Under the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, colleges must provide sexual violence education and awareness programs to their students. At USC, these programs are called Prevention and Education Modules. They include both online, self-paced learning modules and live Zoom sessions for undergraduate students.
Despite a comprehensive curriculum that aims to address students in each year of their education at USC, students continually express concern about its effectiveness and content.
Administrators in both the Title IX office, who facilitate the self-paced learning modules, and Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Services, who facilitate the live Zoom sessions, emphasized their willingess to listen to and desire for feedback like this from students.
“We update the modules based on the feedback we’re getting from the pre and post surveys for that module,” said Deborah Schleicher, the Director of Violence Prevention at RSVP.
Catherine Spear, the Vice President of Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX, went even further, stressing that herself and the members of her office were available to hear complaints.
“We know that we’re not perfect. So … we really, really want to hear from our students about what they like, what they don’t like, what they would like us to do that maybe we’re not doing,” Spear said. “We absolutely can promise that we will really actively listen and take it to heart.”
Yi-Ann Li, a senior majoring in English and psychology as well as the co-founder of the Survivor Support Community at USC, expressed her failing faith in the modules and USC’s violence prevention.
“I don’t think I actually learned anything from the module and everyone that I’ve talked to seems to feel that way,” Li said. “I don’t think it’s doing anything to be teaching people that assaulting someone is wrong, because people know that, you know?”
One scenario in the Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing module, entitled “She Gets Wild After a Few Drinks,” posits the following situation and asks students how to respond:
“Mark mentions that Robyn, a girl he’s been flirting with on social media, will be there. He tells Joe that Robyn is known to ‘get wild’ after having a few drinks. He says that all he needs to do is make sure Robyn keeps drinking ‘the hard stuff’ all night and he’ll ‘get lucky.’ He’s even thinking about getting Robyn to do shots with him so he can be sure they have a good time.”
In another example, students are shown the following situation as an example of a positive way to communicate consent when “problematic things are happening around you.”
“Mauricio and Adam have recently started dating. Mauricio assumes that because Adam invited him over, Adam wants to have sex. While watching a movie together, they start to kiss.
Mauricio eagerly tries to remove Adam’s pants, but Adam stops him. He explains that he does want to have sex with Mauricio, but he also wants to build a relationship in which they feel comfortable communicating their wants and needs. Adam tells Mauricio that he thinks talking about their physical relationship is very sexy.”
Jasmine Damian, a recent graduate of the Annenberg Specialized Journalism Masters program and a survivor of domestic violence, said simply that the module could have just been an email.
“It kind of felt like a ham-fisted attempt to represent everybody that they possibly could, and that in itself felt like the whole thing was just a bid to cover their own asses,” Damian said.
However, Spear stated that the module serves to bring everyone to the same starting point in terms of education and knowledge of resources at USC.
“We use the online training module because we have such a high volume of students at USC that we need to have a baseline platform of understanding,” Spear said.
But this baseline platform may not be reaching the many students who just click through the self-paced modules to meet their registration requirements. All of the students interviewed said that they had seen others merely clicking through the modules or letting them play while multitasking.
“This should not be a thing that they try to make easier for people … just being able to do it while watching TV or something allows the person doing it to remove themselves from the context of everything that’s happening,” Damian said.
There is a clear disconnect between administrators and students when it comes to these sexual assault prevention and education modules. Celia Bartel, a graduate student in public policy and the LGBTQ+ Program Specialist at RSVP, was able to address the issue from both the perspective of a student and a facilitator.
“I understand why students are upset with the state that it’s in because I think it feels like a lot of pressure … is being put on students to prevent violence in the community when the administration is not doing their job to do that,” Bartel said.
Meanwhile, some students do find the bystander intervention education to be essential to the modules. Joshua Sacher, a sophomore majoring in Journalism, found that to be one of the most valuable aspects of the sessions.
“Especially after everything that happened with [Sigma Nu] a couple of years ago, I think it’s really, really important that we stress the need not only to look out for yourself … but also as a bystander, what you can do if you see something, even if its your friend, to stand up and say something,” Sacher said.
All students agreed that they wished the sessions to be in person rather than online or via Zoom.
“They should try to strive for [it to be] in person because for a serious topic like that it’s very easy for kids, even on Zoom, to just doze off [or] be on their phones,” Sacher said.
Li expressed that the Zoom sessions make it far too easy for students to tune out because of the disconnect among the participants.
“The issue lies in people not realizing that they might be part of the problem without even realizing it,” Li said. “It’s a lot easier for people to understand how big of a problem this is when they see how people around them are affected.”
However, administrators said that the logistical barriers preventing them from hosting sessions in person were too difficult to overcome.
With a team of only about 20 people, RSVP Zoom sessions cater to about 16,000 students each year, equating to a ratio of 800 students per facilitator.
Because RSVP elects to keep their Zoom sessions under 40 participants each and hosts about 40 each week, there is the physical barrier of space on campus.
“On USC’s campus it really comes down to space, and then financial feasibility because … you have to pay for space on this campus,” Schleicher said.
Damian called for that financial barrier to come down, saying that “This should not be where [USC is] cutting costs.”
Some student complaints, however, are actively being addressed. Li expressed the desire for more specific education on how some identity groups can address the problem of sexual violence in their own communities on campus.
“A lot of people, especially in queer communities and [among] people of color, [are] obviously affected by the issue of assault in different ways,” Li said. “Whether that’s cultural stigmas or fear and prejudice that stops them from getting the help that they need … [it] impacts someone’s ability to be able to learn about the problem.”
Bartel is currently using their position to “to supplement what I can’t change” by forming a peer education group to help address this issue in queer communities called Queer2Peer.
“I do think that RSVP does a good job at trying to make the scenarios gender neutral, but I do think that they don’t spend a lot of time specifically talking about queer experiences, because I do think that that is different, especially for relationships,” Bartel said.
One issue that administrators have been able to directly address is that of student exemptions from the modules due to the potential for trauma activation. While there has long been the option for exemption, many students were unaware that it existed.
“This year we created a new, more streamlined process where there’s a link and students fill [a form] out. They only have to fill it out once … it’s not very burdensome and that was a goal,” Schleicher said.
Title IX confirmed that based on their feedback, more students have been accessing the exemption process than in prior years because of that accessibility.
Despite these efforts, students still do not feel that the university is adequately addressing the systemic issue of sexual assault on campus through these educational modules.
“It just didn’t feel true to my experience at USC [in] the way that situations were addressed,” Damian said.
While these educational modules are consistently being updated and improved, it may not be enough. In Li’s words as a survivor, “The emotional labor of addressing the issue [needs] to match the emotional labor of the problem itself.”