Despite decades of work to make college campuses safer from sexual violence, recent haunting headlines shine a harsh light on our failures. For years, colleges have responded to sexual assault with a familiar formula: teach students what constitutes consent and how potential victims can protect themselves; provide reporting mechanisms; and urge bystanders to intervene. But a growing body of evidence raises questions about the effectiveness of such approaches and recent news demands the need for greater attention to these concerns.
Allegations of a 2024 fraternity-house sexual assault at Cornell University have prompted renewed scrutiny of the school’s handling of sexual misconduct and fraternity culture. But the range of public reactions to that case also illustrates that Americans don’t agree about what constitutes consent, when someone is capable of giving it, who bears responsibility for recognizing its absence, or the role of institutional systems in helping or thwarting efforts at sexual violence prevention. Most current consent education emphasizes that only an unambiguous YES means yes, and that an intoxicated or unconscious person cannot consent. While these are essential, actual consent is more complicated than a set of rules. It involves considering communication, autonomy, power, pressure, fear, gender role expectations, context, and the ability to change one’s mind. It requires the belief that preventing sexual violence is not the responsibility of the person vulnerable to assault, and it demands that we not only adhere to the legal boundaries of consent, but care about its moral and ethical dimensions.
Earlier this year, we published results from our study of undergraduates at a large public university, which, along with others’ research, paints a particularly troubling picture. We surveyed students in 2017 and again in 2022 about their understanding of sexual consent. In both years, heterosexual men – the demographic most likely to commit sexual assault – demonstrated poorer understanding of consent than women and LGBTQ+ students, who are those at highest risk of victimization. While women and LGBTQ+ students reported a better understanding of consent in 2022 than in 2017, heterosexual men’s understanding of consent in 2022 was the same or worse than in 2017. To be clear, these data do not suggest that most men surveyed were perpetrators. They do, however, suggest a problem with the typical prevention strategies on college campuses.
When the #MeToo movement brought discussions of sexual violence and harassment into the mainstream, colleges expanded prevention programs, reporting systems and educational campaigns. Increasing awareness and changing procedures, however, have not moved the needle on this public health crisis. And on one campus at least, heterosexual men specifically had the same, or poorer, understanding of consent despite these conversations. This suggests that simply increasing the volume of messaging may not produce meaningful change if there has not been an accompanying examination of the cultural values at the core of the consent conversation.
Examining male culture
Boys from childhood are immersed in a range of cultural messages about masculinity that may ultimately render them impervious to traditional consent education. Those messages include that persistence is romantic, conquest is a measure of masculinity, and rejection is something to overcome. In additional, such traditional gender role scripts support the view that a potential sexual partner’s intoxication creates an opportunity, rather than a heightened obligation to stop.
Beyond understanding what consent is, boys and young men must be asked to examine why they don’t or won’t recognize it. Educational programs must discuss masculinity, entitlement, peer culture and healthy relationships honestly, rather than treating consent as a compliance exercise. They must ask young men to grapple with why they would want to have sex with someone who doesn’t really want to have sex with them in the first place. They must engage men, not as presumed perpetrators, but as essential participants in preventing sexual violence. Importantly, this engagement needs to happen in grades K-12, with age-appropriate conversations about boundaries, respect, communication and healthy relationships, rather than relying on college institutions to undo years of cultural conditioning in a few hours of freshman orientation.
No single study is a definitive portrait of college students in America. But we found that knowledge of consent among women and LGBTQ+ students, high in 2017, was even higher in 2022, with no nationally equivalent drop in college sexual assault cases. This hints at the inadequacy of directing prevention messages primarily at potential victims. While there remains an essential responsibility for colleges to support survivors, improve reporting systems, and ensure fair procedures for accused students, the research gives us a reason to reconsider how we educate about consent in the first place.
Making college safe from sexual violence requires more than having policies in place for when something goes wrong, more than another poster in a residence hall. It must be more than another online training module that students click through before registering for classes. It requires a campus culture built on a much earlier foundation in which all students understand, internalize, and embrace each person’s autonomy as both desirable and nonnegotiable.
Dr. Stephanie Navarro Silvera, Dr. Eva Goldfarb, Dr. Amanda Birnbaum, and Dr. Lisa Lieberman are all professors in the Department of Public Health at Montclair State University. They have published three peer-reviewed research articles from their research on students’ perceptions of campus sexual assault climate.
