SEXUALLY ILLITERATE and repressed Indian academia and society in which the older generation suffers ‘sexual envy’ on a mass scale and a society in which it’s generally accepted that girls/women who dress ‘provocatively’ are inviting sexual molestation and assault, could learn a lot from US academia’s initiatives to protect the rights of women students in higher education.
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On September 28, Jerry Brown, California’s governor, signed a bill requiring all colleges which receive state government money for student financial aid to enforce a standard of “affirmative consent”, or “yes means yes”. This means both parties must agree to sexual contact, either through verbal communication or clear, non-verbal cues. Moreover, they must do so at each stage of an encounter. An initial “yes” to a kiss doesn’t constitute a “yes” to sexual intercourse.
Sexual violence in America has declined sharply since the mid-1990s. According to the National Crime Victimisation Survey — the gold standard for measuring crimes that are often not reported — the proportion of women subjected to rape or sexual assault fell 64 percent between 1995-2005, and declined slightly further by 2010, to 1.1 per 1,000 women per year.
Nonetheless, colleges are under unprecedented pressure to make campuses safer. Activists talk of an alcohol-fuelled “rape culture”. A student at Columbia University has vowed to carry her mattress around all day until the man she says raped her, is expelled. Images of what she describes as a piece of performance art, ‘Carry That Weight’, have landed her on the cover of New York magazine.
On September 19, Barack Obama also launched a campaign to prevent sexual assaults in college. This is not the first time his administration has weighed in. In 2011, the department of education sent colleges a letter suggesting that if they didn’t take steps to curb sexual violence, they could fall foul of a federal anti-discrimination law called Title IX. The letter cited an estimate that about one in five women are victims of a completed or attempted sexual assault while in college — a much higher figure than other studies find.
In the past, accusations of sexual assault were typically dealt with privately by schools, usually behind closed doors. Earlier this year, Obama’s administration began publishing a list of colleges and universities under investigation for violations of Title IX; it now includes more than 70, including Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley. Pushed by government and their own students, many institutions are adopting more stringent standards for dealing with sexual violence on campus.
Every member of the Ivy League except Harvard has now adopted the “affirmative consent” standard. So have many, perhaps most, other universities. Supporters of the policy say it educates students about the nature of consent and gives them a vocabulary to use during awkward sexual encounters. “It tells students very clearly that sex without consent is sexual assault,” says Suzanne Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia University.
Other states — and colleges — are likely to follow suit. “Normally the government doesn’t tell schools (colleges/universities) how to regulate student behaviour,” says Alison Johnson, a history professor at Harvard who leads a committee on sexual-assault policies. “But in the current national climate around sexual assault, if you’re not getting it done, they’re going to tell you what to do.”
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)