Jordan Dougherty and Melanie Beres Interventions in Sexual Violence: Student-led interventions
This stream is based on the Gender Studies paper offered at Otago, GEND311 – Interventions in Sexual Violence, which offers students the opportunity to explore what makes an effective sexual violence prevention project. Across the semester, our students worked within groups to develop their own intervention, which they presented to their tutorial streams under the guise of a funding pitch. Students employed the knowledge gained throughout the course and creatively fulfilled an intervention brief. They carried out a needs assessment, highlighted their goals and objectives, provided a methodology and broke down their intended evaluation methods. In this session, we will first go over the framework for sexual violence prevention the students were presented with at the beginning of semester, before handing over to the students themselves present their interventions. We will also reflect on the joys and struggles of teaching this paper and discuss some of the student projects that could not present themselves.
Presentation One: Beyond the Binary: Teaching Inclusive Sex Ed Authors: Alfie Smeele, Sophie Green, Morgan Alcock, Nicki Graham
In Aotearoa, our relationships and sexuality curriculum is not being taught to a high standard, especially regarding queer sexuality, consent and relationships. This discrepancy in relationships and sexuality education for queer students is harmful and is a contributing factor to the higher rates of sexual harm queer people experience. Our intervention is a professional development course for teachers that would aim to educate teachers on teaching relationships and sexuality curriculum inclusively. It would do this by challenging harmful cis/hetero norms about sex consent and relationships, including queer understandings and experiences of relationships, sex, and consent, using a model of consent that emphasizes empathy rather than gendered power dynamics.
Presentation Two: Spark a Shift Authors: Anna Harris, Beth Dunphy, Maleah Abbott-Newland, Oliva Shaw
Spark a Shift is a tertiary workshop intervention programme that aims to reduce ongoing victimisation following sexual violence within relationships for University of Otago students. The five workshops will target the gender norms and rape myths that entrench sexual passivity and feelings of self-blame in women and AFAB people. They will teach context specific rape resistance strategies to empower participants and help participants to reclaim their sexual desire by understanding what they do want to in order to know what they don't want. Overall, Spark a Shift wishes to deliver a programme that targets the underlying causes of sexual violence and provide ways for participants to feel confident in their ability to defend themselves.
