Further to John’s excellent post about Steubenville and rape culture over the weekend, my good friend Shannon is running an Indiegogo campaign to fund her creation of classroom materials designed to teach kids from a consent-culture perspective, which will upon completion be distributed for free online.
So, put your money where your mouth is, guys. This is a chance to put money towards something that actually has a shot at creating real change.
Related Articles
11 users responded in this post
I would like to point out that my donation should in no way cause anyone to infer me to be progressive.
don’t say progressive like it’s a bad thing.
Threw some cash in here myself. If we have money to pay for games and comics on Kickstarter, we have money for this.
This all sounds overly legalistic. Not that it isn’t a very worthy mission, the continued victimisation of the venerable needs to be stopped, but would a teacher training model designed to give kids consent-culture perspective really achieve anything in the long run? How will it effect home life of the children? How would these new lessons speak to issues of class, sexuality or race?
Its like when Andrea Dworkin went after the porn industry by petitioning congress to have it banned, the equivalent to Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill.
Donated. This is a wonderful idea.
@MGK donated and re-shared on the social medias. Thanks for bringing this to our attention
@Chus that is a wonderful argument that you can use to shoot down pretty much any effort to do anything. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
@Chus – I agree…ish, but it has to start somewhere. Building a consent culture is a good thing, and it spans beyond sexuality. It’s actually bigger than ‘just’ consent, it’s teaching empathy. So many of us refuse to see things from others’ perspective.
it’s all the same thing. Self-entitlement. “I am more important than everyone else. My issues and needs are more real.”
I hope she goes beyond teaching kids to ask for consent, and to dig deeper. WHY should we ask for consent? Because other people are people too. This is a terribly hard concept for young kids to grasp (it’s why they are little sociopaths) and I think a lot of adults never REALLY learn this, and just pay lip service to it.
And I see it different than Dworkin in that just trying to get something banned doesn’t change public perspective. You have to build this kind of stuff up slow, from the ground up. It’ll take generations to make real progress.
Hi, Chus.
All of the work I do is from an intersectional perspective. Many people’s experiences of sexual violence are further impacted by their identities of being racialized, poor, disabled, queer, gender non-normative. The legacy of enslavement and colonialism plays a huge role in how some bodies are respected more than others, how some people are exposed to more overt displays of domination and power via sexual violence.
Will what I do change anything in the long run? Like I said in my pitch, I can’t guarantee anything. I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone, or ban anything. I’m offering the opportunity for teachers to take a look at what they’re already teaching, from a different lens. I’m offering resources that will engage students to ask questions of what they see in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in popular culture.
I’m encouraging teachers of younger and older children to model behaviour that we should expect from everyone: respectful engagement, seeking consent, and how to define and maintain health boundaries. None of those three things are restricted to sexual expression.
Learning how to apply them in day-to-day interactions, however, means that many students will have the ability to generalize those skills as they get older and realize that the people to whom they’re sexually attracted are also worthy of being treated with respect, having their consent, and understanding where their boundaries lie.
Learning how to negotiate respectfully is a skill a lot of us struggle with: Compromise is often interpreted as “pushing someone to let go of some of what they want so our needs are met without us having to lose anything,” rather than, “We appear to be in disagreement about our #1 thing we’d like to do. What other common ground do we have so that we can start from there?”
The very basic stuff can start at the earliest grades – preschool, even. It will be more sophisticated as students get older and develop a better understanding of the world, and by the senior high school years (i.e. the age of the kids involved in Stuebenville), some really challenging content can be addressed, with scaffolding.
I’m not interested in teaching people how not to rape (though, to be fair, I would really like people not to rape). I’m interested in fostering a culture in which people treat each other with kindness, compassion, and respect. Which will hopefully lead people to rape a whole lot less. And will lead people to be less afraid of speaking out against those who are being sexually violent or predatory. And will lead people to be more likely to believe and support those who do come forward with experiences of being assaulted. And will decrease the number of people who blame what we wear and not who attack us.
Jake is right: this is grassroots. It’s from the very beginning, basically. We have SO MUCH work to do to combat the ways we’ve done this for so long.
Thank you so much for your support in this work, Chris. We need to go out to a movie soon, for sure.
Pony? Where?!
Contributed and shared. It sounds like the lessons will pretty easily translate to US culture and education as well. When this comes out I intend to notify the schools in my area.
Shannon, I hope you are setting aside a little of the money raised to pay for hosting and bandwidth.
Dan
One thing at a time.
Bandwidth and hosting can be taken care of once there’s content to deliver.
Donated. Also, Shannon, if you’re interested in trying to get this used in the States, you might try to get into contact with The Ohio Resource Center (http://ohiorc.org/). They’re good folks. At the very least, they might help to get your materials exposure to teachers in Ohio (and maybe a few other states).