The University of Oxford’s student union is to roll out sexual consent workshops aimed specifically at LGBTQ students, as well as classes aimed at couples.
The workshops, piloted on a small scale in Oxford last year, are the first of their kind to be introduced at a UK university. The student union will run them at colleges across the university from February.
Workshops will be non-compulsory and open to any student in any year to attend.
Anna Bradshaw, women’s officer at the University of Oxford, says: “This is about getting people to talk about these issues and normalise them as a topic of conversation.
“There are taboos around consent, and talking to someone about how your partner crossed the line within a [non-normative relationship] can be even more difficult. Having spaces for that discussion has got to be good.”
The new workshops will cover consent and queer identity and are likely to touch on sexually transmitted infections (STIs), open relationships and issues that could arise from trans identities.
Bradshaw says: “We talk about kink, gender dysphoria and other ways of being non-vanilla. We’re in the editing stages at the moment but we’re contemplating talking about asexuality and sex work as well.
“No one workshop is supposed to cover everything on all of these issues – materials are there for people to pick up on what’s interesting to them.”
Couples workshops are likely to look at issues that surround domestic violence and communication.
The workshops follow the introduction of compulsory sexual consent workshops at Oxford and Cambridge for the first time this year, which ran for all new students during freshers week.
Tam Guobadia, president of the LGBTQ society at the University of Oxford, has told the Oxford Student that he is excited about the idea of “queering” consent workshops.
He says: “Mainstream consent workshops, while important, are not made for us. The reality is that our bodies, and what we do with them, requires that these workshops are not simply repackaged but reimagined.
Adam Ward, LGBTQ officer at the university, also supports the workshops. “Including narratives of those who identify as queer strengthens the dialogue students can have about sexual consent,” he says.
Sexual consent classes were made compulsory at some universities this year, due to growing concern about the extent of sexual violence on university campuses. A recent report from the National Union of Students (NUS) found that sexual harassment is rife at universities in the UK.
The NUS is piloting an I ❤ consent campaign, which aims to get universities and colleges to run campaigns. Twenty selected students’ unions will develop and deliver a consent workshop programme.
Meanwhile a new fund designed to find ways to tackle homophobic bullying in schools has been launched by the education secretary Nicky Morgan this week.
Support from the £2m fund will be offered to community or non-profit organisations that offer creative ideas to fight homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying.
• Do you think there’s a need for queering consent workshops at university? Let us know in the comment section below.
