All students must watch training videos due to Title IX, a law that protects people from sex-based discrimination in an educational facility’s activities or programs.
Sexual harassment and sexual violence count as forms of discrimination, so students sit down and are supposed to learn about the do’s and don’ts.
However, I think the videos are condescending and make everything a joke instead.
Sexual harassment and sexual violence are serious and sensitive topics. We can’t use humor to convey a serious message.
I get that the point is to make it relatable to a younger generation by including memes, but students who watch the videos will understand that there’s no need for outdated jokes like telling someone to shout ‘THIS IS SPARTA’ to create a distraction.
Chief Diversity Officer and Assistant Vice President of the Office of Equity, Inclusion, and Compliance Linda M. Hoos said the videos come from a third-party company called Vector Solutions.
The most recent training video came out for the 2017-2018 academic year and was supposed to show how students can exercise the three D’s: direct, distract and delegate to prevent sexual misconduct.
These are important lessons for sure, but they get lost within the jokes telling people to start a dance party or throw their drinks at the wall.
I don’t think these will accomplish anything except make the person who does them look like a fool.
The real message is to help someone who’s getting taken advantage of. I think students have the capacity to understand that without having to ruin someone’s home or their own social image.
I think the more jokes in the video, the less likely students are to take it seriously.
The ‘Not Anymore’ training depicted actual survivors who shared their stories.
Those survivors are the voices we should be focusing on.
The training defined consent, emphasized nothing was the victim’s fault and even had quizzes that students had to pass to complete the training.
Those are the hard-hitting stories that bring a much-needed sense of reality.
‘Clarifying Consent’ depicted what healthy and unhealthy relationships looked like and defined consent, but once again had corny jokes.
The video compared consent to a game of catch, but consent isn’t a game and college students are not toddlers.
The video also had people in colored T-shirts that represented how healthy or unhealthy a relationship is with green as good and red as bad.
These people would then perform skits while a robotic voice with a British accent asked them yes or no questions clarifying consent.
I think these videos would be great in a middle school setting, but they’re a flop in a college.
I think students are old enough to understand the severity of these messages, but will treat it like a joke the more these videos do.
CPP has a great theater department and I think we’re good enough to make our own trainings to get the videos across.
#NotAnymore to jokes mixed in with serious topics.
