By Kyle Dennan

Staff Reporter

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According to UAPD’s most recent Annual Campus Safety report, there were 16 forcible sexual offenses reported on campus between 2008 and 2011. Three students in The University of Alabama’s New College hope to increase awareness of what constitutes sexual consent and encourage students to feel at home in their own bodies.

“There were two things that we wanted to do with this project,” Amelia Brock, a senior in New College, said. “We wanted to start a conversation about consent on The University of Alabama campus. Our two maxims were that all bodies are beautiful, and all sexually active [people] should be engaged in conversation about consent.”

The panel is Thursday at 6 p.m. in the Ferguson Center, Room 360 and will feature undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty members and will focus on issues surrounding sexuality at UA. Brock along with fellow New College seniors Libby Loveless and Ann Hataway facilitated this project as part of their New College Capstone Course.

“We’re going to be talking about what consent is and how to give it, how media skews our view of sex,” Brock said. “[About] how [being in the South] skews our views of sex, how to empower ourselves and how to have these conversations with the people we’re engaging in those activities with.”

Loveless said the conversation around consent does not need to be terribly difficult, and the group will address how to make that conversation easier.

“[We’re] going to talk about how to make the conversation not a scary thing, how to make it a sexy conversation,” Loveless said. “Talk about [how] you can make this a better situation for yourself and other people.”

Loveless also said the University should provide this type of training to students.

“Some of our friends who go to schools in the North have this intense thing, kind of the same as AlcoholEdu, about [sexual assault], and I just can’t believe we don’t have that here,” Loveless said.

Brock said she agrees the University is failing to provide this type of training to students.

“On other campuses, they do an AlcoholEdu, but they also do a Sexual Assault Edu, basically,” Brock said. “They have to do a whole separate program around learning about consent, how to give it, and when consent hasn’t been given, how to intervene in situations where someone might be taken advantage of, and how to have these conversations. That’s something that’s sorely lacking on our campus.”

Brock said she was unsure of the cause for this deficiency.

“I don’t know if that’s because where our campus is or if it’s because the administration hasn’t pinpointed this as as big of an issue as it is,” she said.

The group also created the “All Bodies are Beautiful Calendar,” which pictures UA students who agreed to be photographed for this project.

“To engage the issue of body image, we created the All Bodies are Beautiful Calendar,” Brock said. “We took pictures of UA students [who] were volunteers that agreed to strip down to a state where consent would be a necessary topic – if you’re to this stage with another person, it’s time to have that conversation about consent before you proceed.”

Brock said it is also important to reflect a realistic body image.

“We wanted to reflect body types that weren’t necessarily in mainstream media,” Brock said. “We thought it was really powerful just being able to see real bodies that were just stripped down, not Photoshopped, not edited – just bodies.”

The calendar is on sale for a suggested donation of $10. Proceeds will benefit Turning Point, an agency serving victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.

The photographs will be on exhibit Wednesday in the New College Gallery in Lloyd Hall from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Brock said the calendar and the promotion of a positive body image is a large part of empowering people to demand consent for sexual activity.

“Another connection I’ve been seeing a lot, and I don’t know that we even conceptualized this in the beginning, but one of our participants brought it up, when you start targeting issues of body images, you empower people to be at home in their body, to have a voice and be at home in their body,” she said. “Your body is your own, and just because it doesn’t look like someone else’s doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve respect or pleasure or anything else that the bodies you see in magazines deserve.”

She also said the point of emphasizing consent in this way is not simply to put a stop to unwanted sexual behaviors or advances, but to allow both parties to engage with each other in a way with which they are comfortable.

“A lot of people think that this is a ‘no, no, no’ situation; that consent is all about no, but the purpose of consent to us is to have great experiences,” Brock said. “You can go places with other people that you haven’t been before.”