Preventing campus sexual assault could start in kindergarten
| Spencer Platt/Getty Images In the weeks since Jane Doe alleged she was gang-raped at a Cornell University fraternity party in 2024, the plague of campus sexual assault has once again become the topic of a heated national debate.
Key points
- Recently, I interviewed Jennifer Hirsch, who is a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the co-author with Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan of the book Sexual Citizens, which synthesizes the findings of a five-year study of campus sexual assault that surveyed 2,000 students attending Columbia and Barnard.
- “Thinking ambitiously about prevention requires that we get some more tools in the toolbox.” Jennifer Hirsch, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Sex education needs to start in kindergarten, she said, by teaching children to….
- The campus of Cornell University on September 30, soon after the New York attorney general announced a review of the school’s handling of assault allegations.
An important step in the prevention of sexual assault is making comprehensive sex ed more common in American schools, and, in the states that do, making that education start earlier and comply with the National Sex Education Standards.
Additional details
- But not sex ed as it’s currently taught in most American public schools — a haphazard set of state programs, often deeply political, which often stress abstinence over how to be in healthy sexual relationships with other people.
- This other version, known as comprehensive sex ed and currently required in just seven states, takes a holistic approach with focus on how to refuse unwanted sexual advances, establish clear boundaries, and have intimate relationships based on open communication and mutual desire, not force, coercion, or extreme intoxication.
- Experts, pundits, and parents argue for stricter criminal laws and a more transparent and punitive Title IX campus adjudicatory process.
- Evidence suggests that this kind of instruction can reduce sexual violence.
- Anyone horrified by the Cornell fraternity text thread published by the New York Times would agree that enforcement is only part of the story, and a fuller solution would begin with raising young people who don’t think it is remotely okay to treat each other’s bodies and emotions this way.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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