CONSENTING YOUNG ADULTS

Last week, police and school district officials announced a new
course about "drug-facilitated sexual assaults" for Grade 10
students, but it's been in the works for some time.

Jan Sippel, the Vancouver School Board's abuse prevention manager,
said the VPD approached the board about the issue and staff have been
working on the three-lesson course since 2009.

It's been inserted into the Grade 10 Planning class and was piloted
at Tupper, John Oliver and Gladstone secondary schools last spring.

"[Grade 10] was the year we chose. We wanted it to have a context in
the curriculum," explained Sippel, noting other Grade 10 level
subjects include healthy relationships, effective communication and
sexual decision-making. "So this is a good fit with it."

Young women between 15 and 24 are at greatest risk for
drug-facilitated sexual assault, according to police.

"The Vancouver Police Department receives an average of 450 sexual
assaults reports annually, but tragically, we know there are many
more traumatized victims out there because sexual assault is one of
the most under-reported crimes," Det. Const. Denise Foster of the
VPD's sex crimes unit stated in a press release.

Some students revealed they were not fully aware of the risks when
the sessions were piloted, Sippel said. "It's a really important
message to get out to our students. They are going out to parties.
They are going out in the community. We know that these kinds of
assaults are not confined to bars, they're not confined to situations
in which people are drinking alcohol. Drugs have been put into
coffee, pop, soup. That was one of the things students were quite
surprised at when we first introduced the program when we did the
pilot. They thought if they didn't drink [alcohol], then they would be safe."

The first session in the three-session course focuses on
consent--what it means to consent to something, what it mean to get
consent. The second session involves a presentation on
drug-facilitated sexual assault and the third session deals with staying safe.

"[It] focuses on personal safety in their everyday lives--both
off-line and online," Sippel said. "So we're bringing in text
messaging. We're talking about Facebook and we have an activity where
they rotate among different stations and they have different
activities to do at each station."

Ultimately, the object of the course is prevention, she said.

"We're always hoping that what we're doing is primarily prevention,
reaching kids before anything ever happens and giving them the skills
to reduce the risk. We are trying to reduce the risks of
victimization. We're also trying to reduce the risk that a student is
going to be a silent bystander to a situation or that a student is
going to perpetrate a situation--intentionally or
unwittingly--because they didn't understand the idea of consent."