Sexual Misconduct Training Is Often Worse Than Useless
The data is very clear on this!
I am an eternal optimist.
I believe that if you mostly just let people do what they want, most of them will most of the time act in mostly good ways to each other.
I am also an eternal pessimist.
I believe that there are some people with malice in their hearts — Lincoln called them the “lawless in spirit” — who will unhesitatingly do very nasty things to other people if given the opportunity.
I think that, excepting certain common moral blindspots, people tend not to be hopelessly confused about what is right, and what is wrong.
In particular, I think it’s unlikely that very many students entering college are unsure of whether it’s good or bad to rape, assault, abuse, and harass their classmates. My guess is that they’ve got a pretty good handle on all this, and each is either one of the mostly good people who mostly won’t do these things, or one of the lawless in spirit who, given the opportunity, without expectation of severe punishment, will do the things even with the understanding that they’re bad things to do.
So you can imagine that when I walked into a mandatory 90-minute sexual misconduct training with a dozen other freshmen earlier this year, I was already more than a little skeptical of its value. And when I heard from my first-year counselor, a senior in the college, that he’d been made to attend seven of these trainings, each identical to the last, throughout his time at Yale, my skepticism boiled into a deep, rageful cynicism.
But! I thought. Best to keep an open mind! Maybe I’ll learn something I didn’t know — maybe I’ll realize that I’ve in fact been committing all sorts of evil and terrible sexual sins in ignorance.
So I put on a smile, cheerfully shared my pronouns with the group (he/him), and settled in.
Reader, I’m pleased to report — no such secret sinning was revealed to me. I did have a nicer time in the training than expected — my group happened to be full of some very talented comedic skit actors, and so our harassment-roleplaying took a rather entertaining turn1 — but left it only more cynically outraged at all the wasted time, money, and effort.
I mention all this to make it utterly clear that I have what might charitably be called, “strong priors,” about the efficacy of sexual misconduct training.2
But after a half-dozen arguments over the last month where my repeatedly insisting that “no, these things are just so annoying” failed to convince any interlocutors, I finally did a bit of research, and found a journal article from 2022 about the “Effects of Mandatory Sexual Misconduct Training on University Campuses.”
Survey responses were gathered from more than a thousand students at a “diverse public university in the western United States” on their beliefs about sexual misconduct and their intentions to report abuse before and after a training session. The researchers also conducted interviews with students and staff.3
The results were broadly underwhelming.
Of course, there were some successes.
Somewhat contrary to my expectation, misconduct training had a statistically significant effect on the proportion of men who classified sex with a woman too drunk to speak as rape. The study found a 4 percentage-point increase, from 96% to 100%.4
This is good! Though, y’know, 96% is not at all bad, and the idea could probably be successfully got across with a sentence, rather than a 90-minute training — but it’s good nonetheless!
There was a more dramatic increase in the proportion of students — both male and female — who thought that being shown a nude picture of some third party by a friend constituted misconduct. Good!
And we see a similarly dramatic increase in the number of students who, after training, classified the scenario, “a student says you look good in your new jeans,” as misconduct.
Now, I have to say — I’m probably among the 80% of respondents who, even post-training, figured that compliments are an acceptable and normal mode of human interaction. And so I think a training which teaches students that they aren’t, is not a particularly good training!
Of course, it gets worse.5
The study found, surprisingly, that after the sexual misconduct training, women said they were much less likely to report instances of sexual assault!
The authors suggest that it’s got something to do with another bizarre result: women were also (barely non-significantly) more likely to fear retaliation after the training!
The authors are responsibly non-speculative about all this, but I think the causal pathway here is pretty clear: often, these kinds of trainings spend a lot of time talking about how scary the world is for women. In order to justify their existence, they make a lot of hay out of ideas like “rape culture” and suggest that university environments are very hostile to victims of sexual assault.6
It’s not really all that surprising when fear-mongering successfully mongers fear! This article doesn’t, but I bet if you asked women a question along the lines of, “How likely do you think you are to be assaulted in your time here, on a scale of 1-5?” before and after the training, you’d see a similarly “surprising” increase in the average response.
