Local schools, nonprofit partner to teach consent, prevent sexual violence

Millions of people in the U.S. experience domestic and sexual violence each year, including children and teens, and this abuse often starts online.

To try to prevent people from becoming victims and perpetrators, Basalt-based nonprofit Response is partnering with local schools to teach students about consent and healthy relationships in the age of smartphones and social media. 

The nonprofit, which primarily works with survivors of abuse and recently opened a new shelter in Basalt, started offering an education program in 2004. When Shannon Meyer became the executive director of Response in 2017, she helped expand the program and integrate it into the nonprofit’s mission. Today, Response now works with K-12 schools in Aspen and Basalt, plus Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. 

“We work with our community to end domestic and sexual abuse, and that encompasses our education program and our community outreach, really getting upstream of abuse and trying to stop it before it starts,” Meyer said. “And, obviously, the most important place to do that work is with our youth.”

In early May, staff members from Response visited several freshman health classes at Aspen High School. 

While ninth graders take a semester-long health and wellness course covering a variety of subjects from drugs to stress management, Response led a two-day workshop on topics such as consent and sexual violence that built on what students had already been learning about sexuality and relationships.

“Can somebody tell me about what consent is?” asked Alex Akins, who is with Response. 

“It’s like asking permission?” a student ventured. 

“Yes, asking permission. We can ask permission in a lot of different spaces, and we’re talking about consent in more of a relationship zone. So, for example, asking permission before engaging in a sexual act while you’re in a relationship,” Akins said. “So, why do you think consent is important?”

“It makes sure that both people feel safe in whatever situation they’re in,” a student answered. 

“And it was their choice — not, like, forced,” another student said. 

After reviewing a framework to help students recognize what it looks like to give one’s full consent and showing an educational video on the topic, Hannah Horn of Response asked the class if they’re familiar with the terms “sexual violence culture” or “rape culture.” 

“It’s kind of normalizing the idea of rape and like watering it down so it doesn’t seem as bad as it truly is,” a student said. 

Next, Horn pulled up a slide with a pyramid diagram demonstrating how cultural influences and systems of oppression feed into sexual violence — with concepts such as sexism, ableism and homophobia listed at the bottom. 

“And so why do you think that these are here at the base of the pyramid, like the foundation?” Horn asked the class.

“When you don’t see the people there as, like, real people, it feels like you have a right to assert yourself over them,” a student answered. 

Age-appropriate emphasis

Although Response and Aspen School District teachers don’t talk about rape culture or victim-blaming with younger students, they do have curriculum that starts in elementary schools and includes conversations about bodily autonomy and respecting boundaries, such as asking before you give someone a hug.

“It’s more learning like ‘This is my personal space’ and what that looks like, or consent in really basic levels of, like, how to practice it within friendships or in everyday life,” Horn said. “And then we slowly build to bullying online, and then when we get to high school, it’s topics like teen dating violence.”

Horn, 33, grew up in the Roaring Fork Valley. She wishes she could’ve had this kind of education in school. 

“I just think back to when I was in high school and how much I needed that, because I had no idea what boundaries were until like my mid- to late-20s, which is terrifying,” Horn said. “And so just being able to give students information that I feel like I could have really used at their age is huge.” 

Aspen High freshman Maya Khan-Farooqi appreciates that basic conversations around consent started early in her schooling. 

“You can’t tell a kid nothing and then expect as soon as they hit ninth grade, now they need to know all of that at once,” she said. 

In the age of smartphones and social media, Response updated its lessons for older students to include topics such as sexting and “sextortion,” which involves blackmailing someone by using, or threatening to use, sexual images of them. 

“Even via Snapchat, you can meet so many new people who you don’t really know, and they can just start asking you for inappropriate things, so it’s important for us to be educated about concepts such as consent and putting up boundaries,” said Suki Manuel, a freshman at Aspen High. 

Manuel and Khan-Farooqi agree that destigmatizing conversations about consent and abuse helps students feel more comfortable speaking up when they feel unsafe, or even reporting instances of assault. 

“Talking to all of my friends, like, we all have a story of a time that a guy was creepy to us, or, like, something scary happened, you know,” Khan-Farooqi said. “And I just wonder how many people aren’t telling someone about it.”

In the most recent Healthy Kids Colorado Survey of more than 400 Aspen High students, 2.7% reported being physically forced to have sex with someone; 10.6% reported having a sexual experience where they were unsure if they gave their full consent; and 15.6% reported having sex while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. 

