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Teaching Consent with Emojis May Seem Desperate, But It's Probably Neccessary

The campaign veers uncomfortably close to “Playboy Feminism,” by trying too hard to make consent sexy.

When students at the University of British Columbia were walking to see Cashmere Cat play on campus at the annual welcome back barbecue on September 11, they spotted something new on the campus' sidewalks: decals of giant emojis—the now ubiquitous yellow, expressive faces proliferated daily via text message. Accompanying the graphics were slogans prompting students to think about what sexual consent looks like.

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CJ Rowe, diversity advisor for women at UBC, helped implement the Consent is Clear campaign this year to start a conversation among students. Speaking to THUMP, she points to a Canadian Women's Foundation survey that found that 67 per cent of Canadians don't understand how consent works. Emojis remove the technicalities of language and try to present images of consent as something that's, apparently, easy to understand—even if you're hammered on your way to a dance party.

The emoji posters adorned campus bathrooms and residence halls and decals were placed on campus plazas and thoroughfares in September. Each one employing a particular face to explain a non-consensual situation.

The campaign utilizes six different faces:

Rowe explains that starting the campaign early in the year is important because most sexual assaults happen within the first eight weeks of class. "Most of us didn't get this kind of [consent] education before we came to UBC," Rowe tells THUMP. "So, we have an opportunity as an institution to engage in education to shift culture and understanding."

Read More on THUMP: Women Are Using Social Media as a Megaphone to Confront Nightlife's Rape Problem

That shift is especially imortant when 25 per cent of female and six per cent of male students in North America experience some form of sexual assault during their university careers. It's also true that many students may not have encountered consent education before—it was only added to the Ontario sex-ed curriculum in 2015.

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Rowe points to the rape chant sung at UBC's frosh week in 2013, a similar chant at St. Mary's that same year and a scandal at Dalhousie's faculty of dentistry in 2015 as indicators of larger systemic issues in North American culture.

"We believe that all these behaviour are connected," she says.

Sexual assault as a systemic problem becomes even more dangerous as students head to parties, concerts and festivals because over half of post-secondary sexual assaults involve drugs or alcohol. That point is isn't lost in the campaign either: two of the emojis directly address inebriation. The queasy and sleepy faces are cute little yellow euphemisms for being fucked up.

Consent education on school campuses will hopefully translate to other situations where it is badly needed for college-age individuals: namely clubs and festivals. Nicki Varkevisser, who was 18 when she went to Osheaga in 2012, told Global News she was sexually assaulted three different times—once while dancing and twice more while crowd surfing. She told the network she didn't report the assaults because she felt there was no way security could find the perpetrators.

The notorious eat, sleep, rape repeat shirt at this year's Coachella reminded fans that even their beloved flower-crown escapes aren't immune from rape culture.

Read More on Broadly: There's a Rape Epidemic at Festivals and Nobody Seems to Care

But why emojis?

Rowe explains they're an excellent way to grab attention because they create a sense of approachability and invite conversation. "Research suggests that people react to emojis or emoticons the same way that they would a real human face," she says.

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However, not everyone agrees emojis are the best way to tackle the issue.

"I thought it was stupid," Madeline Taylor, spoken-word department coordinator at UBC's campus radio station, tells THUMP. "I think talking about consent is really great, but my first impression of it was that they were trying to pander to the youth and simplify the issue."

She says the campaign veers uncomfortably close to "Playboy Feminism" by trying too hard to make consent sexy.

"[It's] as if you don't have to alter any of the harmful behaviour that leads to sexual assault except asking for consent ahead of time," Taylor says.

She also doesn't like how the posters, arranged like text messages on a phone, present disturbing scenarios like hooking up with a passed-out or sleeping person as "creeeepy"—an understatement, by any reach of the imagination.

"The result of having sex with someone who's passed out or asleep is not that you're a creep, it's that you're a criminal who just violated someone's basic human rights," she says.

Rowe acknowledges an emoji painted on the sidewalk isn't likely to stop a potential perpetrator in his tracks, but she hopes the posters can engage bystanders.

"It's hard for us at the university level to stop perpetrators," she says. "The research shows that has to happen between grades seven and nine. By the time a repeat offender gets to university there's not much we can do."

The posters may give off an air of desperation by grasping at youth culture, like parents insisting they like "a Skrillex." But, given Rowe's sobering statistics about sexual assault on campus, perhaps that desperation is warranted.

Meg Devlin is on Twitter.