The fear-mongering also tends to monger resentment. Some men interviewed by the researchers reported feeling “unfairly targeted,” and 63% expressed negative views about the training. 39% of women did too — one told researchers that the experience felt “isolating.” In her interview, she said that
it made everyone feel, like the genders, feel polarized. So when I walked in there, I was having a comfortable conversation with my neighbor who was a man and by the end it was like we were trying to distance our seats as much as we could from each other.
Other analyses of sexual misconduct trainings are a bit less bleak, though few have particularly nice things to say about them.
A 2014 systematic review of interventions found mostly positive effects on participants’ knowledge and awareness — but overwhelmingly null effects on violent behavior and rape proclivity. (A result very much in line with my optimo-pessimistic theory, do note.)7
And a 2019 article about corporate sexual harassment programs found that they “made things worse for certain groups of women in certain workplaces, and better for other groups of women in other workplaces” — or, in a word, it found bupkis.
Colleges and universities, and even some workplaces, like to talk a big game about community and togetherness. They brag about spending inordinate amounts of money and energy on fostering cultures of respect and inclusion.
And then, in practice, all the fostering comes to nought. Students and administrators waste their time and their sanity on these mandatory trainings — sometimes seven of the mandatory trainings — only to find that they’ve successfully intimidated women out of reporting their abusers, and driven a wedge between male and female students.
I have no doubt that some version of sexual harassment training would be beneficial to a campus community — but I suspect that version could be fit very comfortably into a short email.
One of the student-workers running the training mentioned after the fact that we had been “the most unserious group” they’d ever been assigned.
That is: I’m biased as all get out.
A quick note on demographics: around 45% of the sample was made up of first-generation college students. I would expect this population to be generally less-educated (indoctrinated) than the average incoming Yale student (21% first-generation) about what constitutes sexual misconduct, especially if the definitions they’re being tested against were written by a bunch of college graduates somewhere. (They were.)
Also, the sample is about 45% Hispanic. America tends to be pretty good at assimilating people, but this population likely includes a large number of first- and second-generation immigrants, who might have more traditional, machismo-based views of sex and sexual harassment. Things to keep in mind as we go!
Always good to keep in mind that lizardman’s constant is 4%. In this context, we might say that the after-survey reporting 100% belief is a result of goofball lizardmen being convinced to take this kind of rape more seriously, which would arguably still be a good effect in its own right.
I’m skipping over a part of the study which discusses the misconduct training’s effect on “rape myths.” Most of these, I think, are not so much “myths” as “confusingly-worded statements that progressives insist are categorically false” — some are indeed probably mostly false, some probably mostly aren’t, and I don’t really have the energy to go into which I think are myth-y enough, and which are being misclassified. But here’s the chart if you’re interested:
I’m again skipping over a really interesting finding from this paper. They polled students on their attitudes toward both “hostile” and “benevolent” sexism, before and after the training, and found that men stayed exactly as sexist as they were before — but women became significantly less prejudiced, both for and against themselves!
The theory here predicting that when we say participants gain “knowledge,” we’re referring less to the learning of facts like “raping is bad,” and more to them learning how to guess the sexual-misconduct-training-teacher’s password.
Lots of interesting graphs. Ultimately, the problem comes from the following scenario most of the time: a bad thing happens. An institution “must do something” to solve it/prevent future instances. It has no levers which will actually achieve that goal. It does something else instead, in a minimally-costly way while still having “done something”. Eventually the cruft builds up to the point where it actually causes its own problem, but the institution’s actions were designed to be public-facing, so undoing them is seen as reneging on doing something.
Incidentally, I’ve found the phrase “I prefer to have my pronouns inferred from my gender presentation” to be effective at opting out of the pronoun circle at meetings/events while not causing a stink.
Maybe a 20-min training, but no one reads emails.