and provide them with the skills, such as communication and empathy, to help ensure positive experiences.

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What Does Sexual Coercion Look Like?

by Crystal Raypole

Sexual trauma can happen in many ways, and it doesn’t always involve physical force. Sexual coercion, for example, happens when someone pressures or manipulates you into having sexual contact when you don’t want to.

Sexual coercion can be confusing and deeply distressing. You know what happened wasn’t right, but you might not fully understand how or why. You might even believe they couldn’t have assaulted you since you said “yes” in the end.

Here’s one important thing to know, though: True consent is given voluntarily.

If you only consent because you want the other person to stop pressuring or threatening you, you didn’t really consent.

Coercion describes any attempt to control your behavior with threats or manipulation.

Sexual coercion, then, happens when someone won’t accept “no” and continues to try to convince you to change your mind about engaging in sexual activity.

In this article, we’re using “sex” as shorthand to describe any and all forms of sexual contact or activity. There is no one definition of sex, and what’s considered to be sex varies from person to person.

For example, this might include:

  • kissing, licking, or sucking
  • touching, rubbing, or grinding
  • fingering or stroking
  • cunnilingus or fellatio
  • vaginal or anal penetration

Once you turn down sex, the story should stop there. But this doesn’t always happen.

Sometimes, coercion is pretty blatant. For example: “If you don’t have sex with me, I’ll tell everyone we’ve been having an affair.”

Other times, it might take a more subtle form. For example: “Here, why don’t you have a glass of wine and get out of those work clothes, and we’ll just see what happens.”

Common coercion tactics include:

Coercion typically remains in the realm of verbal and emotional pressure. That said, it isn’t uncommonTrusted Source to give in to coercion if you’re afraid the manipulation and pressure will escalate to physical aggression and violence.

Sexual coercion often happens in romantic relationships, but it can also happen in other contexts — between acquaintances, co-workers, friends or family, at school, at a party, or anywhere else.

If you don’t really want to have sex but agree because you feel obligated or don’t want the other person to get mad, you aren’t consenting voluntarily.

Coercion happens when someone wants you to consent when you’ve already said no or otherwise expressed disinterest. They might use threats, persuasion, and other tactics to get the outcome they want.

When alcohol is involved

Most people can still consent after moderate drinking, but you can’t consent if drugs or alcohol have impaired your ability to make decisions.

Say you’re on a date. You’ve had a couple of drinks, and the alcohol has given you a pleasant buzz, but you don’t feel drunk. What you do feel is great chemistry with your date. From the way they’re looking at you, they feel the same thing.

“Want to head back to my place?” They ask.

“Definitely,” you reply.

As long as neither of you are incapacitated, you can still consent.

When someone keeps offering you drinks with the goal of getting you to agree to sex when drunk, that’s coercion.

In a relationship

Being in a relationship does not mean you give ongoing consent.

Everyone has the right to decide when they do and don’t want to have sex. Once you say no, your partner should respect that. Any threats, wheedles, guilt trips, or other persuasion intended to wear you down counts as coercion.

With that in mind, you might wonder if it’s coercion when a partner tells you how sexy you look in that outfit or gives you a sensual massage to try and get you in the mood.

Typically, the difference comes down to a few key factors:

  • their intent
  • whether you’ve already said no
  • how they respond to your refusal

Let’s say you tell them, “I’m not feeling it tonight.”

They reply, “That’s OK. I’m happy just massaging you, unless you want me to stop.”

This gives you the choice to continue the current level of intimacy with no pressure for more.

If, a little later on, you decide you actually do feel like sex, this isn’t coercion — as long as the decision really does come from you.

It would, however, be coercive if they insist they want to help you relax, but then ask repeatedly, “Are you sure you aren’t feeling a little sexier after all this massaging?”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How to Know If You’re In a Toxic Relationship

The signs you’re in a toxic relationship can be difficult to identify — here’s how.

By Maria del Russo

Any relationship, be it romantic or otherwise, can be complicated. Whether it’s the relationship you have with your pushy mother-in-law, a childhood friend, or a spouse, interpersonal connections can be as challenging as they are rewarding. But a toxic relationship — one that is emotionally, and in extreme cases, physically damaging — is not complicated: it’s abusive. And learning the signs of a toxic relationship can help ensure that your relationships are healthy, sustainable, and mutually beneficial.

“A toxic relationship includes many factors,” Dr. Pavini Moray, a sex educator and founder of Wellcelium, a sex and intimacy school, tells Woman’s Day. “The main gauge, though, is how you feel the majority of the time.” If, for the most part, you feel supported, loved, and generally happy, an occasional spat or heated disagreement doesn’t mean you’re necessarily in a toxic relationship. “Toxic relationships detract from the quality of your life, rather than add to it,” Moray says. And while that could mean different things to different people and depending on their unique relationship, there are certain red flags everyone should look out for.

If you identify with any of the below, it could point to some toxicity in your relationship. But Moray says that all is not lost should you find yourself in this situation. “There is no cookie-cutter answer,” Moray explains. “Some couples can get support, can really get into the work of relational repair, and pull through.” So don’t let the below list scare you. See it more as step one in your healing — whether it’s with your partner, a friend, a parent, or on your own.

An absence of mutual care and support.

While it’s unrealistic to expect to feel happy every second of your relationship, the contentment, support, and shared joy should be more prevalent than not. “You may experience a dullness or a lack of pleasurable sensation when in a toxic relationship,” Moray says. “You may also feel afraid or unworthy, especially if your partner speaks in a derogatory, critical, or consistently blaming manner.” One of the reasons why people enter relationships is to meet their need for belonging, safety, and connection, and that need should be met on a consistent basis. “A relationship that is without the positive benefits of a quality connection like care and joy alongside negative impact means the costs of the relationship are outweighing the benefits,” Moray says. “Your needs are not being met.”

An ongoing lack of effective communication.

