Trinity College Dublin Student Union’s (TCDSU) consent committee will extend education around consent to members of the College’s staff over the coming year.
TCDSU voted to introduce a full-time consent intern in March, with Rachel Skelly, a former student who sat on the union’s consent committee for three years, appointed to the position.
Speaking to The University Times, Skelly said that consent classes have already been given to some Pav staff members. She said the committee will run consent workshops with tutors, assistant wardens and assistant junior deans this year.
The committee, she said, is “starting to collaborate with [staff] in terms of what we can do to help them, and what they can do to help us”.
Skelly said the new model, which was created over the summer, takes a two-pronged approach to consent education – misconduct prevention training and first responder training.
TCDSU class representatives will receive consent training in October, while Skelly also hopes to work with the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) to develop a consent education model suitable for postgraduate students.
“What we have at the moment is tailored to a younger demographic”, she said.
In January 2016, TCDSU introduced consent classes for first-year students living in Halls. In September 2017, The University Times reported that the workshops had an attendance rate of over 90 per cent that year.
Skelly said the committee is “still working with the FRIES [freely given, retractable, informed, enthusiastic, specific] model” for students in Halls, but she added that “we’ve made a few changes. We’re making the workshops more inclusive … we’ve made the scenarios more inclusive, so that all students feel capable of engaging”.
Skelly is also planning to expand their collaboration with the various sports clubs and societies on campus to deliver consent workshops.
Accessibility to consent education is another aspect of Skelly’s plan – she said the committee is looking at ways to engage with “hard to reach groups”.
“Students from different cultural backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, where they’re coming from, consent and sexual activity is discussed in a very different way”, she said. “We want to make sure it’s accessible to them and that’s it’s culturally sensitive information that they’re getting.”
The steering group is currently in the process of developing a new misconduct policy for the College. In addition to Trinity-specific initiatives, Skelly is also working to develop a streamlined reporting tool in several other third-level institutes in Ireland.
The aim, she says, is to “be able to give some kind of indication of what’s happening on campuses across the country”.
“We’re hoping that we’ll be able to develop that so there’s consistent reporting happening across the country”, she said. “A lot of the time we’re getting requests from other media outlets for statistics on what’s happening on college campuses”.
“It would be fantastic if all the HEIs had the same reporting system so we’re comparing like with like, to give a better understanding of what’s really happening”, Skelly added.
