Washington Post
7.19.15 | Emmers Brown
As colleges grapple with the widespread problem of sexual assault, there is a growing consensus that the nation’s schools need to do more to educate young people about sex and relationships before they ever set foot on campus.
A little-noticed measure tucked into the Senate’s 600-page bill to rewrite No Child Left Behind, which passed Thursday, would require the nation’s high schools to begin reporting how they teach students about safe relationships, including what it means to consent to sex and how to avoid sexual violence and coercion. It is one of the ways that advocates, educators and lawmakers are pushing to reexamine what children learn about sex and sexual assault while in public schools.
Many activists see kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) sex education as a missed opportunity to give young people the information they need not only to defend themselves but also to avoid hurting someone else. But sex is — and always has been — a delicate subject for public schools, and while there is a general agreement that teens should be taught how to avoid sexual assault and harassment, there is no consensus about how best to do that.
“There has to be a specific focus on K-12 if you’re ever going to address the problem in colleges,” said Fatima Goss Graves of the National Women’s Law Center, which has filed lawsuits against universities and public school districts accusing them of failing to protect students from sexual harassment and assault. “There is a tremendous amount of work to do.”
College freshmen arrive on campus with vastly different concepts of what constitutes consensual sex and gaps in their knowledge that can leave them vulnerable to assault. A recent poll by The Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in five women experienced unwanted sexual contact while in college. The poll also showed that two people can interpret the same behavior differently: More than 40 percent of students said that nodding in agreement established consent, for example, and more than 40 percent said it did not.
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