Learning how to effectively communicate with the people in your life can be challenging, to be sure. And every once in a while, you’ll have a day where every little thing your partner, parent, or friend says sends you into a rage. But if you’re finding you can’t talk to your loved ones without arguing, it might point to a deeper issue. “If you or your partner is feeling rageful or belittled much of the time, something is wrong,” Moray says. “While conflict is a natural part of relationships, the way you do conflict matters a lot.” The key is to be able to work through difficult subjects without lashing out at one another. If that seems to be lacking, your relationship may not be thriving.

There’s relationship imbalance.

In a healthy relationship, there is a balance of support. Sometimes you have to support your partner, and other times they need to support you. If that balance is out of whack, though, Moray says something more seriously could be up. “Both of you need to feel your needs are important to the relationship, and that you are on the same team,” Moray explains. “If you find you are consistently giving in to your partner’s desires, eventually the imbalance will result in resentment from the partner who is over-giving.” Balance in a relationship doesn’t just apply to big, potentially life-changing decisions, like where you’ll live or whether you’ll have children. It applies to smaller, daily decisions too, like if your partner always chooses the restaurant or whose family you visit for the holidays.

There’s a lack of mutual consent.

While the other signs that have been previously discussed can be chalked up to lack of respect, Moray classifies how consent is or isn’t happening in your connection as a form of abuse. If you’re doing things you really don’t want to do, or are coerced to go beyond your own boundaries — whether they are financial, physical, sexual, or emotional — it’s a sure-fire sign of toxicity. “Healthy relationships are based on a foundation of consent,” Moray says. “Everyone in the relationship agrees to be in the relationship. If you ever feel like you cannot leave the relationship, for any reason, it’s a good idea to consider whether this relationship is in your best interest.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How Using Safe Words Helped Me Reclaim My Sexuality After Trauma

Determining safe words with your partner can create a healthy, loving space.

By By Ashley Oken

There are sexual experiences that can strip you of believing you have bodily autonomy, feeling safe in your own body, especially during sexual encounters. These leave you feeling powerless over your own sexuality.

It could be through sexual violence, such as rape and molestation, aggressive sexual coercion from a partner and unwanted touching, workplace harassment, or anything in between or beyond.

Individuals who survive these singular or multiple experiences can carry trauma that follows them through their sexual life.

As someone who has survived multiple years of sexual abuse and multiple experiences with rape, I found myself grappling with how to get past the mental scars and trauma. I tried many things, including meditation, and music, but they failed to work for me.

The first time I used a safe word with a partner that wasn’t “stop,” which can be triggering, it was liberating, freeing, and I was eager to do so again.

Here’s how safe words — a designated word you say when sexual play with a partner becomes too intense, painful, or creeps past your boundaries — helped me and can help you, too.

1. Safe words empower you to communicate directly without going into detail.

Like many survivors, I struggled to assert myself and my needs.

However, using words such as “red,” “yellow,” and “green” to indicate my comfort level was positive. I could communicate without over-explaining, which can be a barrier to speaking up.

Other words that aren’t related to the traffic light analogy such as, “grandma,” “lettuce,” fire,” and “T-Rex” can be used, too.

2. Once you use the safe word, all sex has to stop. It can’t resume until both partners discuss why one party used the word.

The most important component when using safe words is having a supportive partner who listens to you. They must understand that anything can have the potential to push you out of your comfort zone.

Checking in with one another throughout sex is key to ensuring that everything is consensual. It also helps to make sure that everyone is on the same page and truly comfortable.

With safe words, a survivor is able to control their sexual interactions, and having a supportive partner can be restorative. 

3. Using the safe word without judgement helps a survivor see that their trauma isn’t a weakness.

The minute you feel anxious, triggered, or uncomfortable with an act or a position, you should use whatever safe word you both agreed upon. Do not worry about what your partner will be thinking.

Moreover, know that it is more than okay to assert your boundaries. The use of the word can give you time to reflect on exactly what you want them to do or not do. Then, you can discuss your boundaries more thoroughly.

Your trauma isn’t a weakness. Instead, it’s something that can open the door to much more exploration that keeps consent and triggers in mind.

4. Safe words can give survivors a sense of control back to them, a key component for healing.

When I was raped by an ex-boyfriend, saying “stop,” “get off of me,” and “you’re hurting me” didn’t stop him from inflicting violence on me. Instead, he continued to get more aggressive, and, ultimately, took away my feeling of control within sexual encounters.

Although the experience took my faith in the word “stop” away from me, I learned how to regain control by using other safe words such as, “pumpernickel.” For the first time, I felt in control over every part of an encounter.

5. Safe words remind you that your body is yours.

During the years of molestation I went through during childhood, my body never felt as if it belonged to me, but to my abuser. It also felt as if the things that were happening to me were happening outside of me, almost like they were happening to someone else.

Afterward, I struggled to feel as though my body was actually mine and not working against me somehow. Safe word usage helped me see that I can indeed have a say over what happens to me and that someone listens to me in full.

Survivors’ bodies are always theirs, and they are allowed to assert that at any point and for any reason.

Safe words have helped me come a long way since I began this journey to reclaim my sexuality after trauma.

Like with so many survivors, my road to healing is ongoing and I’m still learning about how to set boundaries with partners properly. But safe words have shown me that healing is possible and that sexuality doesn’t have to be lost.

You can have power over your body and you are not broken, but strong.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How do young men navigate consent in a post Me Too world?

Young men are keen to talk about consent. So say sex educators, who are helping them move the conversation beyond ‘no means no’

 

by Franki Cookney

In a small classroom tucked away up a few flights of stone steps, two dozen young men are reflecting on their chat-up lines. “Sometimes I’ve gone in and told a girl she was hot and maybe I shouldn’t have,” admits one. “I might think differently now.”

The desks have been pushed back against the wood-panelled walls and the lads are sitting around in their sportswear, discussing “rugby culture”. In half an hour they’ll be out in the chilly February night, training with Cambridge University’s under-20s team. But right now, they’re crammed into what is becoming an increasingly stuffy classroom to attend a workshop on masculinity.

