Continuing the Fight Against Sexual Assault

Since the worrying sexual conduct climate survey results were revealed in the fall, Harvard has seen a concerted push across campus to combat the issue. Recently, the Undergraduate Council’s Finance Committee furthered this effort by passing legislation that will require a majority of the executive board members of each student group receiving significant grant money from the UC to participate in sexual assault prevention training provided by the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response and Consent Advocates and Relationship Educators.

The trainings will be required for organizations receiving funding totals within the top 20 percent of the UC's allocations. This figure translates to approximately $1,000 per group; of the 278 groups that requested funding last year, 58 received more than $1,000.

We commend the Finance Committee for this step towards making Harvard’s campus a safer place. The College’s largest student organizations—from club sports to cultural groups to pre-professional organizations—reach nearly all ends of campus. Training these groups’ student leaders on how to prevent and, if necessary, intervene in situations with threats of sexual assault will thus have a far-reaching effect. This also marks an important step toward transforming the campus culture that revolves around the stigmatized issue of sexual assault.

Of course, the legislation’s amendment that will exempt student organizations with individual strategic partnerships with OSAPR and those students who are on multiple executive boards and have already fulfilled the requirement once make sense. In an environment of limited resources, practicality is a must.

That said, we urge the Finance Committee to be wary of the clause that will waive the training for the student groups for whom OSAPR and CARE trainings “cannot be conducted in a logistically feasible manner.” If the resources to provide training for the majority of executive board members are lacking, then the UC should lower each student organization’s attendance threshold to ensure that all pertinent student organizations have at least one representative present. While training at least half of the executive boards of each student organization receiving significant UC funding would be ideal, we believe it is more important to make sure that more organizations are covered by the training before focusing on the fraction of board members who are trained.

In that same vein, the UC should explore the possibility of extending the mandate to all student groups. Though the current legislation already applies to more than 50 student groups, the statistics about sexual assault on campus are simply too dire to be ignored.

If the lack of resources becomes an impediment to this initiative, we hope the UC will push the University to further expand resources for both OSAPR and CARE in order to sufficiently fulfill this need. These two organizations were created for precisely these purposes. They should be able to operate and better our campus to their full capacities. The UC's new training requirement is a fantastic first step toward this goal.