It’s obvious that sexual assault and violence are major problems at college campuses across the country. It’s also obvious that one shouldn’t make light of this fact, yet one can only characterize Cornell’s latest initiative to combat campus sexual violence as a huge joke.
It is so absurd in fact, it’s almost as if the entire idea is a parody, which is just sad in light of Cornell’s documented struggle with handling sexual assault cases from the perspectives of both alleged perpetrators and victims.
Here is the plan, according to a Daily Sun report published yesterday: The Skorton Center for Health Initiatives and the Office of the Dean of Students will hire 20 students “to promote a positive student culture shift on campus and help prevent sexual violence” as part of the new Cornell Social Consultants (CSC) program, headed by Jessie Bonney-Burrill ’14.
According to Bonney-Burrill, the hired students will identify which specific issues to address and implement ways to place “positive spins on how to create these small interventions.”
Co-overseer of the program Nina Cummings was quoted saying: “With this approach you focus on the solution and focus on making the culture more open, more tolerant and more fun… Naturally, it will create less tolerance for the behaviors that make people uncomfortable. Those behaviors will become less of the norm.”
The idea was inspired by a similar program at Yale and the belief that traditional prevention initiatives—like consent and alcohol education—do not work.
Here is an excerpt describing the fantastic work being done at Yale:
Cummings described some examples of student led initiatives at Yale. In one instance, she said Yale students decided that at a traditional meet-and-greet party for new students, there should be two separate rooms — a dark room for dancing, as well as a brighter room where students could actually see and get to know the people they are talking to. Having an additional room allowed people to better ask, “Should I leave with this person? Should I hook up with this person?”
Yes, having dark and lit rooms at empty on-campus parties will certainly curb sexual violence.
Does anyone seriously think this group of 20 students will have any positive impact on campus? Or, will they collect paychecks from the University, shop some “fun” and unserious plans, and ultimately execute them ineffectually—the end result being no value-added and a further degradation of our campus culture?
The point here is not to discredit the students interested in applying to these positions, if they are well-intentioned. The point is that giving up on “traditional” prevention measures and embracing these progressive visions of playful, nonsensical, ineffectual, parody-like tactics is bound to fail, if not make things worse.
Making light of grave issues has two possible effects: it can ease people and open them up to discussing and addressing the issue or it can make the issue non-serious and thus condemn it to the realm of indifference and cynicism. The result is the latter when you try to make the issue seem “fun” or like a game. When you have students or administrators putting on fake smiles trying to get college students to play a silly game—well, you know the result. No one will listen, no one will learn, no one will act.
For example, Cornell freshmen are required to watch a comedy skit about sexual violence their first week on campus. Every year, students refer to it as the “rape show” or some similar crude name, and often compare its hilarity to the forced diversity programming freshmen must attend. And this is not to condemn such cynicism, for how else would one react to a farcical, SNL-style mockery of any subject?
And, now that freshmen are led to believe that the campus takes sexual assault as seriously as hiring a troupe of sketch comics to perform a terrible show, will they go on to become paragons of virtue later that night partying in Collegetown?
The only way to get the root of a problem and ever having hope of solving it, or at least reducing its prevalence and severity, is by acting meaningfully and seriously. To do otherwise is to render an issue like campus sexual violence inconsequential in the minds of potential perpetrators and bystanders. A doctor curing a disease does not think of fun ways to eliminate it or place positive spins on small interventions; he eradicates the malady in as straightforward a manner as possible, abiding by the dictum of “do no additional harm”.
There is only a fine zone where parody and “fun” can play a role in exposing or solving a problem or some unpopular topic, which is to expose absurdity, as in the example of parodying politicians and celebrities. There is no absurdity when it comes to sexual assault prevention, and thus it is very hard to justify how sophomoric skits and games or whatever else the “social consultants” will come up with will make a positive impact.
The CSC program also diverts resources—money, time, effort, etc.—from actual productive efforts. Such efforts should include the following:
- Putting an end to the absurdity that is the movement to shut down self-dense, evasion, or preventative education. Those who try to invalidate any attempt to teach or suggest self-defense, evasion, and prevention are much too arrogant and corkscrewed into their critical-liberation theory psychobabble to be taken seriously, but they unfortunately are. The argument that would-be perpetrators should not perpetrate is obviously agreeable, but unrealistic if that is the only desired prevention education. This type of prevention should be done concurrently with self-defense, evasion, and prevention education. One who is presented with the situation wherein he must defend himself from a sexual assaulter will not wish in that moment “if only my assaulter had been taught not to do this!”
- Reducing stigma surrounding the reporting of alleged sexual violence. Rather than have some “social consultant” try to make this seem like “fun”, have a uniformed police officer calmly and assertively reassure all students that he/she will hear out any reports of sexual violence and direct police in a proper investigations.
- A crackdown on obscene public drunkenness on and around campus. This in turn would reduce the likelihood of binge drinking and other high-risk activities that increase the prevalence of various forms of danger, including sexual violence. It also reinforces general law and order, which quite often seems to be absent in Ithaca.
- Appeals to students’ parents. It is also absurd how few students come to college with no obvious baseline inculcation of respectfulness and decency.
- Countering narratives that equate hookup culture with sexual liberation/feminism. I have no strong opinions about the merits of hookup culture (i.e. couldn’t care less if it persists or not), but glorifying it and saying it makes anyone–man or woman–empowered or freer is really quite demeaning to whomever is being described—that is, if your notion of self-worth and freedom emanates from being able to have casual sex, then you basically reduce yourself to a purely sexual being.
There are undoubtedly other ways to combat sexual violence on campus, but any single one of these would be better policy than paying “social consultants” to organize dark and lit rooms at unattended on-campus parties.
