Twenty-eight professors at Harvard University Law School issued a statement Tuesday in which they attacked policies aimed at better preventing sexual harassment and assault on campus. According to the Boston Globe, the policy, which went into effect this academic year, has altered the definition of sexual harassment, as well as the investigative and disciplinary procedures involved in cases of sexual violence.
Harvard is one of a number of universities that has recently revamped sexual assault policies, and California has even adopted statewide legislation to update sexual assault and harassment policies on campuses. Under this legislation, the consent has been uniformly redefined as an “ongoing” and “affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” made by the parties involved in sexual activity.
While ensuring that the legislative understanding of consent is as clear as possible is a quintessential step toward bringing justice in cases of sexual violence, this action needs to be reflected at a social and systemic level as well. Not enough students have a sufficient understanding of how consent works, and unless this definition is properly taught to them, these crimes are unlikely to decline. Such legislation is positive insofar as it seeks to discourage the behavior of potential perpetrators, rather than that of potential victims, but the attitude it reflects must also be propagated on campus.
One manner of ensuring that this takes place is through improving education. Introducing incoming students to the social aspect of college is a difficult task because of the lack of experience many students have with recreational use of drugs and alcohol. Informing students about the precise meaning of consent, how to react to adversity in a social setting and how to remain safe, must be done in a bold, explicit manner.
Boston University, for instance, tends to skirt around the issues of sexual harassment and assault in its compulsory safety education material. Orientation presentations, where students see melodramatic borderline-silly skits about alcohol safety, and online programs, such as the AlcoholEdu class that incoming students are required to complete, could address issues of sexual harassment and sexual consent in a more direct and serious way.
There are other difficulties in the education process, especially when working with statewide mandates of new policy. Cultural disparities among schools within the same state can be vast. The party and hook-up cultures at University of Massachusetts Amherst are drastically different from those at UMass Boston. Even differences in geographical location, academic programs and student body all call for different magnitudes and modes of education on the topic of sexual violence. In any case, it’s especially important to be direct when addressing such drastic changes in policy.
According to Inside Higher Ed, the California legislation also changes the judicial process by placing the burden of proof on the accused, rather than the accuser. Ideally, this reversal will deter any determined aggressors, but this does not resolve the core difficulty found in many cases of sexual violence: there is often minimal evidence and all investigation is one word against another. There will always be a difficulty in some rape and sexual assault investigations on account of the privacy sex typically entails.
The fact that many cases of sexual assault take place when either one or both parties involved are under the influence of alcohol, drugs or both also remains a challenge to these reconsiderations. The legislation makes it clear that incapacitated individuals cannot give sexual consent, but the effects of alcohol and drugs can blur these situations, even when both parties are functioning. Alterations in judgment and memory failure will always yield grey areas in these processes.
However, establishing a universally uniform understanding of how interpersonal discourse regarding sex works is perhaps the best action that can be taken in light of these ambiguities.
