Blog

McQuaid Jesuit, a Catholic, Jesuit school for boys in Rochester, NY engaged I Have The Right To to interact with students, parents, and educators.  Our team spent three days on campus working with school leadership, making a presentation to more than 500 high school students, facilitating a separate talk with parents, and visiting with senior boys in their classrooms. 

I Have The Right To interviewed Harrison James who is the co-founder of the Independent School End Sexual Violence Coalition (ISESVC). Harrison is a current junior at a boarding school in New England. For his contributions to the end sexual violence movement, Harrison has been honored as a Gold Medalist by the New Jersey State Governor’s Jefferson Awards and a Daily Point of Light Award by Points of Light. ISESVC is a youth-led coalition of students dedicated to anti-sexual violence mobilization across independent school campuses. Their mission is to operate a network advancing social practices and structural change in an effort to prevent sexual violence and mitigate its effects. 

One of the questions we are asked most often by parents is how to prevent sexual assault from happening to their child. Unfortunately, the only person who can prevent sexual assault is a perpetrator, but there are steps every parent can take now to open channels of communication with their child (no matter the age) about healthy relationships, sex, and consent. 

Talking about the risk of sexual assault with your child often means first talking about the opposite: healthy relationships. No matter the age of your child, be sure to regularly express to them that you want them to have healthy, safe relationships. This post talks more about how to do this.

Unfortunately, conversations with your children cannot end at healthy, safe relationships. Parents need to teach children how to identify when someone in their community is not acting appropriately and what they can do about it. Read on for how.

By Michael Hill and Alex Prout

To my children, you have seen all too well that the institutions that are meant to protect you often fail and that justice is often unfairly on the side of whoever has the most to lose. I vow to do my part to change this. Here is my Father’s Day promise to you. 

Vice Chair and Co-Founder of I Have The Right To Alex Prout engaged CEO Martin Waters of Victoria’s Secret and hundreds of employees in a conversation about gender equity and allyship from men and boys during a company Town Hall.  This address is part of the $90 million spend on strengthening the process to report and investigate sexual harassment cases and improve diversity and inclusion governance.

Receiving your child’s disclosure of sexual assault is likely one of the most tragic and gut-wrenching moments of your life. It is the conversation that no parent wants, and yet one that every parent must be prepared for. Below, we lay out what to keep in mind when having this conversation and what to say each step of the way. We will refer to these moving forward as the A.B.L.L.E.^TM phrases.

You reported your sexual assault, underwent a sexual assault forensic examination, and you have just learned that the perpetrator is about to be criminally charged. Here is what to expect once charges are filed.

Reporting your assault to law enforcement is a difficult decision.

Here are five tips to keep in mind before, during, and after a police interview.

Many survivors of sexual assault are confused by how they acted during the assault itself. 

The truth is that there is no correct response to being sexually assaulted. It is also helpful to know the common responses that our bodies and brains have to trauma. When the human brain recognizes a threat, the autonomic nervous system reacts, releasing hormones that trigger physical changes to our bodies to protect us. These reactions are usually characterized in four ways – fight, flight, freeze, and fawn: