Rape-Prevention Programs Proliferate, but 'It's Hard to Know' Whether They Work

Submitted by anthony on Sat, 2009-11-21 01:26

Story here. Excerpt:

'Imagine that you are a male police officer walking down a dark alley. Two drunken men surprise you, take your gun, and then sexually assault you.

This is the scenario groups of young men are asked to visualize during a presentation at Binghamton University. Part of a sexual-assault-prevention program designed for college fraternities, the exercise is meant to sensitize men to the way a female rape victim might feel.
...
On its Web site, Mr. Foubert's organization highlights statistics from studies he has conducted on the program's effectiveness. It says that not only does the program improve men's understanding of how to help a woman recover from rape, but it also lowers "the likelihood of raping for an entire academic year—longer than any other program evaluated in the research literature." Furthermore, Mr. Foubert concluded that 75 percent of "high risk" men who attend his program report lower likelihood of raping after the program concludes.
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Mr. Foubert's nonprofit organization, One in Four—named after the college rape statistic—packs recent college graduates into an RV to tour the country presenting his program. So far about 35 colleges have created chapters of One in Four on their campuses. The University of Pennsylvania, which started a chapter four years ago, has 26 male peer educators trained in the Men's Program. "It works well," says Jessica A. Mertz, a violence-prevention educator at Penn. "Students like to hear from their peers."'

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Comments

Why aren't female students getting exposed to such material when women and girls can and do engage in making unwanted and obnoxious sexual advances on men, and on other women? No discussion of woman-on-woman rape? No discussion of how a female can molest a male who is, for example, passed out at a party? No, of course not.

I am fine with students going into college in their freshman year getting a solid review of what is and is not acceptable interpersonal behavior based on the law adn on the college's guidelines. What I don't like is seeing the male students singled out and only people of their own sex used as examples of who is the perpetrator.

[Update: I posted this same comment re the article and included relevant links and to my surprise, it got through the moderator (it's comment #3). Glad to see The Chronicle of Higher Ed is getting less under the thumb of the PC machine as time goes on. I can only hope it's a trend toward *gasp!!* embracing a divergence of opinion and actually allowing otherwise legally-protected and topically-relevant speech in an on-line academic publication's commentary section.]

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2009-11-21 21:56