Think about sex like you would a corndog. If you buy someone a corndog at the Santa Barbara County Fair, and they don’t want it, you aren’t going to force them to eat it with ketchup and mustard.
Now trade that corndog in for tea and you have “Tea Consent” by Blue Seat Studios, which uses a cup of tea, stick figures, and humor to illustrate the concept of sexual consent. The 2 1/2-minute video (posted on YouTube) opens with: “If you’re still struggling with consent, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea.”
It’s a simple message. If someone doesn’t want tea, or changes their mind about wanting tea, or passes out, you wouldn’t make them drink tea.
Cal Poly’s Safer—which addresses the issues of sexual violence, dating violence, and domestic violence by providing services like preventative education, confidential crisis counseling, and advocacy—uses the video as an icebreaker. It’s the lead-in to that seriously uncomfortable discussion about sex and sexual assault during Safer’s presentations to students.
Safer Coordinator Christina Kaviani said she tries to get through to students using every angle she can to prevent sexual assaults from happening, to try and change what she sees as a culture that is society’s enabler: media images, gender stereotypes, sexuality and intimacy that isn’t discussed, victim-blaming, and sex education in high school and junior high that doesn’t do much more than preach abstinence.
By the time most freshmen hit a college campus, Kaviani said ideas about sexuality, intimacy, and how they view gender are already formed. It’s the thing, for her, that’s the most challenging part of her job.
“[It’s] a feeling that it’s coming too late: That they should have been having these conversations when they were in junior high,” Kaviani said. “These are deep-rooted issues, and at 18 years old, students have ingrained ideas about these issues. … We do reach some, and I know that.”
The national conversation about sexual assault is pushing community colleges and universities to do more about those incidents on and off campus, and much of that surge sparked legislation and executive orders on the state and national levels. Those politically motivated things are trying to fundamentally change the way higher education approaches dating violence and sexual violence, harassment, and assault. At Cal Poly, it’s resulted in an uptick in the number of people coming forward, either to report these types of crimes or seek out someone to chat with. In the 2012-2013 school year, 45 students sought out Safer’s services; the following school year that number was 48; and last year, 208 students went to Safer for help. The reason for that gigantic jump, according to Kaviani, is confidentiality.
“The CSU mandated every CSU to have a confidential space where sexual assault victims can go on campus,” she said. “I see that number [of victims coming forward] rising and continuing to rise for a while, until we make a climate change, then we’ll see a decrease.”
UC Santa Barbara has seen increases in the number of students seeking services as well. Jill Dunlap, with UC Santa Barbara’s CARE (essentially a Safer office for UCSB students), said the number of students her office serves has definitely increased over the past three years. But while Cal Poly and UCSB are seeing a rise in the number of victims looking for help to heal, community colleges like Allan Hancock don’t necessarily have centers with the same draw as Safer or CARE.
Hancock has a Campus Assessment and Support Team (CAST) to “improve and promote safety and wellness” among the student population. However, Alison Wales with the North County Rape Crisis and Child Protection Center said that population of students isn’t necessarily looking for those services on campus—they aren’t wholly dependent and immersed in campus life as a university student would be.
In the last six months to a year, Hancock and the rape crisis center have been meeting with other agencies, such as the Santa Maria Police Department, to figure out how to better serve the community on and off campus, support victims, and help prevent sexual assaults from happening.
That work was starting as a bill targeting sexual assaults within California’s community college population made its way through the state legislature.
On Sept. 1, Gov. Jerry Brown signed that into law. Authored by state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), the bill gives community colleges the ability to discipline students for sexual assaults and domestic violence incidents that occur off campus. Four-year schools already had that ability.
“We hope this is a step toward better education and information for the whole community,” Wales said of the work she’s doing with Hancock and the recently passed bill. “The more information you have out there about what [sexual] consent is, whether you’re male or female, the better you are.”
Serving the community
The increase in victims seeking services seen at the two closest universities isn’t happening in the area the crisis center serves between Santa Maria and Gaviota, Wales said. The reason she gives is that the push for outreach and education on sexual assault is largely targeting a specific region and population—university campuses and the surrounding communities.
