Sexual Assault Prevention Education: Getting the Message Through to Students
A campus-produced movie helps West Virginia University staff effectively and appropriately discuss this sensitive topic.
The challenge with this approach is that the students who are the peer educators change every year. As a result, Beazley spent a lot of time and resources training new peer educators. She also realized that unlike WVU, which has significant resources, smaller schools with populations of 2,000 to 4,000 and severely limited staff couldn’t possibly support enough peer educators and mental health professionals to meet the needs of their students.
Movie Is Effective, Saves Resources
Beazley wanted a budget-friendly curriculum that was informative and kept students’ attention, while being realistic without going over the line. She also believed her efforts would be more appropriate and effective if the programs were presented more often and to classes with 25 students or less.
To address this need, Beazley and a small group of filmmakers created “Welcome to the Party,” a 34-minute movie that is loosely based on the real-life rape of a college freshman.
“With ‘Welcome to the Party,’ I can present it five or six times per day,” she says. “Our film is realistic, but it’s canned enough so that someone can just pick it up in the morning and impact a lot of people.”
The setting of the movie – or as Beazley prefers to call it, “curriculum” – is a party with college students and drinking.
Before she shows the film to students, however, she let’s them know what they are about to see. Beazley is also selective with whom she allows to present the program – only trained individuals who thoroughly understand sexual assault.
She and the other presenters carefully evaluate their audience. “If I get any sense that this might be a more immature class, I’ll tell people, ‘You know, the statistics are one in four [women in college will be sexually assaulted], so it’s likely there is a victim in the classroom right now,’” she tells the students. “‘Before you make funny comments, try to hold back on that because it might be hurtful to someone in the room.’”
The film then starts, but WVU’s sexual assault prevention educators don’t just let it run without engaging the students. They pause the movie at various points and talk about what is going to happen. (They also monitor the class and step in if an attendee appears to be traumatized by the movie.)
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About the Author
Robin Hattersley, Editor-in-Chief
Robin has been covering the security and campus law enforcement industries since 1998 and is a specialist in school, university and hospital security, public safety and emergency management, as well as emerging technologies and systems integration. She joined CS in 2005 and has authored award-winning editorial on campus law enforcement and security funding, officer recruitment and retention, access control, IP video, network integration, event management, crime trends, the Clery Act, Title IX compliance, sexual assault, dating abuse, emergency communications, incident management software and more. Robin has been featured on national and local media outlets and was formerly associate editor for the trade publication Security Sales & Integration. She obtained her undergraduate degree in history from California State University, Long Beach.
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