Although the percentage of female students who reported being forced to have sex (3.3%) was higher than it was for male students (1.4%), Response staff made it clear that people of all genders experience abuse. According to national statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, over half of women and almost 1 in 3 men have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact. 

During the class, students also learned about resources such as Safe2Tell (an anonymous reporting platform for Colorado students who are concerned about their safety or the safety of others) and Take It Down, which is a free service that can help individuals remove sexually explicit images of them shared online. 

“There may be some students who are like, ‘Oh, I’m never going to use Take It Down’ or, ‘I’m never going to report anything to Safe2Tell.’ But if, out of our whole class of, like, 25 students, one of us says, ‘OK, I’m going to remember this site, and if I ever have a problem, I’m going to use it,’ then that is so worth it,” Khan-Farooqi said.

Comprehensive curriculum

Colorado is one of 22 states that, as of the beginning of the 2024-25 school year, do not mandate sex education. But if a school district decides to offer it, the state requires curriculum to meet specific standards including medical accuracy, age appropriateness and cultural sensitivity. 

According to the state health department, this “comprehensive human sexuality education” has had numerous positive impacts in Colorado, including reducing the risk of sexual assault in college and the rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV, delaying the onset of youth sexual activity and lowering reports of bullying amongst LGBTQ+ youths. 

In contrast, research from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health suggests that abstinence-until-marriage programs are less effective when it comes to achieving those same outcomes and, in some cases, stigmatize or exclude many youths and reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. 

Sarah Socorro Hurtado, an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s Morgridge College of Education, researches campus sexual violence. 

Hurtado sees the rise in comprehensive sexual education and the movement away from abstinence-only curriculum as part of a larger trend that has received pushback.

“I do think there was a cultural shift where we were paying a lot more attention to sexual assault, including the #MeToo movement and several high-profile cases of celebrities who were found guilty of assault,” Hurtado said. “But I think at the same time, there’s been a little bit of backswing on the pendulum — you know, if we are making things like access to birth control or abortions more difficult, then a lot of schools and states will return to abstinence-only education.” 

The most common parental concerns that Hurtado sees when it comes to comprehensive sex education are tied to religious and cultural beliefs that manifest as worries about kids learning too much at a young age or the inclusion of LGBTQ+ topics. 

That was the case with some parents who petitioned against the Roaring Fork School District’s new health and sex ed curriculum that it adopted two years ago. 

The Roaring Fork and Aspen school districts allow parents to review their respective curriculum and opt their kids out if they want to.

“It’s all about having open communication lines with the parents, so if a parent is curious about what we cover, it’s easy to share with them the lessons that we’re doing and the state standards we follow,” said Kate Korn, a health and wellness teacher at Aspen High. “And I think once you have those conversations with parents, they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, this makes sense,’ or you have parents who opt out, and that’s OK too.” 

As a researcher, Hurtado hopes more parents will see the benefits of comprehensive sex education, including preventing abuse. 

“Children who experience abuse, it is most likely to be either a family member or a close family friend,” Hurtado said. “And so, as a parent myself, being able to give my children information, to be able to tell me when something’s wrong and to trust their gut, it just means that they are better equipped to not experience this and also not cause this type of harm.”

Although Hurtado believes it’s critical for comprehensive sex ed programs to teach that people with marginalized identities often have a greater risk of experiencing sexual violence, she also thinks it’s important for students to understand that it can happen to anyone. 

“When we limit teaching people what assault can look like, we inherently limit their ability to ask for help or seek out resources if they experience something that doesn’t match, right?” Hurtado said. “So, if we only tell people it happens by boys to girls, right, then for a little boy who is assaulted by another boy or a man, there’s a disconnect from what they’ve been taught assault is, and now they won’t get the help that they need, the resources that they need, you know, to stop it and heal from it.” 

For her part, Meyer hopes to hire more staff and expand Response’s partnership with local schools in the coming years. 

“My dream is to have a person who just specializes in our education program, and really can be working on getting us into more schools and constantly revising and updating our curriculum,” Meyer said. “Our advocates, who are the same folks that work with our clients every day, do the education program, and they’re really good at it, but they have limited time.” 

Back in the Aspen High classroom, the students play a “Jeopardy”-like game to review what they’ve learned with Response over the past two days.

Khan-Farooqi is glad they did a deep dive into topics such as consent and sexual violence to help prepare them with tools to stay safe — and prevent more people from becoming survivors and perpetrators of abuse. 

“We need to protect the people who’ve already had this happen to them, but also, like, stop it from continuing to happen, and make sure that people know that it’s not OK at all,” Khan-Farooqi said.