Video Transcript:

Voiceover:

Thank you for watching Paper to Practice: Evidence-based Advocacy Made Simple. In this video, we will discuss an education abroad program conducted in Galway, Ireland. This program made its inaugural journey in July of 2025 and allowed Michigan State University students to work closely with active consent, an international sexual violence and healthy relationships organization. This three-week course, under the supervision of Dr. Sarah Prior and Dr. Megan Maas gave students the ability to turn research into action by taking part in outreach programs and prevention education programs with the University of Galway and other Irish community organizations. In July of 2025, MSU students, along with Dr. Prior and Dr. Maas, took part in the sexuality, culture, and consent study abroad program in Galway, Ireland. This program focused on consent and sexual health education as forms of violence prevention. Students learned a variety of skills, including disclosure training and trauma-informed response training.

This three-week course allowed students to experience the city of Galway and some of its iconic sites while working closely with active consent to learn more on the topics of sexuality, culture, and consent. Through lectures, theater, and trainings, MSU students became active champions under the guidance of the international organization, Active Consent.

Active Consent is a sexual consent education and research program based at the University of Galway. This program was created in 2013 and has since grown into a national program that aims to educate young people about consent and healthy relationships. They educate through a wide variety of services, including workshops and e-modules that explore the variations of consent to educate teachers, students, and community workers, theater productions that teach students about consent and the kinds of sex you might have at college. Podcasts like GreenLight that aim to build consent culture in Ireland, and social media campaigns such as the Consent is for everyone and the #StartHere campaigns that inform and empower students and staff on how to disclose sexual violence. Active Consent is widespread within Ireland’s Institutes of Higher Education and is continuing to expand internationally with the message that consent is for everyone.

Dr. Sarah Prior:

While we were at the University of Galway working with active consent, our students were lucky enough to learn how they do it at the University of Galway and how they do it with active consent, which is different because the bureaucratic apparatuses are different there, the ways in which the public is talking about consent and sexuality is different there. The university has different expectations. So Irish campus sexual culture is different than US sexual culture in some ways, but also very similar.

Dr. Megan Maas:

To me, the main takeaway from working with Active Consent and our colleagues at the University of Galway is that we have to make our sexual violence prevention programming, our sex education, our work with students more engaging, more entertaining, more fun. I think we can do a lot more work and do that work more efficiently. One of the main takeaways that I feel like I really want to incorporate more in the work that we do here is the way that they do peer health education. But there is an emphasis on really taking ownership of how you contribute to the institution that you’re involved in. So in this case, it would be universities and being able to be a change maker at multiple different levels of your institution, that there are so many other ways you can change the sexual culture, a campus climate in ways that are going to help either prevent sexual violence or help those who are survivors.

So there are many things that we can all be doing that are going to make big changes.

Dr. Sarah Prior:

So one thing we’ve worked with Active Consent on is thinking about how do we take this fantastic program that’s very successful in Ireland and bring it to the United States. And so thinking about the great diversity that we have and the size and the scope, and one thing that we would need to change is really focusing on how does campus sexual culture look different in the two different countries and on different university campuses. And so a lot of the work that we did with Active Consent was thinking about how do we change some of the language, right? Some of the slang that they use there doesn’t really make sense to the slang that we use here. Or thinking about how do we scope this bigger? How do we make this bigger to think about a bigger campus than if we were to talk about it in the lens of Greek life, or if we were to talk about it in the sense of alcohol culture or things like that.

And so really trying to get at what’s happening on US college campuses and how do we implement some of these really key points that are really successful into our campuses.

Voiceover:

The University of Galway and their partnership with active consent is an example of the implementation of institutional courage within IHEs. The information and research that they gather and spread shows that in order to truly elicit a positive change in campus sexual culture, there needs to be a shift in student and IHE mindsets. However, like on any campus, the evolution of campus sexual culture is a process and even the smallest change is encouraged. Next, let’s discuss what exactly Irish campus sexual culture is and how it differentiates from our own campus sexual culture here in the US.

Active consents research shows that in Ireland, 21.8% of males, 47.2% of females, and 44.8% of non-binary students reported unwanted sexual touching, penetration, or attempted penetration in their time at a university. Out of these, 49% of males, 35% of females, and 25% of non-binary students said that they did not report the misconduct, with the most common reasons being that the students did not believe or know that what happened to them was a crime, or they had feelings of shame and embarrassment over the misconduct. It is cases like these that show the importance of the campus sexual culture mindset and how it is viewed by IHEs and their students. The education and environments IHEs provide can have a profound impact on the kind of experience students get in their time at a university, as well as how they view and respond to their own campus sexual culture.

Dr. Sarah Prior:

One thing that lots of students in Ireland are confused by and interested in is the ways in which US campus sexual culture is dominated by discussions of Greek life and the ways in which fraternities and sororities tend to be a big player in how we understand campus sexual culture. That doesn’t exist in Ireland. There are no sororities and fraternities. The ways in which we think about campus sexual culture and its integration with alcohol is very different in Ireland than it is in the US.

Dr. Megan Maas:

We see pretty similar rates of problematic drinking and binge drinking, and then of course the sexual violence that goes along with that. They’re incredibly intertwined. And so that is definitely a similarity there, although we tend to have more extreme binge drinking in the United States, but Ireland faces those issues as well. The media landscape is interesting because American media is really global media. So our TV shows, movies, our pornography is really globally reached. In the US, in particular, there seems to be a campus sex scandal or sports scandal or some type of coverup of bad behavior is in the news all the time. And this really makes it difficult for survivors of sexual violence to feel safe in seeking help because it sends the message that higher ups and people in charge may not be trustworthy. And so it seems like we are very much in institutional repair still in the US where … And that’s obviously going to vary from institution to institution, but there is a lot of repair that needs to be done.

