Date lapsed: November 2023
Proposed by: Fares Azhari
Seconded by: Mariam Raashid (Women's representative)
Progress: Ongoing
What do you want?
We are a group of students who want to organise and provide student-led workshops that will raise awareness and educate all students on the importance of consent and bystander intervention as well as sexual assault, harassment and rape.
We want the Student's Union to lobby the University to facilitate mandatory Consent and Bystander intervention workshops, led by the students. By facilitate, we mean that the University should provide space, allocated time on the timetable and cover the cost for training the students. The students who will lead the workshops will need to receive training to give consent and bystander intervention training; this comes with a cost. We want the Union to lobby the university to facilitate the cost of these training programmes too.
The facilitators of the workshop will be trained by a specialist in the field ensuring that we are ready to run them on our own, this training includes handling of disclosure, specific knowledge about rape, sexual assault and harassment on campus and knowledge about the support services available to survivors. We would require this training to be funded by the university as it would benefit the well being of students. Again, for emphasis, we want the university to facilitate the space, times and the completion of those workshops for all firstyear students throughout the academic year starting from 2020/2021.
Why do you want it?
We consider sexual assault to be one of the biggest issues in all universities including ours and we aim to shift the culture through incremental change, building a safe environment for all students.
What impact will this have?
It will create a community of support for survivors and a system that will hopefully prevent any kind of future instances of sexual violence.