By Aoibhe Connolly

A pioneering University of Galway programme to educate both students and staff on the rules and boundaries of sexual consent has proven to be overwhelmingly positive – but the team behind the project wants to see stricter guidelines into the future.

The Active Consent programme wants the Higher and Further Education and Training sectors to set firm targets for consent education and violence prevention among all staff and students.

The programme’s leaders launched a report last week, outlining their work over the 2023-2024 academic year, with almost 25,000 First Year students interacting with the Active Consent orientation resource.

The initiative was launched to support institutions in promoting healthy relationships, sexual consent and the prevention of sexual violence.

It supports the ethos that consent must be ongoing, mutual, and freely given, for all relationships, genders and orientations, and utilises workshops, arts-based interventions, and specialised staff training in order to promote this message.

The report includes calls on the Higher Education and Further Education and Training Sector to ensure that at least 80% of the incoming student body be exposed to sexual consent education during their orientation, and that this education be delivered to students at multiple points during their third level experience.

“A lot of progress has been made in Further and Higher Education in recent years, but the time has come for these sectors to set firm targets for consent education and sexual violence prevention,” said Active Consent Team spokesman, Professor Pádraig MacNeela from the School of Psychology.

Engagement with the Active Consent Campaign in the past year has been overwhelmingly positive, as seen from the results of a survey of over 8,000 students, with 80% affirming that they learned something useful and 91% agreeing that they would recommend the programme to a friend.

Increased efforts have also been made to include and educate staff as part of the initiative, with over 2,000 staff members participating in raising awareness and training in consent education.

While a high level of recognition of sexual violence and online harassment was recorded, with 90%, for example, agreeing that it is sexual coercion if intimacy takes place with one person showing reluctance, responses to stories on harassment were less encouraging.

Only 57% of students considered it sexist harassment for someone to show a video mocking women to a group of peers and a massive 42% of the students agreed there was sexual consent in a story about a ‘hook up’ that did not include verbal consent to sex.

Most positively, students who availed of the programme’s educational resources displayed a greater intention to intervene if they saw sexual violence and harassment take place, highlighting the overall positive impact that the programme has had.

University of Galway Students’ Union president, Faye Ní Dhomhnaill has witnessed firsthand the beneficial results of the Active Consent programme.

“Active Consent was first set up to improve education around consent among the students at the university, and it has presented a noticeable shift in the attitudes of students around campus,” she said.

“It’s great to see this crucial information made widely available for students and staff and even better to see so many actively engaging with the programme,” she added.

Pictured: Report…Professor Pádraig MacNeela.