One of the things I’ve observed is that Irish institutions of higher education are really insular in that they’re focused on education and that’s what they do. Our universities are really heavily focused on athletics and it’s a huge part of what we do and it is amazing what we do, but there unfortunately are higher instances of sexual violence on game days than there are on non-game days. That creates a lot of competing interests and a lot of different needs to fulfill and boxes to check for leadership in order for them to respond in ways that are going to be supportive of survivors, but then also in ways that are going to support the other endeavors that we have in the image that needs to go along with that. So it seems like there are so many competing, either financial interests or other interests with American universities that are probably impeding the process of really being an enacting institutional bravery in ways that Irish institutions of higher education really don’t need to consider because they don’t have that kind of stake in athletics, for example, and financial gain for institutions both within the universities and outside of the universities.

It’s a lot more complicated for universities in the US to really focus on the needs of the students when so much of what brings in revenue is about sports and entertainment.

Dr. Sarah Prior:

So one of the things that’s interesting about learning from our colleagues in Ireland is learning that sexual health conversations are very normalized. They’re integrated into lots of different aspects of young people’s lives. And so it’s much more likely to see media representation that focuses on a more sex positive or at least a way in which we’re framing conversations about sexuality and representations about sexuality that are more inclusive and that are recognizing the gray areas and recognizing how young people are navigating these conversations. Because these conversations are happening, we don’t tend to see the kinds of big, mediated, publicized scandals that we do in the United States. Not to say that institutional betrayal doesn’t happen, it just does not seem to be happening on the scale that is happening in the United States. And so we’re not seeing campuses have to grapple with institutional betrayal about sexual violence in the same way that we’re seeing it in the United States.

Voiceover:

No matter the culture or location, the presence of institutional bravery within IHEs is essential to establish a more positive campus sexual culture. Creating that positive shift in campus culture and implementing institutional bravery to establish a more educated and safe environment is possible within IHEs. Universities can learn from their successful counterparts and adapt strategies that will make their campuses a safer and more informed space for their survivors and students.

Dr. Sarah Prior:

I definitely think that it is possible for institutions to shift from a framework of institutional betrayal to a more courageous institutional bravery. I think that we have lots of different examples of how we need to go about doing that by collecting data and being transparent about it, by engaging with people who are impacted by this and actually seeking their input so that we can move forward, and by truly putting in the resources that will allow us to move towards a framework of institutional courage, because that’s really what’s going to help all of us on campus.

Dr. Megan Maas:

Instituting what has already been recommended for years is great in terms of survivor support services, comprehensive prevention education, having different Title IX reporting procedures. But one of the ways that we can really change is by elongating and deepening our education around sexuality and gender. So having a context where students are together for a whole semester and they’re learning about sexual violence in the same context that they’re learning about sexual pleasure and anatomy and puberty and menopause and relationships and pregnancy and birthing really helps to integrate the knowledge of sexual violence prevention and response in a more humanistic way of understanding that all of these types of human issues require empathy and intention and bravery. So Ireland has changed a lot in the last 10 years, 15 years. There has been a lot of focus on women’s health in general. For instance, there is a major focus on menopause care in Ireland right now in response to high suicide rates among women in the menopause transition.

We have similar rates in the US, but we’re not really responding to those issues as public health issues in ways that they are in Ireland. In Ireland, they have very similar culture in terms of religion, but what they are able to do in a way that we seem to have trouble with in the US is really separating some of the religious views from what services should be available. So for instance, they are able to practice their faith and not have it necessarily bleed into the politics as much as we try to have separation of church and state in the US. It’s difficult, particularly now as we’re rolling back on reproductive rights and reducing reproductive justice and access to abortion, for example. And so I think if we learn from our colleagues in Ireland, we can maybe make some higher level changes that can make institutional bravery in college campuses, for example, more likely to happen if some of those bigger picture perspectives shift.

It was really fun to see how much our students loved the Active Consent Program. And these are students who are SARV educators, peer health educators. They’ve been through our sexual violence prevention programming here at MSU, and they loved how forward thinking. The information and the language was in terms of talking about sexual experiences.

Dr. Sarah Prior:

Some of the really fantastic pieces of active consent are the ways in which they are very youth focused, the way they talk to youth, they engage in youth, they make youth a piece of what they’re doing, which is really powerful. They have great slogans, right? Consent is OMFG: ongoing, mutual and freely given. It’s catchy, it catches people’s attention, but it also is really important. They also do a really good job of having very inclusive, particularly queer representations in all of the media that they produce, the theater piece they produce, and all of the literature, which provides all of us with a much better understanding of how we can understand consent and sexual culture.

Dr. Megan Maas:

One of our students described it as our programming here feels a lot more like abstinence only sex education and their programming feels a lot more like comprehensive sex education. So that I think speaks volumes in that if we really want to engage the kinds of students we need to engage to make real institutional change, we have to engage people who are really resistant to traditional ideas of sexual violence prevention. And if we want to engage them, we can really benefit from having more entertainment, pleasure focused programming that is going to capture their interests while we hopefully change their hearts and help them develop skills and courage so that they can go out and use their influence for positive change on campus.

Voiceover:

In this video, we learned that while campus sexual culture can differ all across the world, creating a safe space where survivors and young people are believed and educated is incredibly important and possible within IHEs. We also learned about the programs and strategies we can apply on our own campuses to establish institutional bravery. Programs that do not disregard and betray their students and survivors, but instead bring around a positive cultural shift through education and support are needed to ensure a safe campus for everyone.