The session is run by Good Lad Initiative (GLI), an organisation which delivers volunteer-led workshops in schools and universities on everything from male mental health, to LGBTQ+ identity, sex and consent.

No one in the room has actually used the word “consent”, but that’s what they’re talking about. And recognising that innocuous-seeming compliments can make women feel uncomfortable is the first step towards a more nuanced understanding of it.

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Facilitator Jolyon Martin, 27, first attended a GLI workshop himself four years ago when he was still a student. “People often do these things for social capital,” he says. “The workshop shows them that actually no one in the room is impressed by that behaviour.”

He’s noticed a move away from a “minimum standards” approach to consent – which focuses simply on what’s legal and what’s not – and towards a more holistic view. He also believes the freshers arriving at university have a better attitude than some of the older students.

“I’ve been in workshops where an older guy has said something and the 18-year-olds have called him out on it,” Martin says.

For Matt Whale, consent wasn’t something he gave much thought to as a teenager. “In my head, saying ‘no’ was in response to a violent act by a stranger, or a random man being creepy,” the 24-year-old admits.

At 18 he moved to London to study and began to hear stories that undermined this view. Friends told him about being sexually assaulted on dates. Others talked of the pressure they felt to appease their partners. “The frequency of this has completely blown my mind,” he says.

These conversations are to empower young men to want more for themselves

Like most people his age, Whale’s school sex ed consisted of basic biology and an assertion that ‘no means no’. But as the Me Too movement and the recent conviction of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein shows, consent is more complicated than that.

Very few young people are taught what it means when someone equivocates, changes their mind or doesn’t say anything at all. In 2018, Childlike reported a 29 per cent increase in teenagers seeking advice on peer-on-peer sexual abuse. The organisation noted that callers lacked understanding about consent and how it applied within relationships. Meanwhile, a 2019 survey of 5,649 university students by sexual health charity Brook found that 56 per cent had encountered unwelcome sexual behaviour.

But while many may appear fearful or defensive about their ignorance, few are apathetic. Contrary to the typecasting, boys and young men are keen to participate in conversations about consent.

For her recent book, Boys and Sex, journalist and author Peggy Orenstein spent two years interviewing young men in the US. She feels optimistic about their willingness to discuss consent. “I saw so much in them that was so interesting and valuable,” she said in an interview with Time magazine. “They were really ready and eager to engage in all of these issues.”

And me

Nathaniel Cole is a London-based writer, speaker and sex educator, who works with organisations such as Sexplain UK and GLI delivering workshops to children aged 8 to 18. He says the key to opening up consent conversations with young men is not by lecturing students, but by listening. “These conversations are not just to tell them what they’ve been doing wrong, but to try to empower them to want more from themselves,” he says.

This is what workshops like GLI’s aim to do. “Boys have been taught that to survive in the harsh world of dating you need to learn some tricks,” explains director of GLI, Dan Guinness. “We want to open up space that people can say these things, then discuss what that would feel like for the other person. It’s about trying to shift the perspective.”

The students attending today’s workshop seem confident and engaged, but you might expect that from Cambridge undergraduates. However, youth worker Glen Wiseman, who delivers sex education in state secondary schools, says teens are just as eager to talk.

“They’re desperate to have these conversations,” he says. “Whenever they’re asked what they’d like to cover next, they always say they want the sexual health or relationship sessions.”

Wiseman is part of Bracknell Forest local authority’s sexual health team in Berkshire. As well as facilitating discussions and offering advice, they give out free condoms, offer pregnancy tests and STI screening, and prescribe contraception.

The team runs 300 sessions a year and in 2019 saw 5,000 teenagers come through their doors. “We’ve moved on from the basic consent stuff,” Wiseman says. “We talk about accessing pleasure and communicating how you want it to be.”

Historically, relationships and sex education (RSE) in British schools has focused on the mechanics of sex and on contraception. The 1999 Teenage Pregnancy Strategy brought government funding into areas like Bracknell Forest, which had one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country at the time.

Justin Hancock remembers the initiative well. He has worked with young people for more than 20 years, first as a youth and social worker and then as a dedicated sex educator. Boys’ desire to talk about consent isn’t new, he says; but society’s realisation that those conversations matter is.

“Young men have always been fascinated about consent and wanted to talk about what it is that they’re supposed to be doing,” he says. “They’ve always been very aware that, generally speaking, they will have the most power in a sexual situation, and they want to make sense of it.”

As the 10-year strategy came to an end, for a lot of places the money dried up. Further cuts to local governments caused RSE to drop down the list of priorities. Continued financial support to his area allowed Wiseman and his colleagues to adapt their clinics and workshops in line with shifting attitudes and priorities, but many schools do not have that luxury.

Young men have always been fascinated about consent

From September 2020, RSE will become statutory in all secondary schools in England. The curriculum guidelines mention consent, but how these lessons will be taught depends on the available resources. “Schools either don’t have enough money or they’re not allocating enough money towards RSE,” says Hancock. “They’re not sending their staff on training because they can’t afford to pay for cover staff. And they can’t afford to pay for external workshops.”

Talking the talk

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced in March to 23 years in prison, after being found guilty of a criminal sexual assault in the first degree and third-degree rape. During the trial his defence lawyer, Donna Rotunno, told the New York Times’ The Daily podcast that, if she were a man, she would ask women to sign consent forms before sex.

Both the high-profile trial and Rotunno’s controversial words – which outraged many – have helped to keep the topic of consent firmly in the public sphere. Generation Z boys and young men, growing up with access to a wealth of information and ideas on social media, are switched on to that.

Whale says he’s never had a conversation with a group of male friends about consent, but tells me about an Instagram account he follows which has helped his understanding. Everyone interviewed for this piece agreed the Me Too movement had made a huge impression, raising awareness of consent among teenage boys, but not always in the way you might expect.

“Me Too has also had a negative effect in that boys are starting to question it and ask if it can be true,” explains Cole.