Jackson’s bill, and any legislation really, is a step in the right direction, Wales said. Although, no assaults have taken place on Hancock’s campuses in the last few years, in 2013 Santa Maria had 34 forcible rapes and Lompoc had 17, according to FBI crime statistics. And that’s just of the reports that were made to police, which is estimated to be 32 percent, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.
Now, if Hancock hears about a sexual assault incident involving a student off campus, it can take important steps to protect the victim. Wales said the school could ensure the victim doesn’t have classes with the alleged perpetrator or isn’t on campus during the same days, or the school could kick the perp out of school altogether—“Something to help protect the victim as far as her right to finish school.”
Wales used an example of someone who’s seeking counseling through the rape crisis center right now: a student with “debilitating anxiety” about running into the person who assaulted her in the upcoming fall semester. The college should have the ability to help her finish school, and Jackson’s bill may make it easier to do just that.
But, Wales said, the plan to make that happen isn’t quite figured out. There are still a lot of unanswered questions out there, and something concrete has yet to materialize. Hancock President/Superintendent Kevin Walthers said the school’s in the process of working out agreements with participating agencies and nonprofits “so that we’re all on the same page.”
Those agreements will help formalize relationships that are already in place, Walthers said.
“Even if the bill hadn’t passed, we want to make sure we have procedures in place to help our students,” he said. “This is an issue of national importance.”
The college offers crisis counseling, has an onsite psychologist and counselors, and runs a police department that can respond on campus. But Walthers added that if an incident happens between students in the community, their first thought isn’t going to be to go to the college for help, so Hancock needs to work closely with places like the rape crisis center to ensure it’s meeting student victim needs.
What that’s going to look like is up in the air for community college campuses throughout the state. Walthers said the colleges have three major meetings every year, and he’s sure this will be a topic at all of them.
Change on campus
As Hancock and other community colleges enter the planning phase, places like Cal Poly and UCSB are already well into the implementation phase. The CSU passed a number of executive orders in 2014—and revised them in July 2015—to ensure better outreach and services that align with Title IX.
Title IX was passed in 1972. The act works to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to gain education, and states that no person in the U.S. should be subjected to discrimination on the basis of sex. The act was updated in 2013 to strengthen the rules about sexual and domestic violence against women.
According to Cal Poly Title IX Coordinator Martha Cody, the executive orders were the result of a Title IX audit conducted on the CSU and UC systems—using UC Berkley, UCLA, CSU Chico, and San Diego State as examples of the whole—in 2013 by the State Auditor’s Office. The results released in 2014 listed 23 items the university systems needed to improve when it comes to dealing with stalking, domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and dating violence.
All incoming and returning students are now required to take online training about alcohol and sexual misconduct upon registering. If they don’t complete that training by a certain point in the fall trimester, Poly will block that student’s winter registration. Faculty, staff, and administrators have to complete a similar training.
In the 2014-2015 school year, the Cal Poly Title IX Office served 54 students, which Cody said is a big jump over the year before. It’s similar to the increase in services provided by the Safer office.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to find one number that illustrates what’s actually happening within student populations, as each organization keeps track of its own data and deals with students in different capacities. According to a study published in the Journal of American College Health in 2009, it’s estimated that one in five undergraduate women will experience sexual assault in college, and only 4 percent of college assault victims report the incident to the police or campus security.
Cody said a jump in the number of students coming forward in any capacity to report sexual assault or seek some level of services is a good thing.
“I think students are feeling much more comfortable coming forward,” she said. “What we’re really hoping is that they’re feeling much less stigmatized as the victim.”
It’s complicated
Cody’s worked in the Title IX Office for the past seven years, and she said the campus conversation around sexual assault has changed in the past five years. The example she gave is an incident some students told her about during the last school year.
There was a girl at a party, drinking, and she was chatting with this guy, and eventually they disappeared into a room together. Her friends kept an eye on the whole thing as it unfolded. They burst into the room asking: “Did you consent? Did you consent?”
“I just thought, ‘Wow. … They intervened,’” Cody said. “I don’t think that would have happened five years ago.”
While that incident may have gone one way, not all party situations are clear cut. Often times the clarity of sexual assault cases enters hazy territory because it is one person’s interpretation of a situation versus another’s, and there are substances involved. The typical case breaks down like this:
• The two people know each other in some capacity.
