Yesterday, March 18th, I participated in the “50 Shades of Consent” deliberation. Just to summarize about the overall experience of the deliberation, I thought that it went well and I thought it was a very interesting topic to discuss because of recent events at the university. It was in a larger room compared to the smaller table that I had for mine which I liked, but also didn’t. I feel with the smaller table, we were able to get a more personal response from people, but with the larger room there were a LOT more opinions and I thought that was really helpful.

Going into the actual deliberation, the big problem that I had was that their three approaches overlapped too much and I felt like each discussion about them didn’t really lead us into different topics of discussion, but instead led to us consistently talking about the same thing, just worded a little differently.

For me, it was really interesting to learn how this specific university handles sexual assault. A point that I wish was expanded on more was what happens after we get a text alert. Personally, I think that the repercussions of student’s actions should be made more public in order to deter those actions more. While I would have liked to gone into more discussion about that, I felt as though we were really pushed to focus on preventative measures to be taken by victims and the university instead of the students who committed the crimes. I also felt as though we didn’t actually come up with any new solutions to the problem, we just kind of kept talking about why the few things that we have now don’t really work. While I feel like we really talked through the reasons why the ideas that are currently implemented aren’t working, we really didn’t come up with any dramatic changes to make. A main problem that we found was that education about preventing sexual assault needs to be more engaging and more personal on order to get people’s attention and maintain that focus. We all agreed that the online program that we are required to do regarding sexual assault, does not teach us anything.

A really good point that was brought up was that education about sexual assault is really forced upon you during freshman year, but after that it stops. We reached a general consensus that this education needs to continue throughout college in order to keep it constant.

I felt like the people who ran the deliberation were very professional and were good at encouraging people that their answers were good and I really liked how they didn’t just stick with the questions that they had pre-written. They took the conversation at hand and tried to expand on it.

I think the main difference from my deliberation was that with my, I really felt like I walked away from it with different points of views and opinions and was still pondering what could be done. While I thought this was a very well-run deliberation and that the topic was interesting, I feel like I didn’t walk away with any new opinions because everyone seemed to agree about everything.