By Ketul PatelThe Daily Northwestern
Northwestern’s new coordinator of violence prevention and sexual health education wants to take a different approach to preventing sexual assault.
Katie Guilfoyle said she wants to help NU students think about sexual assault in terms of sexual health rather than legal repercussions.
“A lot of other people give statistics,” she said. “I like to frame sexual assault prevention in a more diffuse way.”
Guilfoyle said she wants NU to have more proactive methods to prevent sexual assaults instead of reactive measures such as the Sexual Assault Hearing and Appeals System.
The appeals system, made up of faculty members and students, holds hearings regarding sexual assault cases and reports the results to the university.
According to the University Police Web site, six “sexual offenses” occurred on NU’s campus from 2003 to 2005, all of which were classified as “forcible” rather than “non-forcible.” UP also received one report of a sexual assault on North Campus this September.
To meet the need for more proactive methods, Guilfoyle plans to implement a peer education program. The program would train students to lead discussions about sexual health, birth control and sexually transmitted infections, she said.
“Students at Northwestern who are intensively trained in sexual education can relate to other students better than I can,” Guilfoyle said. “It gives you room to talk explicitly about consent.”
She said she thinks this method will be more effective than “using scare tactics to convince people.”
Peer education programs tend to be more effective than programs with an administrator talking to students, said John Foubert, founder and president of One in Four, a national rape prevention program for college men.
“There are methods of peer education that can work well in college campuses,” he said.
Guilfoyle participated in a similar program while she was a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in public health and another in gender studies.
She said talking with peers their own age will be easier for students than talking with a “65-year-old man.”
Guilfoyle also said she and Donald Misch, executive director of student health services, have discussed conducting sexual assault research at NU.
“We’re looking to do specific research on Northwestern students and their perception of sexual activity,” she said. “So we don’t have to rely on data about the general public.”
Misch said he hopes to develop a research team with other area universities to study sexual assault prevention.
“She and I would both like to focus on sexual health in general,” he said. “My deal about health education is the field gets smarter when we do this research.”
Guilfoyle said talking about consent might help reduce the incidence of sexual assault because many instances of assault occur when people have trouble with communication.
“A lot of times, sexual assault occurs with misperception of intent,” she said. “An overwhelming majority of sexual assault occurs between two acquaintances.”
Misperception of intent can occur when both people initially consent to sex but one person changes his or her mind afterward, Guilfoyle said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site states the victim knows the perpetrator in eight out of 10 sexual assaults.
According to the 2000 National Crime Victimization Study, females 16 to 19 are four times more likely than the general public to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
Guilfoyle said she would like to work with Jessica Sempek, coordinator of alcohol and other drug education, to decrease the incidence of sexual assaults.
“So many acquaintance rapes are directly linked to alcohol use,” Guilfoyle said. “There’s a lot of room to collaborate on prevention efforts.”
Alcohol is the most commonly used chemical in crimes of sexual assault, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.
Reach Ketul Patel at [email protected].
