#sexual violence prevention programs
Sexual assault programs must address racial power dynamics & acknowledge the history of racist lies about assault
Sexual violence prevention programs—often delivered as discussion-based workshops directed towards youth—are crucial to ensuring community safety. Participants often learn important skills towards ending sexual violence, like building empathy and bystander intervention. But these programs have also demonstrated a terrible shortcoming: When program participants are presented with situations of sexual violence, they are less likely to empathize with Black victims, more likely to blame them, and less compelled to intervene to help.
Sexual violence prevention programs must stop treating the intersection of race, ethnicity, and sexual assault as only a footnote. Racism is much more intertwined with sexual violence than our society likes to admit. Ignoring this fact will only result in the further criminalization and victimization of the same Black students these programs claim to help.
The most glaring issue with sexual assault prevention programs lies in its most useful tool: roleplaying exercises and scenarios designed to build empathy or encourage bystander intervention. Participants are given hypothetical sexually violent situations and are asked to intervene to help the victim or empathize with them.
In many versions of prevention curricula, most of the victims have “white” or generic names. This causes Black participants to feel that they are being erased, due to our deeply racist ideas of what a “perfect victim” looks like. For some organizations, the response has been to include more victims in the scenario with “Black” names, which studies show leads participants to blame the victim and show lower empathy for them.
The solution isn’t to stop including Black victims in these scenarios, it is to make sure that the scenario explores the role of race in the sexually violent situation, not glosses over it. In the discussion, participants should intentionally be asked open-ended questions about how society treats Black people who disclose sexual violence, and what specific stereotypes contribute to Black victims—particularly Black women—not being believed.
In prevention programs, detailed and complex discussions about the role of race in sexual assault are often ignored in favor of simple solutions. In my experience as a consent educator, when facilitators mention that the vast majority of survivors (90-98%, and probably more) are telling the truth about being sexually assaulted, some Black male teenagers will then ask about the historical fact of white women lying about rape by Black men. While most facilitators would never demonize this question, it’s common for them to simply reiterate the statistic and move on. This results in Black students feeling unheard and invalidated.