Guinness agrees: “People get defensive. It’s that idea of, ‘You can’t do anything anymore,’ or, ‘You put your arm around someone and you go to jail’.”

The key, Cole says, is to try to meet their challenges with compassion. In his 2019 talk for TedxLondon, he explained that allowing boys to talk about their fears and frustrations was a crucial part of consent education.

According to Cole, society is finally cottoning on to how valuable education around consent can be; and where schools have brought it in, they’ve seen good results. “More talks and workshops are being booked proactively,” he says. “Rather than waiting for boys to go down a certain path, they want to have the conversation now.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Sexual assault is a consequence of how society is organized

By Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan

The Department of Education is about to release new rules about how schools must deal with sexual harassment, stalking, and sexual assault. There’s a lot that’s disastrous about this interpretation of Title IX, which is supposed to promote equal access to education for women.

But what’s largely missing from both the rules and the flood of public criticism they are generating is a discussion about prevention. This is typical of the national discourse about sexual assault on campus and beyond, and of the broader conversations in this era of #MeToo. The singular focus on adjudication reflects two assumptions.

The first is that victims frequently fabricate claims of sexual assault; all the evidence suggests that false accusations are rare. The second is that sexual assaults happen because of “bad” or “sociopathic” people. The only way to deal with them is through punishment harsh enough to strike sufficient fear into those who commit or want to commit assaults.

But what if the most sexual assaults were “normal”? Not in the sense that it’s acceptable, but in the sense that it’s often something that everyday people do—  a predictable, if awful, a consequence of how society is organized. In doing the research for our book, Sexual Citizens, that’s exactly what we found. And there’s an important consequence to this finding: we’re not going to punish our way out of these normal assaults.

Because those who commit normal assaults often don’t think they’re committing assaults, they believe they are having sex. When a student we interviewed for our research with undergraduates at Columbia and Barnard told us “I put on a tie. So I knew I was going to have sex”, he meant that, for him, agreeing to go to a sorority formal with a woman who invited him came with an obligation to have sex her. He described doing while she was blackout drunk; he never reflected any awareness that he’d raped her.

Acknowledging that sexual assault is often socially produced, rather than solely the result of individual moral failings, expands our vision of what to do about sexual assault: rather than responding to sociopaths’ evil acts, the goal also becomes to prevent those harms from ever being committed.

We’ve been successful using this approach to address other social problems. Think about drunk driving. Since 1982, there’s been a 50 percent reduction in drunk driving fatalities. Among those under 21, fatalities have reduced by 80 percent. This tremendous success reflects what public health calls a ‘multi-level’ response, with efforts that include but go far beyond trying to change the behavior of the individual causing the harm.

Drunk drivers are held responsible, but so are the bar and restaurant owners who over-serve them. Road design has smoothed dangerous curves and urban planners have added speed bumps to slow traffic, complemented by safer cars, drivers’ education, points on licenses for repeated infractions, and increased enforcement during periods of greatest risk. The power of moral persuasion has made it socially unacceptable to drive drunk or to allow others to do so and has normalized the idea of a designated driver.

We need a prevention approach for a sexual assault that parallels the success in addressing “drunk driving”. We still must address the harm done by those who commit assaults. But punishment would not be enough, both because it doesn’t necessarily address harm and because it’s relatively ineffective at prevention. A new approach must be built upon the realization that far more progress will be made through things like education, transforming the physical environment, and drawing upon our moral institutions and commitments. The steps are many, but they are also fairly clear.

The adults at home need to be partners in sexual assault prevention — which means raising children who have the skills to have sex with other people without assaulting them. This is consistent with a central task of parenting: helping children develop the social and emotional skills to manage their bodies so that they can go about their lives without hurting others. When they want something, we say, “don’t grab — use your words.” We teach them not to hit and to apologize if they step on someone else’s foot. We make sure that they know how to drive before we let them borrow the car. Yet our silences around sex have meant these lessons haven’t been extended and applied to young people’s intimate lives, with disastrous consequences.

Parents may object that talking about sex is awkward, or that it’s the children themselves who shut down the conversations. But many parents are frequently the source of much discomfort.

When they choose words like “hoo-hoo” or “pee-pee” instead of vulva and penis, they are communicating that some body parts are unspeakably shameful. Children learn very early that sex is not something they can talk about, especially with their families.

The solution isn’t only to start naming body parts. Nor is it to make the discussion technical, talking with young people about fallopian tubes — that’s like teaching driving by explaining how spark plugs work. 

What young people need is a moral education: to hear from us that we want them to be fully formed sexual citizens, with the right to say yes and to say no to sex, and that they must always respect that those they’re with have the same rights. Adults have a choice: to talk with young people about how sex and intimacy will be an essential part of their lives — how they connect a person they love—or to let their values be shaped by a cacophony of messages from pornography, advertising, and mass media.

Families can’t do this work alone. Children fortunate enough to have the adults in their life help them develop a sense of sexual citizenship will nonetheless go out into a world in which they will be surrounded by others who have grown up in sexual silence and shame. That’s why comprehensive sex education is so essential.

Research suggests that sex ed can reduce the likelihood of perpetrating sexual violence. An analysis of survey data from the Columbia and Barnard campuses showed that women college students who had had sex education that taught them to refuse sex they didn’t want were half as likely to be raped in college. That’s as strong a protective effect as the flu vaccine. At the population level, high immunization rates create “herd immunity.” Protecting everyone. Making sure that all American school-children receive comprehensive, age-appropriate, medically-accurate sex education will prevent a vast number of campus sexual assaults.

And yet the current American landscape for sex education is starkly unequal; young people who grow up poor or in rural areas are less likely to receive comprehensive, medically-accurate sex education. And as is true nationally, the LGBTQ students we talked with told us that the sex-ed they’d received in high school only addressed heterosexual experiences. They didn’t feel just underserved; they feel erased. That erasure is part of their well-documented greater vulnerability to being assaulted on campus.

