Impact of Sexual Consent Education on Working Professionals

Description

By Neeshali Adhya, Date of Project Submission: April 2015., Completed for: Kawartha Sexual Assault Center; Supervising Professor: Sharon Beaucage-Johnson; Trent Community Research Centre, FRSC4890 - Community Based Research, This paper explores the impact of the Sexual Consent Conference that was held in June of 2016 at Trent University. This conference was hosted by the Kawartha Sexual Assault Centre. The conference took an inter-sectoral approach to discussing the complexity of sexual consent. It was funded by the Status of Women Canada and was a response to a needs assessment that was conducted by the Kawartha Sexual Assault Centre. The present study answered three questions: 1) Did the conference provide a learning experience that was relevant to the attendees’ role in the community, 2) In what ways did the conference enhance the attendees’ knowledge and skill set around consent, and 3) In what ways did the attendees modify their approaches to service delivery. I found that the information was relevant to 92.86% of the attendees, 60.60% of the attendees stated they learned something from the conference, and 30.95% of them changed the way they deliver their services. Some recommendations for another conference are to specify what changes want to be seen in the community in reference to sexual violence and consent, and how to implement them through interactive sessions. This could enhance the networking aspect of the conference while determining what specific changes can be made to help the community. Some future research could be considering if the results of this research is specific to the topic of sexual violence or if the results are similar to other conferences on different topics. One limitation of this research is the interpretation of the survey questions, some of the attendees may not have understood what was being asked in full.