Students and facilitators on why having shared language to address boundaries ensures everyone is on the same page
Niamh Murtagh and Jamie Mangan, who are facilitators of DCU’s consent classes. Photo: Gerry Mooney
It’s eight years since Trinity College Dublin announced that it was offering mandatory sexual consent classes to students as part of its orientation programme. These were modelled on similar courses that were in place in a number of British universities and the response was mostly positive.
This was around the time of the Brock Turner rape trial in the US and the gathering of pace of the #MeToo movement, but the classes also came on the back of a 2014 student survey at Trinity that found one in four female respondents, and 5pc of men, had a non-consensual sexual experience during their time at university.