Beyond parents and schools, faith communities have mainly figured in discussions about sexual violence as sites of perpetration. Those same institutions can and must do more than just prevent harm — they can join as allies in prevention. We have seen through the first-hand experience how powerful it can be for young people to engage in conversations about relationships and intimacy grounded in religious values with trusted adults other than their parents.

If the fundamental goal of religion is to provide a framework for people to figure out what it means to live a good life, then sex and intimacy must be part of that discovery. Prevention is everyone’s job. The character-development element of youth sporting can reinforce lessons of fundamental respect and decency. Musical education can reinforce lessons of listening to one another. Sexual education isn’t just about sex. It’s about connecting the experiences of what it means to be a good person to one’s intimate life.

Unquestionably, campus adjudication processes should be fair to all involved and not cause more harm. But research conducted on our campus showed that only a minute proportion of all assaults are formally reported; that’s typical of many institutions. Getting adjudication right will barely move the needle on reducing sexual assault. We can’t spend most of our energy reacting to assaults that have already happened.

There are small clear steps we can take to make assaults less likely to happen in the first place. We need to talk about sex. We need to ground that discussion in moral visions of how we must treat one another. And we need to provide comprehensive age-appropriate sexuality education for young people. The path to prevention is clear. We simply all need to walk along with it together.

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Seven factors that influence sexual consent

By Valeria Escobar

Through over 150 interviews spanning five years, two Columbia researchers have tried to “pull back the curtain” on the sex lives of Columbia undergraduates. As concerns around sexual assault have become a central part of the undergraduate student experience, during which as many as one in three women and almost one in six men will report being sexually assaulted, the researchers sought to find the factors of college living that enable these acts and the ways in which colleges can best prevent them in the future.

Last week, Jennifer Hirsch, professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, and Shamus Khan, chair of the department of sociology, released the culmination of their work in their book, “Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus.” Through their work, Hirsch and Khan argued for a need to reevaluate popular notions about consent to empower students to feel as though they have the right to choose their sexual experiences.

To begin their book launch, Hirsch and Khan participated in a panel at the Forum on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus, where they discussed the scope of their project to an audience of hundreds of students and faculty.

“The thing that complicated consent for us was that people consented to sex that they didn’t want to have and people had sex that they wanted to have without ever consenting to that sex,” Khan said.

“Consent education thinks fundamentally not about the moment of transaction between two people in the presence of the ‘yes’ or the expression or affirmation, but tries to understand bringing that social world into that moment,” he added.

Hirsch and Khan’s publication follows the 2018 findings from the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation tam, which noted that race, gender, and class play significant roles in shaping students’ experiences with consent. In interviews with Spectator, students noted that these factors contribute to their complicated experience with consent, which the straightforward “yes means yes” model that is taught during the New Student Orientation Program fails to address.

At the panel, Hirsch and Khan highlighted among these factors the “Seven Dimensions of Consent”—““gendered heterosexual scripts,” “sexual citizenship,” “intersectionality,” “men’s fears,” “alcohol,” “peer groups,” and “spatial/temporal factors”—as wrinkles that have yet to be ironed out by the affirmative consent model.

Gendered Heterosexual Scripts:

In heterosexual sexual encounters, the male-identifying partner is traditionally expected to ask for consent, affirming the idea that masculinity is associated with “unceasing sexual desire.” According to their findings, this expectation has reinforced the expectation for men to ask for rather than provide consent, making it difficult for men to recognize their own experiences as nonconsensual.

The book recounts the story of Boutros, a pseudonym for a student, who was leaving a pub crawl in Edinburgh when a woman undressed and groped him, even after he repeatedly asked her to leave him alone. The account of the story became very muddled, the researchers wrote, as he hesitated over his words.

“Come on, a girl can’t really sexually assault a guy,” Boutros told the researchers, noting that he would never “sue her” or seek compensations. “Unless I get grievous bodily harm or come to serious financial detriment.”

Sexual Citizenship:

Personal experiences, including childhood, sexual education, and interactions with family and peers inform one’s right to determine one’s own sexual involvement, according to the researchers. Khan said that sexual citizenship is more than having the “right to say yes or no” due to differing conceptions of social responsibilities; rather, he emphasized, it entails engaging both partners’ personal desires.

Adele Chi, BC ’22, told Spectator in a 2018 interview that she received a comprehensive affirmative consent education at her private high school, which allowed her to feel more confident in making decisions about her personal experiences with sex and consent in college.

“When I walk into [a] frat house, I don’t think, ‘Oh, I am setting myself up automatically to enter into a sexual relationship.’ It is my own free will, and I am my own person. I don’t feel like women should feel like their bodies are entitled to other guys, even if [they] enter into an environment where it welcomes that sexual context to happen,” she said.

Intersectionality:

Factors such as differences in race and ethnicity, physical strength, social status, and age further complicate consent. These differences, which are indicative of social inequalities, contribute to a fear of physical intimacy, according to the researchers, who highlighted the importance of underscoring social inequalities that contribute to sexual assault.

“Sex is not a cognitive behavior, it’s not a health behavior, it’s a social behavior,” Hirsch said. “You can’t understand what people are trying to do when they are having sex without understanding the world [around them].”

Gender and race are both factors that affect people’s ability to contest or request sexual encounters. Additionally, Hirsch noted in the discussion that every single black woman who spoke to the researchers had experienced unwanted sexual contact.

“If you’re thinking of sexual assault prevention, you have to also think about racial justice,” she added.

Men’s Fears:

Men worry that there is a gap between actual consent practices and the legal standard that they were taught. While there is no evidence to suggest that false accusations are common, men still largely fear the possibility of being accused because they are usually responsible for obtaining consent.

The paper emphasizes the fear on the part of students of color, and particularly black men, who have an “intense awareness of racialized risk of sexual assault accusations.” Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen attributes this notion to the impact of “overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and law enforcement bias” that disproportionately penalizes racial minorities.

