Written by Allison Preyde, M.A., Manager of Prevention and Education, Anova

One in three. It’s a familiar number to many of us when talking about sexual violence. But this time I’m not talking about survivors—I’m talking about perpetrators. 29% of male undergraduates in the US and Canada self-report having perpetrated sexual violence[1]. To those of you for whom this is a staggering number: you haven’t been paying attention.

In recent years the conversation around sexual violence has finally started shifting to include men and the need for work to be done with men in order to prevent perpetration. This is key, because no amount of survivor support or intervention moments for young women will ultimately end sexual violence. If women alone could have ended sexual violence, well, we would have done it already. The fact of the matter is that we need men to step up. We need men to get involved. And that means inviting them into the conversation.

For the past three years, Anova has been involved in co-creating and facilitating the Undressing Consent program on campus at Western. This was originally requested as a response to the events of O-Week 2021, but has continued to be offered every summer to incoming first years in residence. During the 90 minute workshop, all students engage in conversations about consent, sexual violence, alcohol, and sexual scripts, and then the women and nonbinary participants have a section on understanding desire and the men talk about handling rejection.

Student feedback on the workshop has been overwhelmingly positive, which I think is a credit not only to the curriculum we’ve developed but also to the empathetic and discussion-based approach of the facilitators. We don’t lecture students or try to convince them to abstain from drinking or casual sex. We open space for conversations about risks, rewards, and the realities of campus life. With the young men in particular, we talk about how much pressure is placed on men in sexual situations to initiate, to be experts, to read body language and figure out nonverbal and indirect cues of consent or rejection. We talk about how much it sucks to be turned down, how the brain can interpret rejection as an experience of physical pain, and how important it is to have a plan for what to do with those feelings.

This isn’t about blame or shame. We can’t guilt men into behaving differently—trying to do so just increases their self-defense mechanisms and causes them to disengage entirely. I believe that the vast majority of men don’t want to sexually violate anyone. But as a society, I think we’ve failed to actually teach young men the social skills and emotional tools we expect them to magically have, all while steeping them in a patriarchal stew of politics, pop culture, and pressures to be the “right” sort of man. This doesn’t absolve individuals who have already caused harm of their responsibility for that[2], but rather allows us to approach prevention work from a place of empathy, compassion, and hope.

[1] Anderson, R. E., Silver, K. E., Ciampaglia, A. M., Vitale, A. M., & Delahanty, D. L. (2019). The frequency of sexual perpetration in college men: A systematic review of reported prevalence rates from 2000 to 2017. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse.

[2] While I am focusing here on prevention education, I would be remiss not to mention the important transformative justice (TJ) work being done with perpetrators elsewhere. For those interested in learning more, I recommend starting with the Barnard Centre for Research on Women who created an accessible series of videos to introduce folks to the topics of working with harm-doers from a TJ framework https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/transforming-harm-experiments-in-accountability/

Breaking the Silence: Engaging Men in the Fight Against Sexual Violence