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Politics Student life WUR Campus

Let’s Talk About Yes (LTAY) take the next steps towards a consent culture at WUR

Judith, Evelien and Jeroen from the LTAY campaign met with Arthur Mol – Vice chair of the Executive board and Ingrid Hijman – Head of the Student Service Centre yesterday, to hand over 210 handwritten cards from students, about their experiences of sexual violence and consent at WUR.

The LTAY campaign were at the AID to answer people’s questions about consent, were in Orion during their action week in November to collect these handwritten cards, and have met with various groups to discuss consent culture including the AID organization team.

They have also been in contact with student and study associations, and provided them with a list of organizations that provide information and workshops on consent. They also offer to sit with them and help them to make a plan on how to deal with consent and sexual violence in their associations.

All this work seems to have convinced groups and people within WUR of the need to take more action around the topic. Ingrid Hijman is currently the main employee responsible for looking into which existing groups within WURs structure can help with this and how resources can be mobilised to support more initiatives.

Ideas discussed include a week-long series of events around consent, increasing the number of confidential advisers for victims of sexual violence, speaking with the mayor and police to see how they can better deal with victims and perpetrators, and bringing more experts on the topic into WUR to advise.

Currently there are two confidential advisers specialised in the topic at WUR and Ingrid plans to have this increased to 5 next year. Furthermore, she plans to have a more diverse group of advisers available since it is important that victims of sexual violence can choose who they feel more comfortable speaking to.

“We’re glad that the university understands its role in preventing and fighting sexual violence during student life. Today Arthur and Ingrid showed us that the WUR is willing to work on this. Hopefully we can start to see our first consent-based events and implementations soon.”

Let’s Talk About Yes Wageningen

All that said, there is a lot of work to do if we want to build a consent culture at WUR. This includes informing ourselves and other students about sexual consent. If you are interested in informing yourself you can read this site and if you would like to work on informing others you can reach the LTAY campiagn at consentwageningen@gmail.com .

At the same time, making sure victims are heard and perpetrators are held accountable is essential. More information about the confidential advisers can be found on the website and you can contact them if you have experienced any form of assault at vpstudent@wur.nl or call 0317-483618.