Alcohol:

During the panel discussion, Khan raised the question of why alcohol and sexual activity are so commonly paired; Hirsch noted that “people get drunk in order to have sex” to avoid the awkwardness that arises from social interactions that limit sexual opportunities. Their work notes that although one can’t give consent while intoxicated, drunk sex is a normalized part of the college experience.

“If you view sex as something that is so shameful or you’re so afraid of that you can’t do it until you get really drunk, we need to ask ourselves why is it the case that we are relating to sex in [through sex],” Khan said.

A number of high-profile cases of college sexual assault have recently involved intoxication, leading the two researchers to examine alcohol as an important component in the discussion of sexual assault prevention.

However, Khan also noted that many incidents of sexual assault occur when people are sober, so looking to alcohol as a major contributor of sexual assault “isn’t going to get us very close” to understanding the complexities of consent.

Peer Groups:

Students’ lives are centralized around peer communities that maintain an identity through group harmony and a collective reputation. As such, peer groups can facilitate sexual interactions that will benefit the standing of the group, the researchers emphasized. However, members of these groups may also downplay instances of assault so as not to cause a disruption in the community’s cohesion.

While the peer group benefits from a student’s decision to engage in a sexual encounter or avoid labeling an incident as “assault,” the student consequently sees their sexual partner only as a means of social leverage rather than as a result of personal desires.

“Part of the idea of sexual citizenship is not just if you have the right to say yes or say no but that you treat the other person that you’re active with like they’re a human being and not a sex toy,” Hirsch said.

Spatial/Temporal Factors:

The urban setting of Columbia causes a divergence from the quintessential New England college campus; space is limited, and the University is not the most prominent feature of its city. Space and time are noted as contributors to “implied” consent throughout their research; in certain “sexually charged” places and at certain times, such as party spaces and bars, sexual activity is an essential component of the experience for students.

Most recently, Columbia researchers at the Society for Applied Anthropology suggested that there are specific times within the calendar year, relationship stage, and span of the sexual interaction when a person establishes expectations for their partner and limits the ability to refuse consent. Students perceive an invitation to a fraternity formal, a long-term relationship, and an encounter organized through a dating app as temporal factors that indicate consent.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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To stop sexual and domestic violence, start in the classroom

By and

As two prosecutors with decades of experience helping survivors of domestic and sexual violence in King County, we spend all day, every day responding to cases involving abuse. Over the last year, almost 5,000 survivors of sexual violence and their families sought help from the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. In 2019, the King County Prosecutor filed more than 2,000 sexual and domestic violence cases, from homicides to rapes to aggravated assaults. We assisted on thousands more protection orders, worked to reduce firearm violence and helped children who were often the targets of abuse.

We want fewer victims to experience violence. This is why we support Senate Bill 5395 and its companion, House Bill 2184, which will provide comprehensive sexual health education for all Washington students. This proposal would help stop sexual and domestic violence by requiring public schools to include age-appropriate curriculum that develops healthy relationship behavior in students.

Legislation can be a powerful tool to reduce violence. Last year, laws redefined rape and removed the statute of limitations on many sex crimes, reducing the burden on victims and giving many of them the time needed to come forward and report crimes. Our community also passed domestic violence laws to keep victims safe and reduce firearm violence.

These are steps in the right direction. For true culture change to happen around sexual and domestic violence, proactive education and prevention also is needed. Too often, young people don’t know how to ask for and receive consent, or how to engage in healthy relationships. Access to this information is a critical part of the solution to end cycles of abuse, especially when the cycles are generational. It is particularly critical that young people receive reliable, accurate information in a digital age where harmful explicit materials are one click away.

Government already makes choices about what schools teach. Washington requires financial literacy because learning about “spending and saving” are important life skills. We agree: Students should know how to balance their checkbooks. Students should also know how to treat their partner with dignity and respect.

Any conversation about sex and relationships must begin with the basic concept of respect. This is the modern, evidence-based approach to sex education. Washington should follow the lead of dozens of other states including Missouri, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Oregon and California and promote education on healthy relationships, dating violence, consent and sexual assault.

For too long, Washington has had no law and no plan to support prevention. We are at an important moment: #MeToo; mass shootings by domestic batterers; sexual assault on college campuses; and domestic violence as the leading cause of violent crime. We cannot prosecute, shelter, or rehabilitate our way out of sexual and domestic violence. The classroom is a far better option for lasting, positive impact.

Positive change is already happening and needs more support. Coaches at schools deliver lessons on prevention through Team Up Washington. King County Sexual Assault Resource Center (KCSARC) prevention specialists now teach middle and high school students as part of health educator teams in Renton schools. Many school districts in King County rely on the evidence-based FLASH curriculum to impart these life skills. We see the positive impact these programs have on young people and on school culture. Toxic environments fade when replaced with more care, less violence and hope for the future. There is no shortage of proven, evidence-based programs to help prevent abuse in schools, on teams and in student relationships.

Let’s grow beyond a reactive strategy to stop sexual and domestic violence. It is time we confront, head on, the culture in our community that leads to violence. We stand with all of our community partners, including Harborview Abuse and Trauma Center, KCSARC and many domestic-violence agencies when we say we can and must do better for our children and reduce the number of future victims by making comprehensive sexual health education a priority for our schools.

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In ‘Sexual Citizens,’ Students Open Up About Sex, Power And Assault On Campus

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Sex, power and assault are at the heart of a new study that looks at what it is that makes college the perfect storm for misunderstandings around sexual encounters.

Beginning in 2015, Professors Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan interviewed more than 150 Columbia and Barnard College undergrads to learn about their sex lives. What they wanted out of sex, how troubling encounters unfolded, and how layers of misunderstandings led to assault.

In their new book, Sexual Citizens, Hirsch and Khan make the case that prevention starts with education — and they offer new approaches for universities, parents and kids on how to tackle the problem and empower people to feel like they have the right to choose their sexual experiences.