• There’s alcohol involved on both sides.
• One person says the other consented to the sexual act.
• One person says they weren’t OK with it, and things went further than they wanted them to.
The question Cody’s office has to find an answer to is: Would a reasonable person have been able to tell that this person was so incapacitated that they could not give consent? In other words: How drunk were they? Were they slurring their words? Could they stand up? Did they vomit? Did they pass out?
The Title IX Office also needs to consider typical reactions to situations that generally initiate flight or fight responses. A common neurological reaction is also to freeze, which definitely doesn’t mean “yes” in a sexual situation. Cody said that’s why it’s important to get some form of verbal consent from the person you’re getting down and dirty with—and it doesn’t have to be awkward. Because someone actually saying “no” isn’t always going to be the indicator that things should stop. Some people simply don’t have the ability.
“It’s very complicated, and it’s heartbreaking sometimes when someone really feels violated and we can’t get the preponderance of the evidence needed … to say a violation has occurred,” she said, adding that the official result of a complaint doesn’t mean an assault didn’t occur, it just means it can’t be proven.
With cases of stranger sexual assault—maybe someone was kidnapped and raped, let’s say—it’s crystal clear to people and the justice system that there’s a victim in those cases. And, according to Jesse Torrey—the associate director of RISE, which is SLO County’s resource for sexual assault and domestic violence, providing women’s shelters, advocates, training and education, a crisis line, and access to services—stranger assault cases are also easier to talk about.
But 75 to 90 percent of victims of sexual assault know their perpetrator, and about 90 percent of those victims are female.
Yes means yes
Legislation is helping push colleges and universities to get ahead of sexual assault, educate students about healthy relationships, provide better services to victims, and basically help change a culture.
In 2013, Congress passed The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act requiring most higher education institutions to educate students on the prevention of rape, domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
In 2014, California passed the “yes means yes” bill, co-authored by Sen. Jackson. The bill made the state the first in the nation to define affirmative sexual consent and require universities and colleges to educate students about affirmative consent and sexual assault.
And yet another assault bill authored by Jackson is waiting for the governor’s signature. It would require high schools to teach students about sexual assault and violence and prevention as part of sex education.
Jackson said as she started working on these bills, she realized that the issues surrounding sexual assault started before kids turned 18.
“It became really clear that this issue … this sort of unhealthy relationship between young men and young women starts much earlier than college,” Jackson said. “Nearly half of sexual assault victims are under 18.”
RISE Executive Director Jennifer Adams said although conversations surrounding rape and sexual assault have made some forward progress in the 20 years she’s worked as an advocate, the culture hasn’t really changed all that much. As a nation, we still blame the victim and we still don’t believe women when they say they’ve been raped, she said.
Citing Bill Cosby as an example, she said the majority of society didn’t believe he’d assaulted any women, even after numerous victims came forward. It was only after the deposition was unsealed, and it was revealed that Cosby admitted to giving women drugs, that people could no longer say it wasn’t true.
“You’re talking about something the majority of the population engages in—consensual sex—and you take one thing out of it, and that’s consent,” she said. And that thing happens between two people, he said, she said. “The criminal justice system is not the end all, be all answer to this question.”
So what is the answer?
“We need to put the focus on why are and how are we raising our men so that this is OK,” Adams said. “It’s so accepted that this happens, and so, if we want to avoid it, we have to protect ourselves.”
A woman taking steps to protect herself isn’t a bad thing: It’s empowering, Adams said. But protection isn’t enough. Something’s got to change on the other side of the equation.
According to FBI crime statistics, there was one forcible rape every 6.2 minutes in the nation during 2012 and one every 6.6 minutes in 2013. According to Adams, one in three women experience some form of sexual assault, sexual violence, or domestic violence in their lifetime.
She’s in agreement with Jackson and Kaviani from Safer, kids need to start learning about sexual assault, gender roles, and how to deal with the images thrown at them from an early age. She said sex education is usually tied into teen pregnancy and prevention, not necessarily sexual assault and prevention. Both are important. Both need to be part of the same conversation.
Contact Executive Editor Camillia Lanham at clanham@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Sep 17-24, 2015.