Training for the instructors of Trinity Hall’s mandatory consent workshops will take place on September 1st, and will see 12 students trained to lead the workshops that will begin this year for first-year residents, alongside 12 staff facilitators.
College staff will also support Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) in overseeing the workshops. The Senior Tutor, Aidan Seery, and Trish Murphy, a counsellor from the Student Counselling Service, will sit on the six-person steering committee responsible for organising the workshops.
TCDSU Welfare Officer, Aoibhinn Loughlin, also sits on the committee alongside TCDSU Gender Equality Officer, Rachel Skelly, as well as President of the JCR, Sara Ní Lochlainn. Former TCDSU Welfare Officer Conor Clancy is also a member of the group.
In January, a motion mandating the TCDSU Welfare Officer to help organise consent workshops with the JCR passed almost unanimously at a meeting of TCDSU council.
Applications to be a workshop facilitator are due to be sent out soon to a number of groups within college, including Niteline, peer supporters, the TCDSU Welfare and Gender Equality Committees, the Trinity Hall Welfare Committee and the JCR.
Speaking to The University Times , Loughlin said that the applications would be sent to those people who have already developed “active listening skills”.
They will be looking for students who express “empathy and understanding for other students’ emotions and feelings”, Loughlin said, to ensure “we have the best facilitators taking on this really difficult task really of hosting a workshop for first-year students who have had next to no sexual health training or help in school”.
The training will be split into two sessions, with the first half of the training taken by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, while the latter half will be led by Dr Pádraig MacNeela, from the School of Psychology in the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG).
MacNeela led NUIG’s Smart Consent initiative, which saw consent workshops offered to all students as part of the university’s SHAG Week 2016. The workshops, which took place in February, were gender-specific and were led by a trained group leader.
Loughlin praised the “positive, student-focused” way of educating people pioneered by MacNeela’s consent workshops. “We researched loads of different options over the past year, and that was the best one”, Loughlin said.
Speaking to The University Times Skelly said that the group would be looking for potential instructors who have shown “a passion and interest in the issue”. She said she expected at least 30 applications for the 12 positions, considering that the issue of consent is a “hot topic” at the minute.
Discussing the differing approach the two sessions will take, Skelly said that the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre will provide the “nitty-gritty” on consent, while the session led by MacNeela will be “more focused on the actual context and delivery of the workshops”.
Instructors will also be given the opportunity to run a mock workshop before the real thing begins on the Sunday before Freshers’ Week begins in Trinity. There will be 24 workshops during the week, with around 32 students in each session.
Following the motion passing at TCDSU council, the proposed workshops received national and international attention, with articles in newspapers like The Irish Times and The Guardian covering, and in some cases, criticising the workshops.
A TCDSU survey on sexual consent, the results of which were released in January 2015, saw 25.2 per cent of female students report having had a “non-consensual sexual experience”, with 4.5 per cent of men responding the same. 41.7 per cent of women reported having experienced verbal harassment while studying at Trinity, compared to 7.2 per cent of men.
