Updates on Sexual Harassment/Violence in Schools

From the group, Stop Sexual Assault in Schools' Facebook page:

We invite anyone who’s concerned about sexual harassment and assault in K-12 schools to watch the student-centered video “Sexual Harassment: Not in Our School!” at SSAIS.org/video.

Also, a good story from NPR, How Schools Can Reduce Sexual Violence:

Over the last two decades, research on college campuses has shown that giving students the real facts about their peers reduces unsafe drinking. This approach is called positive social norms. It works because of a basic truth of human nature: People want to do what others are doing.

Now, that research is starting to be applied to a novel area: preventing sexual assault and harassment. From an unwanted comment on the street to groping in the hallways at school, surveys suggest more than half of young women and almost half of young men have experienced sexual harassment before age 18.

Background:

"Peers are very, very influential, and people of any age who want to fit in will try and behave according to what they perceive as the group norm," explains Alan Berkowitz, a psychologist and expert on preventing sexual assault. But when you're talking about transgressive behavior, like underage drinking, drug use or nonconsensual sexual behavior, there's often a "misperception of the norm."

What's new:

Sandra Malone directs prevention and training at Day One, a nonprofit in Providence, R.I., which offers both education and rape crisis services. Her program has been among the first to try to move teens to seek consent and build healthier sexual relationships by harnessing an unlikely force: peer pressure.

In its workshops at high schools, Day One uses a version of the positive social norms approach adapted from alcohol education programs.

She explains that the workshop leaders started with survey questions. For example: Would you care if a girl at your school was being verbally harassed? Do you think others at your school would care?

"We could see that everybody thought nobody would care," Leslie says. But in fact, "everybody saw, oh, a lot of people do care, which is something a lot of people don't know."