Why Online Sexual Assault Prevention Training Alone Rarely Works

As the allegation of a brutal rape at Cornell University reignited a nationwide conversation about sexual assault on college campuses, a university on the opposite coast was warning students of similar threats; within one September week, the University of Oregon received five reports of sexual assault on or near campus. Four of those cases involved Oregon students, and “several alleged perpetrators may have taken advantage of the fact that the victims were intoxicated at social events,” according to a Sept. 30 campus crime alert.

In a statement last week, Oregon President Karl Scholz called the reports “deeply troubling” and noted that while the university already has “evidence-based” prevention and education programs, “we need to do more.” Before signing off, he urged students to complete an annual, required sexual assault–prevention module, which they received information about and instructions for on Tuesday.

Oregon debuted the course—which covers consent and healthy relationships, bystander intervention, survivor rights, and campus and community resources—during the 2024–25 academic year. Students are expected to take it every fall, but completion is not enforced, a spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed.

Colleges tackle campus sexual assault with myriad strategies, but online training modules like the one Oregon offers are a popular prong of prevention efforts. They wrap legal requirements and other topics like consent, alcohol and drug use into an easy-to-deploy package that can be slotted into busy student orientations and fall class schedules. Done well, the trainings can be a useful component in an effective sexual assault–prevention effort. Done poorly, they can sometimes make the problem worse, experts say.

“Comprehensive sex education is an evidence-based program that, when done correctly, reduces perpetration of sexual assault,” said Nicole Bedera, a sexual violence researcher and author of On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence. But using just a piece of that education program, such as online consent training, “can actually increase the perpetration of sexual violence, especially sexual harassment.”

The Rise of Online Modules

Online prevention training became particularly prevalent over the past decade, catalyzed by changing Title IX regulations and the COVID-19 pandemic, said Tracey Vitchers, executive director of Its On Us, a nonprofit dedicated to ending campus sexual violence. After the Campus SaVE Act—which required that colleges offer sexual violence–prevention education to all students—was passed in 2013, a for-profit industry cropped up around “this new need for institutions to provide prevention education to their students at scale,” Vitchers said.

The early 2020s “turned into this perfect moment for these online platforms to really capitalize on the market around sexual violence–prevention education on campus, because you had additional requirements around response, particularly related to how schools were framing legal definitions of sexual violence and misconduct under Title IX,” Vitchers said. “And then you had the COVID-19 pandemic, and so institutions that maybe previously did in-person learning or a combination of in-person and virtual learning were essentially forced into doing this work online.”

One of the largest suppliers of such trainings is Vector Solutions, which Oregon uses to offer modules on sexual assault prevention and drug and alcohol abuse. Vector acquired its competitor EverFi’s higher ed and campus prevention network business in 2021, and today the company sells courses to more than 2,000 colleges and universities, or two in five degree-granting institutions in the U.S., according to Charity Stutzman, senior director of higher education at Vector.

Company data evaluating RespectEDU, the suite of programming Vector offers on sexual assault prevention, showed that in the last academic year, 83 percent of students who completed the program said the course increased their understanding of their college’s policies, according to Stutzman. Another 82 percent of students reported the course “helped them identify healthy and unhealthy relationships” and 83 percent said the course “provided skills to better support a peer,” Stutzman said.

But Stutzman noted that online prevention trainings are not sufficient on their own.

“Prevention work cannot be done in a silo,” she said. “Where we see the most effective prevention occur is when campuses have embedded this one course into a much larger strategic initiative on their campus [and] are engaging in ongoing education.”

Causing More Harm?

Many colleges began to implement consent training around the 2014–15 academic year, shortly after the Campus SaVE Act was passed. From the beginning, “experts were saying [colleges] weren’t implementing consent training correctly. A one-time training at first-year student orientation is not sufficient to meet the requirements of a true comprehensive sex education course,” Bedera said. One study she referenced determined that for prevention training to work, it must include multiple sessions over time (for example, one effective intervention curriculum aimed at teens, called Safe Dates, includes 10 sessions, 45 minutes each). Stand-alone 30-minute to hourlong training can sometimes make the problem worse.

“You can literally watch the sexual harassment happen during the training. You can listen to men sitting in the back row who know that … because they’re only having to do this for half an hour during orientation, it doesn’t really matter [to the institution],” she said. “Then they also make fun of it, and in making fun of it, they often sexually harass their peers. They make comments about rape victims that are misogynistic. They do all of these things that cause harm in the moment.”

The education and messaging that young men receive about gender and sex before going to college also affects how they respond to sexual assault–prevention training, research shows. An April study from It’s On Us showed that for men who received sex education that emphasized hierarchical gender norms (that men are superior to women) and sex apprehension (that sex is something to be feared), sex-positive training and education actually increased their hostility toward women. And prior research shows that hostility toward women is a predictor of sexual violence.

“Our fear is that if you have young men who have been taught to believe things like ‘men are superior to women’ or ‘men should be sexually dominant or aggressive and women should be sexually submissive,’ attempted interventions that are focused on affirmative consent … threatens that worldview that they’ve been raised in,” Vitchers said. “It causes them to double down on those rigid gender beliefs, and therefore poses the risk of them actually being more prone to committing violence.”

After one-time consent training, men who aren’t receptive to the programming “will walk away feeling more like, ‘Oh, now the school doesn’t care about this. Now I know I can do what I want. They’re not actually going to enforce this here,’” Bedera said.

She pointed to an interview she did with a college serial rapist for her dissertation on campus sexual assault. He told her about the first time he was accused of sexual assault, and said that afterward he had to sit down with a college administrator who taught him about verbal consent.

“He told me in our interview that every time that he had any kind of sexual contact with a woman, he would make her say that she was OK with it, and then he would ignore any signal after that,” Bedera said. “As long as he got his yes—and he [talked] about ways he would coerce a yes out of his victim—he felt really confident that he could do whatever he wanted because he could just tell the school she said yes, even though, to quote him, ‘She laid there like a dead fish while it was happening.’”

Framing is also important, Vitchers said. Training that portrays young men as would-be perpetrators causes them to shut down. Training that is entirely gender neutral “also erases young men, because we don’t live gender-neutral lives,” she added.

In a recent focus group of college athletes, “there was at least one young man in each room who shared a story of something that happened to them that we, as experts, would have labeled as sexual or dating violence. But they did not label it that way themselves because they had been taught that men can only be perpetrators, not victims or survivors,” Vitchers said. “When you frame men strictly as perpetrators or [provide] solely gender-neutral programming, young men don’t see themselves reflected as potential survivors in either one of those types of programming.”

Colleges must look beyond online modules if they wish to address the root issues of sexual violence, Vitchers and Bedera said.

“If we are putting students [who are] potentially high risk for perpetration through programming that just increases the likelihood that they may perpetrate,” Vitchers said, “that’s a horrific outcome.”

Cornell—the epicenter of the current campus sexual assault conversation—is working to expand its prevention efforts beyond one-off training. The university announced Tuesday it would “accelerate” its implementation of recommendations laid out by the Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault in a March report. These include developing required, in-person small group training sessions at new student orientation, and using students’ first semester to “reinforce this messaging and to provide additional education and engagement” with programming such as peer-led workshops, the task force wrote.

“We will put the knowledge gained from this initiative into practice, and invest the resources required to sustain real change into the future,” Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff wrote in a statement Tuesday. “We will take all necessary steps to address the conditions that led to Jane Doe’s experiences, and those of other survivors. Cornell must be a place where safety is not an open question.”