In the weeks since Jane Doe alleged she was gang-raped at a Cornell University fraternity party in 2024, the plague of campus sexual assault has once again become the topic of a heated national debate.

Those discussions inevitably land on familiar solutions. Experts, pundits, and parents argue for stricter criminal laws and a more transparent and punitive Title IX campus adjudicatory process. But these solutions have been tried in the past and not proven effective: Campus climate surveys show persistently high rates of assault, and Cornell’s own data show that reported incidents rose from 23 percent to 35 percent between 2023 and 2025.

It’s increasingly clear that to make meaningful progress requires a focus on prevention — not just punishment. Anyone horrified by the Cornell fraternity text thread published by the New York Times would agree that enforcement is only part of the story, and a fuller solution would begin with raising young people who don’t think it is remotely okay to treat each other’s bodies and emotions this way. There is a group of scholars and advocates across the country who are working on one surprisingly effective policy that might get us closer to that goal: comprehensive sex education.

Yes, you read that right: sex ed. But not sex ed as it’s currently taught in most American public schools — a haphazard set of state programs, often deeply political, which often stress abstinence over how to be in healthy sexual relationships with other people. This other version, known as comprehensive sex ed and currently required in just seven states, takes a holistic approach with focus on how to refuse unwanted sexual advances, establish clear boundaries, and have intimate relationships based on open communication and mutual desire, not force, coercion, or extreme intoxication. 

An important step in the prevention of sexual assault is making comprehensive sex ed more common in American schools, and, in the states that do, making that education start earlier and comply with the National Sex Education Standards. Evidence suggests that this kind of instruction can reduce sexual violence. 

Giving young people information about contraception and how to avoid STIs is an essential part of sex ed, but it isn’t enough. Far too many of our children head off to college without the interpersonal skills required to have healthy relationships involving physical intimacy, which are critical to their psychological development into caring and fulfilled adults. 

The consequences can be devastating, and I see them firsthand. I am a law professor who runs a clinical program at the University of San Francisco that trains second- and third-year law students by having them litigate real cases under close supervision. Since 2018, we have been representing Title IX clients — the accusers and those they accuse — at colleges and universities all over the United States. In every case, every time, the end result is the same: pain, heartbreak, and ruined lives. The legal “resolution” is almost beside the point. 

The allegations in the Cornell case are at the extreme end of the spectrum. In nearly all of the cases we handle, there is no malicious intent or casual cruelty. Instead, there are two young people who are inexperienced, hesitant to convey their real feelings, and bad at reading nonverbal cues. They drink excessively and use drugs to overcome their awkwardness and insecurity, which only makes the poor communication worse. My colleague and I joke bleakly that we are in the wrong business. What we really need to be doing is going to secondary schools and preaching the value of comprehensive sex ed to tweens and teens to stop these assaults from happening in the first place.

Recently, I interviewed Jennifer Hirsch, who is a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the co-author with Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan of the book Sexual Citizens, which synthesizes the findings of a five-year study of campus sexual assault that surveyed 2,000 students attending Columbia and Barnard. 

Sex education needs to start in kindergarten, she said, by teaching children to respect the bodies of their classmates by keeping their hands to themselves and refraining from playground activities like chasing down a classmate trying to kiss them. In higher grades, she explained, the instruction should change to become more age-appropriate, gradually adding topics relating to sexual health for tweens and teens “to teach the things you need to know, to grow into being a person who can have sex without hurting other people or yourself.” Currently, only Washington and Oregon start this early. (A few other states begin in first grade.)

While it is true that many colleges and universities have mandatory trainings for students that involve learning about consent, bystander intervention, and how intoxication is a risk factor for sexual assault, it is too little, too late. By then, Hirsch said, “there is a non-trivial possibility that they’ve already experienced sexual violence or perpetrated sexual violence.” She compared it to “starting with calculus when they’ve never done arithmetic.”

The need for such education is even more urgent today when kids snap and text instead of talk face-to-face as they are fed a diet of toxic social media messages and violent pornography that tells them what women want is to be dominated, degraded, and objectified.

Gen Z in particular is in desperate need of a sexual education that is designed to dispel the fear, shame, and ignorance most young people feel around this topic and replace it with candid instruction on how to set boundaries, read cues, and treat intimate partners — whether it is a long-term relationship or a casual hook-up — with a basic modicum of respect and care. 

Study after study has shown that there is widespread bipartisan support for having sex ed incorporated into secondary school instruction that teaches students the skills they need to have safe and healthy sexual relationships. Comprehensive sex education holds promise in combatting sexual assault, although the data is limited. A 2016 survey of more than 1,600 college students led by John Santelli, who is also a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School (and Hirsch’s spouse) found that when high schoolers received comprehensive sex education, it lowered their risk of sexual assault in college. Instruction stressing abstinence or how to avoid unwanted pregnancies and STIs did not. 

This makes intuitive sense. If a young person learns early on how to extricate themselves from a sexual encounter that has turned uncomfortable or scary, they will be more likely to leave before an assault happens. If he or she is taught that other people’s bodies are not theirs for the taking, they will be less likely to violate them and instead ask for clarity whenever there is ambiguity about consent. 

Still most schools shy away from such instruction. “It is better to tell kids that rape is bad than to say nothing,” but to stop there and hope for the best is not effective, Hirsch told me. “Thinking ambitiously about prevention requires that we get some more tools in the toolbox.” 

But comprehensive sex ed, despite its popularity, has for decades been blocked by a minority of loud opposition, often motivated by religious beliefs, in states that consider adopting it. Since 2017, New York state lawmakers have advocated for a law mandating comprehensive sex ed for students in grades K-12. Every year, Hirsch told me, it dies in committee. At the federal level, the Trump administration has eliminated most of the federal grant money for sex ed that isn’t abstinence-only even though the research has shown that telling kids to “just say no” to sex has no impact on their behavior.

Suspension, expulsion, even criminal prosecution are not the solutions. They are the inadequate answers on offer by the adults in the room, who are trained only to react once the problem has become too big and ugly to ignore in any particular case before bracing for the next one. Reducing the accused to monsters and the accuser to a pitiable victim reinfects the wound, it does nothing to heal it. Wringing one’s hands and asking why, a generation later nothing has changed, virtually guarantees that nothing ever will. 

If we really want to combat the plague of sexual assault on campus, we need to vaccinate our children in the same way we would against a lethal virus. Comprehensive sex ed is the best place to start. 

Author: Source Author

Source: Vox.