April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) in the United States, and at Pace, this April marked the launch of a new campus sexual assault policy.

The policy, which adopts language and details from the federal Not Alone report as well as the State University of New York (SUNY) procedures, defines consent, confidential and non-confidential resources, and the progression of an on-campus report.

In an attempt to spread awareness of the new policy, several Pace administrators, faculty members, and students have begun integrating sexual assault education into on-campus programming.

On Sun., April 19, CNN documentary The Hunting Ground was screened in Butcher Suite in correspondence with Residential Life, Residence Hall Association (RHA), and the Pace Women’s Justice Center in White Plains.

Following the movie, Assistant Director of Multicultural Affairs and Diversity Rachel Simon held a question and answer session, in which she projected the new consent language and website to those in attendance.

It is conversations such as this, according to Interim Dean for Students Rachel Carpenter, that are crucial in communicating the new policy.

“[I]t challenges us educationally to have the conversation about what consent means,” said Carpenter, who specifically referenced a discussion Simon had at last month’s Take Back the Night event. “She had a very frank conversation with students about sex, about consent, and you can see everyone start to get a little uncomfortable, and she said, ‘that’s exactly my point. We need to reach a point when it’s not uncomfortable to talk about because consent should be sexy.’”

Part of Pace’s SAAM programming has included ‘Consent and Cookies,’ a training session by Simon to promote this notion and explain the new consent language to students.

“[The goal is that] you’re not just finding out about [the policy] when the situation happens,” Assistant Dean for Community Standards and Compliance Debbie Levesque said. “Hopefully, we’ll be successful in generating a lot of conversations from different consent trainings, Step Up bystander training, and things like that.”

Making the policy as widespread as possible is an ongoing goal for Levesque, Carpenter, and Title IX Coordinator and Affirmative Action Officer Lisa Miles.

“[We] looked at how we could market and communicate the new policy because part of what we discovered from students was that…we weren’t doing a great job in terms of communicating the policy out,” said Miles, who admitted that many students did not know what her office’s purpose was.

Miles, whose responsibilities lie within compliance and investigating, attended student government meetings on both campuses last semester to make her position better known and gauge feedback.

“We involved advisory groups on both campuses, and we actually looked at language,” Miles said. “We had students speak to us about what was imperative in our policy—that it had to have respect, and it had to have a foundation of civility, that it needed to be gender-neutral, that we needed to be clear about what we meant when we said incapacitated, so that there was an in-depth conversation about that.”

Although programming is said to continue throughout the year and collaborate with various organizations, the next step, according to Carpenter was peer-to-peer communication.

“Consent is not a checklist mentality; it’s something that we have to keep active throughout the year,” Carpenter said. “The next challenge is elevating it from [administrators and faculty] to peers. It’s one thing for the university to host events, and it’s another thing for students to host events, students to talk about it…it’s peers responding to peers.”

For more information on Pace’s sexual assault policy, visit pace.edu/sexual-asault.