Interview Highlights

On why the students opened up to them about sex

Hirsch: So the research that we did that we share in Sexual Citizens was part of a bigger project, The Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, which I co-directed with Claude Mellins. And so one of the ways that we worked with the students, we had a group of undergraduates who advised us and we also had a research team in the day-to-day data collection with students. And, so, some of the interviews I did, or Shamus did, but some of the interviews were done by this group of younger researchers. And we generally find in doing this kind of research that people are hungry to tell the stories of their lives.

Khan: I mean, we sent out this note as part of the broader project, just announcing the project. And students emailed back saying, I have a story to tell. And one of the things that we found was that people are often, you know, adults and young people’s lives are often producing so much silence around sex and sexuality that many of the young people we spoke to expressed it as a relief that someone finally sat down and listened to them about their sexual lives. …

Hirsch: There were so many of them that we had to hire another interviewer with experience in trauma-based research. I remember walking up Amsterdam after doing one of those interviews sobbing because the story [one woman] had told me about being assaulted and then trafficked was so intense. And yet she slung her backpack over her back and walked out of the interview room. I think, it seemed like she had a feeling of satisfaction that there was going to be somebody at the university who knew how she had suffered and was going to think about what that suffering would mean.

On consent and misinterpretation

Khan: So, so much of what we think about when we think about assault is predation, or sociopaths — that is people who are trying to assault someone. But what we found really frequently was that often people who assaulted others thought that they were having sex. They didn’t think that they were committing an assault. They didn’t think they were a predator. And, you know, we had one young man tell us a story, for example, and he said to us, I put on a tie so I knew I was going to have sex.

And, you know, he felt like she really liked him. She’d invited him to this formal and she had gotten very drunk. And he described to us her going in and out of consciousness as he, in his words, had sex with her. Thinking that’s what in some ways he was obligated to do. And in that context, you know, it has to do with … men who often think about their own needs and desires, but who also think about, you know, sex as something that they accomplish — and not really considering what the other person was thinking or what the other person’s [plan] might be in that moment.

On enormous neglect and lack of awareness

Hirsch: There’s neglect and there’s also, in many cases, a lack of awareness of their own power. In the book, we tell the story of a freshman Lucy being assaulted by a Scott. Obviously, all of these are pseudonyms. …Lucy was a freshman, it was orientation week. She met Scott in a bar. They stumbled back to the fraternity … he led her upstairs to his room, started to take off her pants. She said no. He said to her, it’s OK — but it wasn’t OK. He raped her. And in that moment, obviously, he’s a senior. She’s a freshman. So it’s not just gender that has power, it’s also age. It’s control over the space. It’s control over alcohol. So there’s so many forms of power that produce those experiences, those moments of vulnerability to assault. And the most charitable interpretation that we could give for Scott’s behavior is that he was unaware of how much power he exerted in that moment.

On describing assaults as assaults

Khan: There are lots of reasons why people don’t describe assaults as assaults. We need to remember that most people are assaulted by somebody they know, not by strangers. And given that, given that they know the person, given that they’ve often had some kind of sexual contact with them before, naming something an assault isn’t just describing what happened to you. It actually fundamentally transforms your relationship with that person — and often your relationships with your shared friends. It’s like saying, you know what, my boyfriend or my girlfriend is a sexual predator, is somebody who did something terrible to me. And many people don’t want to do that. They don’t want to say that. …

We heard from many young women who told us that they were in a room with a man and they didn’t really want to be there anymore. And so they just performed oral sex on him to get out of there. And those young men didn’t force those women to have sex — but I think that they fundamentally didn’t realize what it was that the person they were with wanted to do.

We had other stories of a young woman who was asked to go out for a walk with her ex-boyfriend, who was very upset about the fact that his sister had just gotten a cancer diagnosis and she was thinking she was going to comfort a friend. And he ended up raping her up against a tree and dragging her to the ground. And she told us this story — chuckling, laughing about how she later found dirt on her body. And she didn’t describe this as a rape, but instead as a weird experience that she had. For these women, it’s not that they’re fundamentally denying the experience of their assault. It’s that they’re enmeshed in so many relationships that are important to them that they don’t want to call it what we see it as, which is assault.

On changing the conversation

Khan: We’re trying to change the conversation away from: Did it happen or didn’t it happen? Did she say no or did she not say no as vigorously? And instead to say: How do we prevent this in the first place? So, I think that adjudicating that situation with that woman in the room, with that young man, is nearly impossible. But I think what we outlined in Sexual Citizens is a way to make sure that that situation is less likely to happen in the first place.

On race

Hirsch: So, yes, I think that the stories that black men shared with us about an acutely racialized fear of false accusation drove home the way gender is not the only form of power that shapes experiences of assault or accusation. And, so, there was a sense of racialized precarity. Black men, students, that we spoke with felt like they were marginal on campus, didn’t fully belong. Were less secure. And so the way they navigated consent reflected not just gender, but also race in … a really painful way.

Khan: As Jennifer has said so many times, racial justice is fundamentally an issue of preventing sexual assault. We may not think about those two things together, but it’s really important that we do. In addition to black men, every single black woman that we spoke to told us a story of unwanted, sexualized touching — every single one. It was profoundly disturbing when we analyzed our data that that occurred to us. And this reflected the ways in which black women’s experiences in college was something where their bodies were seen as accessible, things that people could touch without consent in in ways that other students didn’t describe to us.

On LGBTQ rates of assault

Khan: I think there were a lot of reasons why LGBTQ students experienced assault at higher rates. One was that they didn’t accept as normal the kind of touching that happens at parties. So, you know, if you’re in a college basement, at a party rubbing up against each other and someone, you know, casually uses their hand and grabs your butt or something like that — a lot of LGBT students were like, this is not what I’m here for. I’m here for a different kind of experience. Whereas for heterosexual students, you know, there was sort of an understanding that this was part and parcel of being a college student. But there are other reasons why LGBT students also experienced assault at such high, high, high levels. And that’s because every single LGBTQ student that we talked to told us that they had sex ed that wasn’t at all relevant to their own sexual experiences, or sexual identities. And so, really, they just had to figure out sex on their own without any guidance from the communities and families that had raised them.

