'They're just not enough': Students push to improve sexual assault prevention trainings for college men

“That immediately causes them to tune out because … that puts their guard up,” she said. “If you were to go to anybody and say, ‘I am telling you this because you are potentially a violent person,’ and that person feels that fundamentally they’re not, that’s going to cause that person to get defensive and tune out. That is something that we’ve seen across all of the research that we’ve done, that the young men on college campuses find that [prevention education] is either completely ‘name, blame, shame’ or is irrelevant to them as men within their campus community.”

The culture of victim blaming creates an enemy instead of focusing on the real issues. And the biggest issue is that we can't recognize abuse as easily as we believe we naturally do. It's normal, it's okay, but it isn't.

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“That immediately causes them to tune out because … that puts their guard up,” she said. “If you were to go to anybody and say, ‘I am telling you this because you are potentially a violent person,’ and that person feels that fundamentally they’re not, that’s going to cause that person to get defensive and tune out. That is something that we’ve seen across all of the research that we’ve done, that the young men on college campuses find that [prevention education] is either completely ‘name, blame, shame’ or is irrelevant to them as men within their campus community.”
The culture of victim blaming creates an enemy instead of focusing on the real issues. And the biggest issue is that we can't recognize abuse as easily as we believe we naturally do. It's normal, it's okay, but it isn't.