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*Possible Trigger Warning*

 

 

This semester I decided to take CRIM 423: Sexual Violence as an elective for my Sociology major. I was looking forward to the class before the semester since I was and am interested in the topics covered in the class. After a semester of the course, it has exceeded my expectations.

I have learned so much in the course, and I have read so many interesting and informative literature on the topic. Each day in class, we usually come in and have a brief quiz on the reading. Then, the rest of the class is spent discussing what we read. It is a great format for the topic of the course.

However, my favorite part of the class has been the group activism project. At first, I thought that the project wouldn’t make much of a difference, but my group’s project went really well. My group decided to go into one of the State College Area High School’s eleventh grade health classes and teach the students about consent and sexual assault.

We started off the class by having the students define consent by anonymously texting answers in to a website that we then read to the class. Then, we briefly verbally defined consent and showed them a fun video that uses an analogizes drinking tea and consent.

From there we broke out into smaller groups. There were three stations that the groups rotated between. One station addressed societal myths surrounding sexual assault. An example of a myth was that men cannot be sexually assaulted.

The second station involved bystander intervention techniques. The people from my project group read out scenarios and asked the students how they could intervene and prevent someone the person in the scenario from being sexually assaulted.

My favorite station was the third station. This is partially because I ran this station with one of the other girls in my group. We wrote out vignettes which all depicted sexual assault. We then had the students hold up a red card if they believed it was sexual assault or a green card if they didn’t think it was sexual assault.

The students were very engaged at our station. Almost every student spoke at one point. They also thought that the scenarios were very straightforward since they didn’t have too much trouble identifying them as sexual assault.

However, we pointed out that all of the scenarios that we read them were based off of real sexual assaults that did not result in a conviction in a criminal court. Most of the students were shocked after hearing this.

Additionally, we tried to influence the students to blame the victim or change their answer by asking questions, but they all were very aware that sexual assault is never the victim’s fault. This gave me a lot of hope for our society in the future. Many of these students already knew that victim blaming is wrong.

We concluded the class by talking about rape trauma syndrome and gave the students resources for if they are ever sexually assaulted or have a friend who is sexually assaulted.

Overall, my group and my professor all thought that our project made a real impact on this group of high school students. I am really glad that I decided to take this class.