Building Ethical Communities

Abstract

When I began to focus my specific attention on the effectiveness of education for the prevention of sexual violence in 1999, I had no idea where it would lead me. One of the pleasures of being an academic researcher is that I have the privilege of stepping back from my practice and having time to reflect. I am acutely aware that many front-line workers do not have this luxury, and I know I didn’t in the decades where this was the sole focus of my work. Many of the approaches I have critiqued in this book are ones that I had been involved in developing and delivering. I was often left with a sense of unease after delivering an awareness program in schools or with professional groups. I now know why. It was, at best, a partial picture of the complexity of relationships; it did not seriously address ways of preventing sexual violence before it occurred. And like my schoolgirl experience of sexuality education, thoughts and feelings about the messiness of sexuality and violence in intimate relationships were submerged. Boys and young men were excluded from these discussions and, in many violence prevention programs, they still are. With the best intentions in the world, I had ended up mainly talking to women about how to avoid sexual assault and pressured sex.