Will America Ever Follow Canada’s Lead on Campus Sexual Violence?

by Monica Joshi

1 in 4 North American women will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime. Sexual assault is far more common than we would like to admit. Rapes, 80 percent of the time, are committed by someone known to the victim or within 1 mile of their home. There are about 4 incidents of sexual assault per 1000 female students on university campus in the US and there needs to be a more proactive, preventative method to curb the issue. Canada could have an answer for you.

More than 400 women at three universities in Canada took part in a new rape resistance program aimed at helping college women avoid rape. The program consisted of four 3-hour sessions that included lectures, discussions on rape prevention, and ways to practice what they had learned. A second group of more than 400 women was offered brochures with general information about sexual assault. The new program helped reduce the risk by nearly 50 percent.

The new program, called the Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act Sexual Assault Resistance program, has several components. It aims to help women identify risky situations where there is a high risk for sexual violence, and figure out how they could create disadvantages for potential perpetrators. The program also focuses on trusting your instinct, understanding that the perpetrator could be someone that you know (even though you might not want to believe it), and self-defence or verbal resistance such as swearing or yelling to prevent rape.

One year later, nearly 10 percent of the women in the brochure group reported that they had been raped, where a perpetrator used force, threats or incapacitating drugs to rape her. On the other hand, only about 5 percent of women who participated in the rape avoidance program reported being raped during that same period.

According to the findings, published in the June 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, women in the rape resistance group were also reported to be less likely to experience an attempted rape, wherein the perpetrator tried to rape the woman but was not successful. In addition, 9 percent of the women in the brochure group reported an attempted rape, compared with 3.4 percent of women who participated in the program.

Most college programs aimed at preventing sexual assault have not been studied to see whether they are effective. This new program is thus far the only one to demonstrate that it can decrease instances of sexual violence that women experience for at least one year.

The study's co-author, Charlene Senn, a professor of applied social psychology and women's studies at the University of Windsor in Ontario, said:

"This proves that providing women with knowledge and tools can increase their ability to defend themselves, and reduce the severity of the sexual violence they experience."

Senn's program tackles some very complicated scenarios that are quite common on university campuses. For example, a woman may be alone in her dorm room when her roommate's boyfriend stops by to visit, and insists on coming in even though the roommate isn't there, Senn said. The boyfriend could then act in ways that make the woman feel uncomfortable, but she hesitates to do something because she thinks her roommate will be upset. Senn's program also teaches ways to help women overcome these emotional barriers, so they can take action more quickly.

While these are all methods to prevent rape, there are still other future programs required on campus to tackle the issue. In addition, programs that focus on changing people's attitudes towards sexual assault take longer to have effect. This doesn't mean that we simply give up on those mechanisms of change, but rather, as Senn says:

"We can't wait to give women the tools they need to fight back.”

The full program scripts are available online for viewing in the study appendix.

It would be interesting to see the program not only give these tools to women, but also open up the discussion and lectures for men. Researchers have found in past studies that 1 in 6 men have experienced abusive sexual situations even before reaching adulthood. Also, 6.1 percent of men have experienced sexual assault on campus. While this program, specifically designed to equip women to deal with possible dangerous situations, might not be the perfect fit for men, it would be interesting to see the researchers come up with a program designed for men as well.

An advocate for women's health on women's terms, Judy Norsigian is executive director and a founder of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. When the collective started forty years ago, there was a "knowledge gap" and a dearth of information about women's health issues. That's slowly but surely changing, she explains: