view . fall 2011
7
Left: Dr. Charlene Senn is involved with a $1.3-million project designed to help women discourage unwanted advances.
Charlene Senn is paving the way for
Canadian university campuses to
be among the safest in the world for
young women.
A psychology professor, Dr. Senn
leads a team of researchers testing the
effectiveness of a new sexual assault
resistance training program designed
to help women fend off unwanted
advances by combining the best
methods for preventing attacks with a
greater awareness of their own sexual
preferences, needs and desires.
“If women have a clearer
understanding of their own sexuality,
as well as some basic methods of self
defense, they’ll be better at resisting unwanted sexual contact from
men they know,” she said.
The program will be implemented and studied over the next
five years at the University of Calgary, the University of Guelph
and the University of Windsor, thanks to a $1.3 million grant
from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. It contains four
three-hour sessions that provide concrete methods for women to
assess risks, recognize dangers and overcome emotional obstacles
to using physical self-defense to prevent attacks by men they
know. The enhanced portion includes a three-hour session called
Sexuality and Relationships, which helps women define their own
sexual boundaries, assert their desires effectively and improve their
understanding of what a healthy sexual relationship means to them.
“A woman leaving one of these sessions should believe she
has the right to expect that her sexual needs will be taken into
account,” Senn said. The theory behind the program came out of
her understanding of the way most sexual assaults occur.
“It made sense to me that because most sexual assaults are
committed by acquaintances, and they don’t involve a knife or a gun
– a lot of them are by verbal threats and coercion – then the more
knowledge a woman has about her own
wants, the more firm her sense of self
would be, which would provide her with
a firmer sense of resistance,” she said.
According to statistics, more than
one in six women will be sexually
assaulted in their lifetimes, most by
men they know, and the risk is greatest
between the ages of 14 and 24, making
this a critical time for intervention,
she said.
Recent research suggests many
young women delay their resistance
to unwanted sexual advances because
they’re not sure they’re reading the
situation correctly, she says. They don’t
want to hurt the man’s feelings, or they’re unsure whether they have
the right to say ‘no’ to some sexual activity and say ‘yes’ to others.
Between 2005 and 2008, more than 200 female students at
UWindsor received a variety of sexual assault resistance training.
Between 2006 and 2007, Senn’s research team compared the
effectiveness of the basic sexual assault resistance training program
with the enhanced program. The study revealed that combined,
both programs cut the number of attempted and completed rapes in
half, according to results published last year in the academic journal
Psychology of Women’s Quarterly.
This fall, the research team will begin to enroll participants at
all three universities, with a goal of including more than 1,700. The
objective is to establish whether the training can reduce the annual
incidence of sexual assault by at least 30 per cent.
“I’m confident that we’ve got the program in good shape,”
she said. “We’ve already helped a lot of women here at the
University of Windsor. At the end of the five year study, we
hope to be able to say this works and that it should be offered
to every Canadian campus.”
n
v
STOPPING
SEXUAL ASSAULT
Knowledge as power
BY STEPHEN FIELDS
“IF WOMEN HAVE A CLEARER
UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR OWN
SEXUALITY, AS WELL AS SOME
BASIC METHODS OF SELF
DEFENSE, THEY’LL BE BETTER AT
RESISTING UNWANTED SEXUAL
CONTACT FROM MEN THEY
KNOW.”
DR. CHARLENE SENN