On solving the problem

Hirsch: Part of what solving the problem would look like is starting out when kids are young. Teaching them how to be respectful of other people’s bodies, right. It starts out in kindergarten. Sit criss-cross applesauce. Keep your hands on your own body. So those sort of early lessons in interpersonal respect, which are part of comprehensive sex education but are also part of just good education, are a fundamental first step.

Khan: And I think further steps are: comprehensive sex ed. You know, it wasn’t just LGBTQ students who described sex ed that really didn’t meet their needs. Most young people describe the sex ed that they received as a sexual-diseases course, or something that was incredibly fear-based. Here are the risks of pregnancy. Here are the risks of sexually transmitted infections. Here are the risks of sex — sex is something terrifying and really dangerous. And instead, we need to think about talking to young people about sex that’s something that will be really important in their lives. That’s going to be one of the ways in which they connect to some of those [that] are the most meaningful relationships that they’ll have. And to talk to young people about sex where they treat the other person that they’re having sex with as a human being — not just a toy that they’re going to be playing with. And if we don’t do that, what’s going to happen is that young people are going to learn about sex, but they’re going to learn about it from things like pornography.

On what parents can do

Hirsch: I think, as parents, we have a choice. We can have conversations with our children and, you know, the other children in our lives, about sex and values and how to treat people and what feels good. Or we can let our kids have their sexual values be formed by pornography and advertising.

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Almost 10 million in U.S. have faced sexual violence at work

By Carolyn Crist

Almost 1 in 18 women and 1 in 40 men have experienced sexual harassment in and related to the workplace, according to a U.S. study.

That represents almost 7 million women and 3 million men who have reported assault, unwanted sexual contact or verbal harassment by a boss, supervisor, coworker, customer or client, the study authors report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“Sexual violence is a prevalent issue and is also preventable,” said Kathleen Basile of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, the study’s lead author.

The term “sexual violence” is defined as unwanted penetration through the use of force, alcohol or drug facilitation; pressured or coerced sex; unwanted sexual contact, such as groping; unwanted experiences, such as exposure of sexual body parts and sexual remarks.

“Given the recent media attention to this issue and the re-emergence of the #metoo movement, the time seemed right to focus on it,” Basile told Reuters Health by email.

The researchers analyzed 2010-2012 data from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which included about 23,000 women and 19,000 men. Basile’s team studied the prevalence of several types of sexual violence by a workplace-related perpetrator, including both authority figures and non-authority figures. They also looked at the numerous after-effects of these experiences, such as psychological problems, safety concerns and absence from work or school.

The study specifically focused on sexual violence by a workplace-related person but couldn’t determine whether the actions occurred at the workplace itself, the authors note.

(Reuters Health) – Almost 1 in 18 women and 1 in 40 men have experienced sexual harassment in and related to the workplace, according to a U.S. study.

That represents almost 7 million women and 3 million men who have reported assault, unwanted sexual contact or verbal harassment by a boss, supervisor, coworker, customer or client, the study authors report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“Sexual violence is a prevalent issue and is also preventable,” said Kathleen Basile of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, the study’s lead author.

The term “sexual violence” is defined as unwanted penetration through the use of force, alcohol or drug facilitation; pressured or coerced sex; unwanted sexual contact, such as groping; unwanted experiences, such as exposure of sexual body parts and sexual remarks.

“Given the recent media attention to this issue and the re-emergence of the #metoo movement, the time seemed right to focus on it,” Basile told Reuters Health by email.

The researchers analyzed 2010-2012 data from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which included about 23,000 women and 19,000 men. Basile’s team studied the prevalence of several types of sexual violence by a workplace-related perpetrator, including both authority figures and non-authority figures. They also looked at the numerous after-effects of these experiences, such as psychological problems, safety concerns and absence from work or school.

The study specifically focused on sexual violence by a workplace-related person but couldn’t determine whether the actions occurred at the workplace itself, the authors note.

The research team found that 5.6% of women and 2.5% of men reported some type of sexual violence by a workplace-related perpetrator. About 4% of women reported harassment by non-authority figures and 2% reported harassment by authority figures. About 2% of men reported harassment by non-authority figures and about 0.6% reported harassment by authority figures.

For women, the most commonly reported sexual act was unwanted sexual contact, and for men, it was unwanted sexual experiences such as sexual remarks.

About 1 million women, or 0.8%, have been raped by a coworker, who was more likely to be a non-authority figure. About 400,000 men, or 0.4%, have been sexually coerced by a coworker and 184,000 were forced to penetrate another person.

“The typical public perception of sexual violence in the workplace is that it is mostly verbal harassment or creating a hostile work environment,” Basile said. “Sexual violence involving physical contact, including forced penetration, while not the most common type, was still reported as having been committed.”

For both men and women, fear was the most commonly reported effect of sexual violence.

“Much of the perpetration is being done not by bosses, as is often the assumption, but from co-workers and, importantly, clients and customers,” said Adrienne O’Neil of Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“I hear this a lot from nurses, psychiatrists and emergency workers, where they’ve been made to feel that they are to put up with unwanted sexual advances and assault because their priority is to treat patients above all else,” she told Reuters Health by email. “We’ve known for a long time that these factors put you at risk of heart attack.”

Workplace-related sexual harassment also affects co-workers who witness the behavior, the victim’s loved ones and the victim’s children, said James Campbell Quick of the University of Texas at Arlington, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Company policies should include stricter enforcement around sexual harassment, he said, which includes providing high-risk employees with help before they act. Workplaces should “become obsessed with deviant behavior,” he added, and socialize everyone with proper training, starting with first-line supervisors.

“The greatest tragedy is that this is not a workplace accident,” Quick told Reuters Health by email. “It is a preventable form of malicious, motivated behavior. One act of sexual violence in the workplace raises the threat level for the entire workplace.”

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