Sexual Civility and Empowerment (SCE)

Ohio State’s Sexual Civility and Empowerment program (SCE) was started in 2015 following a campus climate survey. The SCE program included the responsibilities of educating students that were implemented under Buckeyes ACT, as well as helping survivors of sexual assault through counseling, reporting services, and activities specifically for survivors of sexual assault.

In February of 2018, the SCE office on campus closed without explanation. The office was said to be “under review” and became unresponsive to calls and emails. In an effort to gain some understanding of why SCE closed, I set up an interview with Doug Koyle, the Assistant Vice President of Student Life.

I did not gain much understanding of the issues with Sexual Civility and Empowerment (SCE) from my 2018 interview with Doug Koyle. He stated that the program was “under review” and that prevention efforts would continue in the fall. He also stated that students should get involved in prevention efforts on campus and be engaged in the current climate of sexual assault on campus.

Since that interview, SCE was replaced by the Relationship Violence and Education program for the fall semester in 2018, which took over the educational aspect of sexual assault prevention on campus, and is housed under the Wellness Center.

Ohio State announced that the counseling aspect of SCE that has been nonexistent for the past year will be covered by the placement of two full-time SARNCO (Sexual Assault Resource Network of Central Ohio) representatives on Ohio State’s campus. The representatives are employees of OhioHealth, and are confidential resources on campus. I am very relieved that Ohio State has found a new counseling option for survivors that is not legally obligated to report to the university. I hope that this new programming will remain and grow into something larger so that, as Louise Douce put it, students can go from “surviving to thriving”. (clip 11)

In the wake of the recent Strauss investigations, which revealed that former athletics doctor Richard Strauss sexually abused at least 177 men during his employment at Ohio State (https://accessibility.osu.edu/files/final-redacted-strauss-investigation-report-tagged.pdf), it is necessary to acknowledge the importance of accountability and owning the consequences of an action. Ohio State has addressed the Strauss case, and while the issue is far in the past, I was glad that the investigation was addressed in an email to all students and staff, and my hope for the university is that we will continue forward with prevention programming that aggressively addresses toxic masculinity, how power influences the ability of people to come forward about their abuse, and how we can move past it by all acknowledging our role in relation to rape culture and toxic masculinity.

In this new wave of callout culture and the #MeToo movement, which Douce referred to as “the new wave of feminism,” we must make a shift from acknowledging and identifying impact and consequences, toward putting pressure on actors to change, acknowledge, and apologize for their behavior. (clip 9)

I think many people would agree that “Me Too” has reenergized our culture’s approach to sexual assault. “Me Too” was founded by Tarana Burke to help amplify the voices of sexual assault survivors–particularly women of color. However, the movement was not widely known until 2017, when dozens of celebrities began to tell their stories of sexual assault from men in power positions over them; most notably the case of Harvey Weinstein sexually harassing actresses cast in his movies for years. The reenergizing of Me Too does acknowledge the underlying issue of power in sexual assault and sexual violence, but it does not recognize privilege. It has begun to garner a response from those who were called out, but as we have seen with the Kavanaugh hearings, there is still a widespread denial and ignorance toward sexual assault.

The reluctance of men to change their behavior has discouraged survivors from coming forward for years, because there is a large community of men who are afraid of addressing the way that toxic masculinity affects their own actions. While I do feel that we are heading toward a cultural shift with callout culture that will force us to address toxic masculinity as a culture, change happens slowly, and we have to push these issues on a systemic level. Instead of expecting survivors to address problematic behavior on their own, we need to work it into our culture and social lives. Louise Douce saw the re-implementation of programs like “Men (can stop) Rape” as a key component to the goal of reorganizing our culture. Encouraging men to admit how they have been affected by Western male socialization opens up a learning environment that encourages men to address the consequences of toxic masculinity.