Sen. Kaine aims to prevent sexual assault through K-12 education
Public scrutiny of the prevention of sexual assaults on both college campuses and in the military has led to Congress drafting a preventative legislation.
In a press conference, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine (D) said he is sponsoring the Teach Safe Relationships Act in response to concerns raised by students of the University of Virginia students. According to Kaine, student responded in the wake of the now-redacted Rolling Stone article which detailed a rape that occurred on the U.Va campus.
“If there was more education at the high school level in (Sexual Education) and health class, not just about reproductive biology but more about relationships and what is consent and what is coercion and where to go when you need help, then students would be equipped with that information when they went into college or the military,” Kaine said.
In the aftermath of the Rolling Stone article, Kaine went to U.Va and met with a student group sans faculty and press. Kaine said that his experience communicating with the students influenced his contributions to the Teach Safe Relationships Act.
Kaine urged that education is an important facet of the solution because of how sexual assaults, in all scenarios, disproportionately targets people from the ages of 16-24. Many of the perpetrators of these assaults are in that age range as well.
“It’s when people are first emerging into full, adult sexuality,” Kaine said. “They may not be completely confident in their own sexual decision-making. They may be vulnerable to another person scamming or coercing them into something.”
Sexual education in schools has been long-debated by the public, though a 2015 poll by the Future of Sex Education, an organization with the goal to advance the implementation and institutionalization of comprehensive sex education in public schools, show that the majority of Americans support it being taught as early as junior high school.
The content of the education, however, can range from abstinence-only to, as Kaine described, only the biology of reproduction.
While the Teach Safe Relationships Act does mandate the education on issues regarding dating and sexual violence, it also states that education is dependent on an “individual’s age, developmental stage, and culture.”
Recent documentaries regarding these two institutions, such as “The Invisible War” and “The Hunting Ground,” look both at the actions of the perpetrators of assault, as well as the administration of universities and the military who fail to protect victims and punish assailants.
Spectrum Editor, Austin Walker
Austin is a sophomore print journalism major. He started at the CT as a contributing writer, and frequently covers work done by artists and performers both on and off campus. He hopes to one day be a columnist writing about art that impacts culture, politics and documenting the lives of extraordinary and everyday people. // Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
walkeraw@commonwealthtimes.org
