From Affirmative Consent:
“Having a model that is uniform and clear is only going to make it easier for students to understand,” Goss Graves said. “You would hate for a student to be on one campus and think that the definition was one thing and be on another campus and think it was another.”
Alison Berke Morano, a former vice chair of the Florida Democratic Party and campaign consultant, co-founded the Affirmative Consent Project, a national advocacy group, after a high-profile incident at FSU in which a student accused a football player of sexual assault.
Morano, whose group tracks state-level sexual assault legislation, said she hopes California and New York's enactment of “affirmative consent” might lead other states to take similar action. By the time Florida lawmakers consider such policies, they will have been improved, she argued.
“As we look at the legislation that’s already passed, maybe it goes through some generation of change, and as it goes from state to state, legislators will be able to incorporate this in a way that’s more comfortable for everybody,” Morano said.
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Politico Florida
8.17.15 | Jessica Bakeman
TALLAHASSEE — As the White House and student activists have raised awareness nationally about college sexual assault, lawmakers in California, New York and other states have attempted to change campuses’ culture by redefining consent and implementing new procedures for adjudicating rape allegations.
But in Florida, the only state policy legislators have considered is a bill that would allow people to carry concealed firearms on college campuses. If women who are licensed to carry guns were allowed to do so at school, they’d be able to protect themselves against attackers, leaders have argued.
Lawmakers have already introduced the campus concealed-carry legislation for the 2016 session after the bill stalled in the State Senate earlier this year, and Second Amendment lobbyists have begun spinning the issue as one about women’s rights.
Meanwhile, the state’s public universities, which oppose the campus carry proposal, have moved independently toward adopting “affirmative consent,” a “yes means yes” definition of agreement to sexual activity, as well as other best-practice policies, such as encouraging bystanders to intervene in situations that could lead to sexual assault and offering amnesty to students who reveal alcohol or drug infractions while reporting rape.
