Several colorful posters depicting cartoon animals, flowers and speech bubbles with educational puns now cover the University of Idaho campus. A part of the Women’s Center’s consent campaign, their goal is to teach students the importance of clear consent.
The Women’s Center partners with multiple organizations across campus and the Moscow community to use funds from the department of justice grant to do violence prevention and advocacy work.
“The consent campaign fulfills part of the grant goals for the Women’s Center’s current Office on Violence Against Women grant,” Lysa Salsbury, director of the Women’s Center, said.
This almost $300,000 grant must be renewed every third year.
This year should be a renewal year but because of COVID-19 and a few other factors, UI was given an extension to spend the money from their last term, as well as a renewal.
“We just found out a couple weeks ago, it’s not official yet, but we were refunded for an additional three years,” Salsbury said.
There is a core group of people who have been working on aspects of this campaign for the past three and a half years. This group is made up of the Women’s Center, Alternatives to Violence of the Palouse, Title IX Coordinator, the Office of Civil Rights and Investigations (OCRI) and local law enforcement.
The posters are a part of a larger scale incentive to demystify the concept of consent and set an example of what it is and isn’t.
Erin Agidius is the OCRI director and a part of the subcommittee in charge of the poster campaign.
“Consent is probably one of the number one things that we, I think, people really struggle with,” Agidius said. “And not just students. I think a lot of people struggle with, what is consent and what does it look like.”
Because consent is such an important aspect of any relationship but also an awkward conversation for some, the design team felt it was important to make the posters fun, colorful and clever to catch the eye of those who pass by.
The result was a series of cartoon animations of bigfoot saying “consent is not a myth,” and a bird and a bee saying “talk birdie to me. No consent? Buzz off!” among other creative “dad jokes” as Emilie McLarnan, associate director of Violence Prevention in the Dean of Students’ Office, put it.
These posters are meant to lead people to the Violence Prevention section on the UI website which has a tab labeled consent.
After clicking the link, patrons are directed to a webpage that explains the definition of consent, how to ask for it, examples, verbal signals, nonverbal signals and what consent looks like when alcohol is involved.
This website also includes printable posters for anyone who wants can have one as a reminder.
“We have lots of copies of these posters in the Women’s Center, and so if anyone wants one for their personal space or for their residence hall or for their lab or for wherever they would like,” Salsbury said. “Even if they just want one for their room, they can come to the Women’s Center and get one. We’ve got lots of really nice copies of these posters to give away. We just want students to put them up.”
Paige Fiskecan be reached at [email protected].