College will decide tomorrow whether to fund a €15,000 expansion of the pioneering consent classes piloted for the last two years in Trinity Hall.
Trinity’s Student Life Committee will tomorrow decide whether to fund the workshops, which had a 91 per cent attendance rate in Trinity Hall last September.
The workshops on sexual consent were introduced by Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) in 2016, after a survey conducted among students revealed that one in four women and one in 20 men had experienced a non-consensual sexual experience.
The proposal will ask Trinity to fund the workshops for the next several years.
The expansion of the consent workshops would see the classes offered to sports clubs and societies on campus. The proposal also includes plans to eventually bring the classes to all Trinity student accommodation, including in Kavanagh Court, the Binary Hub and the yet-to-be-built Oisín House complex. By 2021, TCDSU Welfare Officer Damien McClean said, the entire cost of the workshops will be €20,000 a year.
The expansion also includes a new website dedicated to consent and a video, which McClean said was part of the “mission statement” of the workshops.
“We’re asking for it to be fully funded by College because it should be fully funded by College”, McClean told The University Times. “Trinity has been a leader in consent with these workshops. We need to have consent as a topic of conversation everyone in Trinity is educated about.”
Currently, there is no dedicated funding for the consent workshops, with money coming from a range of groups, including TCDSU and the Student Counselling Service.
Speaking to The University Times, Trish Murphy, a counsellor from the Student Counselling Service who has worked with TCDSU on the classes, said funding from College won’t change the structure of the workshops. “The essence of it is that it is a student-led idea”, she said. Murphy said that, so far, Trinity had been supportive of the classes.
Trialled first in Trinity Hall, the workshops were attended by 400 students, before being revised in accordance with participants’ feedback. The workshops received international attention ahead of their introduction, with TCDSU being one of the earliest adopters of consent classes for students.
“There have been a lot more students helped by the welfare service since the introduction of these classes”, McClean said.
Dominic McGrath also contributed reporting to this piece.
