California Changes College Life With New Sexual Assault Law

Governor Jerry Brown has just passed an important bill into law that changes California for the better. This law improves the definition of sexual assault and rape to protect the victims more clearly and thoroughly. It will focus on ensuring that colleges are fully protecting their students and no longer hiding sexual assault cases.

The number of rapes and sexual assaults that occur on campuses alone is high, with one in five women and one in 16 men reporting sexual assaults during college. This is without considering the fact that an estimated 90 percent of victims fail to report sexual assault even while it occurs on college campuses. These numbers are ridiculously high and need to change.

The way we change these numbers could be addressed in a number of ways, from properly educating our children to know what consent means and how to respect the opposite gender to creating safer environments and reducing the bystander effect at work. This could mean reducing the way we constantly sexually objectify women and men in media and how we reinforce rape myths. But the first clear step California is making towards this is the “yes means yes” sexual assault law.

This sexual assault law defines consent as “an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” by all parties involved to engage in sexual activity. This ensures that the absence of “no” doesn’t qualify as consent. Currently, this will apply to all colleges and universities accepting financial aid from the state of California.

The new law was partially triggered by the rise of sexual assaults on college campuses. These reports have led to the investigations of 106 colleges by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. These investigations are mainly due to the concerns of possible violations of Title IX. Title IX is supposed to ensure that schools take immediate action to ensure a victim’s continued education and have an established procedure for dealing with sexual assault cases.

With this new and progressive law in place in California, hopefully students can begin to feel safer on campus and sexual assault cases can begin to go down. This new “yes means yes” concept needs to begin to spread across the nation along with different methods to continue a change and decrease the amount of sexual assault both on and off campuses.

Featured image by geralt, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Lauren is a senior in high school and interested in pursuing a career in clinical psychology and possibly politics. She enjoys reading, martial arts and spending time with friends and family.