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As Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos obliterated the already-imperfect Title IX, the civil rights law created to protect students in schools and higher education from sex-based discrimination. Title IX was initially meant to protect female student-athletes, and it had became an important tool for student survivors of sexual violence.

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. 

“I wondered what can I do to harness the fact that people are willing to talk, they’re willing to do something, and they’re willing to be brave and share their story,” said Aspinwall, who majors in international affairs at the University of Georgia. “How can we take that energy and propel it forward?”

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.

We brought our girls to the Capitol to show them the promise of America, and instead gave them a briefing on its reality.

Dads, we are failing our children.

As men and fathers, we participate in institutions every day that perpetuate a culture of rape. And once a sexual assault occurs, we are often — however unintentionally — a part of the machine that shames survivors, forces them into silence, and isolates them from their communities.

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.