Education bill includes provision to fund K-12 education on safe relationships
Provisions of U.S. Sen. Timothy M. Kaine’s Teach Safe Relationships Act were signed into law this week as a rider on the Every Student Succeeds Act, making public funds available for elementary and secondary school instruction about sexual assault and safe relationships.
Packaged within the bill that replaces the No Child Left Behind Act, the provisions open Title IV funds for grants that encourage instruction and training on safe relationship behavior among teenagers and young adults. The former Virginia governor’s bill was first introduced in February with Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
“I believe it will help prevent sexual assault, not just on college campuses, but for anybody in the 16 to 24 age range, who are most vulnerable,” Kaine said.
Kaine said he met with University of Virginia students after Rolling Stone published a 9,000-word article about sexual assaults at universities across the country, primarily using UVa as an example of “rape culture” that exists on college campuses.
Although the story was later discredited by authorities and a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism report, Kaine said Wednesday that many of the story’s “statistics were correct.”
Earlier this year, Kaine said the Justice Department estimated 290,000 Americans each year are victims of rape or sexual assault. Advocates suggest the number of victimizations is higher because many incidents go unreported.
According to the FBI, 116,645 rapes were reported to police in 2014. The Bureau of Justice Statistics in August said the rate of intimate partner violence — which includes crimes committed by current or former spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends — was 2.4 per 1,000 people in 2014.
Last December, Kaine met with about 30 members of One Less, an all-female UVa student group dedicated to sexual assault prevention, shortly after Rolling Stone published its story. Kaine said the meeting was private and excluded media and university administrators and faculty.
“These students didn't all agree with each other about various points, but the goal was to get a sense from them about what we in Congress could do that would be helpful and what were things we might want to do that would make us feel good but wouldn't be helpful,” Kaine said.
“Many great ideas came out of that discussion, but there was one in particular that grabbed my attention,” he said, alluding to what became the basis for the bill.
Even though brief announcements regarding public safety — including sexual assault and harassment — are given to first-year students during orientation, advocates who met with Kaine last year said those lessons often get buried in the excitement and overwhelming amount of information that’s disseminated at the start of the academic year to newly arrived students.
This past semester, all UVa students were required to complete two new online training modules about sexual assault and alcohol abuse. According to UVa, the two-part “Not on Our Grounds: Sexual Assault Education Module” fulfills federal requirements for colleges and universities. The module includes “key definitions, statistics and suggested strategies for bystander intervention.”
“It is important to provide education early on because these are issues that can affect students before they even enter college,” said Clare Driggs, a member of One Less.
“Hearing the message before college will help students be prepared when they enter the new environment and might give them an opportunity to intervene or offer support to survivors even before college,” Driggs said. “We are excited to see the issue being addressed on a national level, and we feel honored to have gotten the opportunity to talk to Sen. Kaine about it.”
Driggs said that both One Less and One in Four, an all-male sexual assault prevention student organization, have been meeting with first-year students in their dorms to create a “comfortable peer-to-peer environment to foster discussion on the difficult topics and establish norms” about appropriate relationship behavior.
Earlier this year, the Teach Safe Relationships Act received endorsements from a number of advocacy groups, including the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance.
The Sexual Assault Resource Agency, a Charlottesville-based education and advocacy group that is accredited by the alliance, applauded the passage of the provisions from Kaine’s bill.
“A lot of work is being done on college campuses to lessen the amount of sexual violence. Unfortunately, by that time in a young adult’s life, their values and beliefs related to sexual violence may already be solidified,” said Rebecca Weybright, executive director for SARA.
Serving Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Nelson, Louisa, Fluvanna and Greene, SARA says it reaches approximately 550 survivors and 1,100 students each year through its advocacy programs and support services.
“Expanding this work to students in K-12 provides the opportunity to talk with children — with age-appropriate topics and language — about protective factors, consent, identifying trusted people, the impact of gender norms and more,” Weybright said. “This education gives us a chance to send young people forward with better skills for identifying inappropriate behavior and knowing what to do when they see this.”
Other provisions that Kaine authored in the Every Student Succeeds Act are expected to strengthen career and technical education and preschool programs in schools nationwide.
According to Kaine’s press office, the bill adds career and technical education as a core academic subject and allows states to apply for a grant to develop such education with academic studies and support professional development for teachers of such programs.
The bill also authorizes the Preschool Development Grant, which states can use to bolster early childhood programs. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will administer the program in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education.
