Campus Sexual Assault: It Starts with an Assault on the Sexual Narrative

Problem Statement

SHIFT NC, a statewide nonprofit working to improve adolescent and young adult sexual health, has made a lot of progress expanding sexual health education in North Carolina school districts. However, it excludes sexual assault prevention as an integral piece of sexual health. Yet organizations that target youth, like SHIFT NC, are in a unique position to enact effective preventative measures. While prominent public discourse highlighting sexual assault prompted mainly colleges and universities to adopt prevention strategies, not a single prevention method has proven effective at the college level. This is because, by the time students arrive on campus, lack of comprehensive sexual education created space for harmful social influences to have already solidified within young men and women. As a result, young women often struggle in both college and the workforce to navigate through oversexualizing from the media and the age-old social narrative of moralized virginity. Social norms have also instilled a general reluctance to talking about sex before, during, and after people engage in it, which often leads to destructive sexual encounters because people feel unable to express their levels of comfort. Sexual assault prevention will only be effective if it is implemented in the earlier stages of youth development.

If SHIFT NC is going to be successful in improving adolescent sexual health, it is imperative that they include the protection of emotional sexual health in their agenda. The organization has shown major success in curbing teen pregnancies and STDs by partnering with places like the Greensboro YWCA to implement public, youth sexual education programs, but the content of its current sexual education curricula fails to help students develop a stable foundation for understanding ethical sexuality. This is because technical information about physical health and various forms of birth control will not help students begin thinking about sexuality as a social and cultural act, as well as a physical act. While any sort of moralistic curricula about sex will be met with backlash from both proponents of abstinence-only curricula, and those in favor of more progressive, amoral sex education, SHIFT NC should consider helping students develop their own values regarding sexuality. This approach will also be more effective because, as university prevention methods have gleaned, simply telling people the right and wrong way to act does not effectively change behavior.