The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) today voted overwhelmingly to design national consent workshops for students, based on models successfully introduced in colleges across Ireland over the last year.
Proposed by the union’s welfare committee, the vote means that USI will now begin the process of researching and designing national consent workshops for the union’s thousands of members, in consultation with expert bodies. The vote took place at the union’s national congress in Clare, which is attended by students’ union delegations from across the country, including universities and colleges in Northern Ireland.
Speaking at USI’s congress today, Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Welfare Officer, Aoibhinn Loughlin, who is also member of USI’s welfare committee and helped develop Trinity’s consent workshops, said that Trinity’s workshops had provided a good insight into the strengths and weakness of the current consent workshop model.
“We learned what worked. We learned what didn’t work”, she said. Loughlin emphasised that, according to a TCDSU survey, one in four female students had experienced a non-consensual sexual experience. “This is happening in all of our colleges”, she said.
Various unions, she said, had contacted her looking for advice and support on developing workshops in their own colleges. By asking USI to research and design workshops, it would mean colleges across the country would be able to learn from Trinity’s own experience.
While the motion initially proposed that the consent workshops would be based on recommendations from the Trinity consent workshops, the union’s congress voted to remove the reference to Trinity, meaning that the workshops will be based on feedback from consent workshops across the country. The TCDSU delegation was the only group who voted to maintain the reference to Trinity’s workshops.
Consent has become one of the defining and most-publicised student campaigns in recent years, with various student unions developing their own on-campus workshops. In September, 400 first-year students in September took part in consent workshops in Trinity, and Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) is currently working to develop Trinity-specific consent workshops alongside the Trinity’s Counselling Service.
In February, University College Dublin Students’ Union (UCDSU) dropped their consent classes after poor attendance. Referencing this, TCDSU President, Kieran McNulty, speaking during discussion of the motion today, said: “These cannot fail. We’ve seen what happens when they fail.”
Trinity’s workshops saw 24 facilitators trained to run the consent workshops. The 12 students and 12 staff members selected received training from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and from Dr Pádraig MacNeela from the School of Psychology in NUI Galway.
The Trinity consent workshops received international attention, covered by newspapers including the Guardian and the Irish Times.
Various student unions across Ireland have also worked to develop similar workshops, and the vote by USI will see the union put further effort into educating students and supporting individual unions in offering the service.
Dominic McGrath and Sinéad Baker were reporting from USI’s congress in Ennis, Co Clare.
