On teaching boys to take sexual assault seriously

A few weeks ago, our school participated in Denim Day, a campaign to spread awareness about the prevalence of sexual assault and to take a stand against it. A few days before, my advisory co-teacher and I shared information about it with our advisory - 28 9th grade boys. Our boys' reaction demonstrated that they really didn't understand what sexual assault is, when or how it happens, or what healthy sexual interactions with women should look like. Our boys tapped their pencils and looked out the window. There was nervous laughter at inappropriate times. One of our boys raised his hand to ask, "Wait, if you're both drunk and you do it, she gets to say it was rape after? That's messed up."

My co-teacher and I knew we wanted to address these behaviors and make the topic real for our boys, but we didn't have much time. Every curriculum is about priorities, and we have a lot of them that need to be addressed in Advisory. So even though health educators plan full units around healthy relationships, we wanted to take a crack at teaching our boys the core importance of consent in one 30-minute class period.

We started by having the boys think of a time that something had been stolen from them.

 

Having them discuss in partners and share out afterward at each step, we then had our boys think of a more personal item that could be stolen. I told them about an item that's really important to me that I would be devastated to lose. Everyone has prized possessions, so this was relatable.

We then asked our boys to think about being deceived, stolen from, and betrayed, all at once. Emotions became real. The debriefs included anger, sadness, and confusion.

And now it was finally time to put our boys in the shoes of someone who was the victim of sexual assault.

You could feel the weight in the room. It was the complete opposite of everything we felt when we talked about sexual assault for Denim Day. Sexual assault is serious and awful business, and our boys finally felt some understanding of that. We closed by offering an important stat, anchoring to the women in our boys' lives, and driving home every person's responsibility for preventing this around us.

This may not be the best way to teach this lesson, but I've shared it here because I really struggled to find good resources for this topic. Every lesson I found was about directly shoving down our students' throats that consent is necessary and important, and none tried to lead them there on their own. I'm sure that there are great health curricula out there that do this, but I didn't find them easily. If anyone has thoughts to improve this for the next time it's necessary to teach it, I'd love to hear them.