This week, students, faculty, and staff gathered at Colgate University to talk about how sexual assault has impacted their campus and what action they can collectively take. It sounds like it was an amazing meeting. First, students presented results of an informal campus survey:

Watts and Aziz surveyed 115 students, 71 female and 44 male, and received some interesting results. More than 50 percent of women surveyed felt pressured to “hook up” even though they did not want to. 48 percent of men and 44 percent of women did not know what constituted sexual assault, 36 percent of males admitted to being in an ambiguous situation where they did not know whether a woman was too drunk to hook up and 68 percent of women said that they had been called a derogatory name by a male.

What strikes me the most about those stats are the high numbers who couldn’t define sexual assault. This is a clear example of where an existing sexual assault policy isn’t doing it’s job. Colgate’s policy does not currently define consent, and while a sexual assault policy isn’t the only place where students learn about sexual boundaries, a policy that does provide such definitions (and requires prevention programming that does so) will at least give students a touchstone and a basis for dialogue.

A third student followed up by presenting her research on sexual assault prevention education programs on other campuses, including the MVP Program at Northeastern University, a really cool leadership/bystander prevention program that trains student atheletes and leaders to start important dialogues about assault and related issues, and speak up amongst their peers.

The meeting seems to have ended with survivors sharing stories, and I’m so impressed with the students who organized the event that they were able to set up/maintain a space that people felt safe to speak honestly in. There seems to be awesome momentum going, and I’m excited about things to come at Colgate!

Boston-area schools, like many, are struggling with how to keep funding for their sexual assault prevention programs as budgets are cut and money gets tighter. This is a concern that ArchDiva raised in a comment a few weeks ago, and one that I think we will hear about more and more as the months go on.

The key in many cases to keeping funding for sexual assault prevention programs is going to be student insistence, as well as faculty, staff, and administration commitment. The other opportunity for activists will be around the grants the Department of Justice gives colleges to start or enhance prevention programs. As the article I linked to addresses, I think making the grants larger and longer is a good thing, as it will really allow programs to solidify and prove their effectiveness before they have to fight for university funding. But it means that fewer schools are getting these grants.

We can push for more money for these grants and also for a requirement that universities commit to continuing to fund their sexual assault programs for at least three years after their three year federal grant runs out. Otherwise, what’s the point of getting a great program up and running, only to see it collapse for lack of funding, as may happen with Northeastern this year?