Women's advocacy group UltraViolet launched a new campaign Thursday to promote consent before sex among college students and to keep pressure on college rankings publisher Princeton Review to survey students about sexual assault.
UltraViolet's new website, EndCampusRape.com, focuses on the standard of affirmative consent, which essentially shifts rape prevention from "No means no" to "Only yes means yes."
The main video on the new site has what the group called a "classic porn" look -- grainy, with cheesy R&B music in the background -- as it shows couples obtaining permission from each other before they start hooking up. UltraViolet said in an email that it wanted to illustrate how consent works in an intimate setting.
Another, less provocative video encourages parents to talk about consent with their teenagers:
UltraViolet plans to target ads at students who attend Arizona State, Brown, Catholic University of America, University of Colorado Boulder, Columbia, Dartmouth, Florida State, Harvard, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Kansas, Southern Methodist, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Washington State and University of California, Berkeley. All of these schools are under investigation for their handling of sexual violence complaints.
Earlier this week California enacted the nation's first law requiring colleges to teach students about affirmative consent.
The new website lists every school currently under federal investigation for its sexual assault policies and practices, offers survivor stories and links to an UltraViolet petition launched to push Princeton Review to rank schools on how they handle sexual violence. Several infographics break down the statistics on sexual assault in college.
UltraViolet's previous efforts had been aimed at shaming schools that were accused of mishandling sexual assault cases.
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