School pulls controversial assignment asking girls how they can 'avoid' sexual assault

A Kansas school district pulled a classroom assignment that asked 10th-grade girls how they can “avoid” getting sexually assaulted.

On Wednesday, parent Charity Willard Eigenberger uploaded a Facebook photo of the question asked at Bradford High School in Kenosha as part of a health assignment. “What could have Melissa done differently to have avoided her sexual assault (provide at least 4 examples)?”

According to Kenosha News, students watched the 1996 TV movie, She Cried No about a college freshman played by Candace Cameron Bure, who is raped at a frat party.

“Haven, my sophomore, was shown a video on sexual assault,” wrote Willard Eigenberger alongside the image, receiving 4.3K reactions and 13K shares. “This is the first question on the assignment.”

Kenosha News reports that Willard Eigenberger’s 16-year-old daughter refused to answer the question or complete the assignment because it blamed the victim.

On Monday, the Kenosha Unified School District released a statement to CBS58:

Superintendent Dr. Sue Savaglio-Jarvis and Principal Dr. Kurt Sinclair did not return Yahoo Lifestyle’s request for comment.

Student Hannah Ramos told CBS48, “Like how are we going to avoid it? By not being girls? I don’t understand why that would even be a question, even if it is curriculum, why would they have 15, 16, 17-year-olds looking at a question like that?”

Another student, whose identity is anonymous, told the news station she and her mother informed the district about the assignment. “My first thought was ‘did I read that right,’ I thought maybe I wasn’t understanding because of what it was asking,” the teen told CBS58. “I started to get frustrated because it didn’t make sense to me to blame the victim.”

Later, Willard Eigenberger wrote on Facebook, “The principal called me right away the morning after I posted this and apologized, without making any excuses, for this horribly worded question and lesson.” She noted that the lesson has been pulled and Sinclair thanked her for the social media post “because he has gotten hundreds of emails from all over and in many of them, people have offered resources and curricula that he and his health education department would’ve not otherwise been exposed to.”

Christia Brown, a professor of developmental psychology and author of Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that kids are raised to believe that girls are well-behaved and boys are unfettered. “What’s frustrating is that you’ll see schools justifying this belief system with female dress codes or by not teaching boys the concept of consent,” she says.

Brown references a stat from the Association of American Universities: one in four girls will be sexually assaulted while attending college. “Most of these cases involve date rape, not the stereotypical notion of a rapist in a back alley,” she says. “It’s not that we have so many rapists walking the streets — it’s that college-aged men have never been taught consent by their parents and in school. It’s not even a factor.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• Woman sues American Airlines over her alleged sexual assault during flight

• Principal says school dress code puts ‘every male in this building in an awkward situation’

• High school principal under fire for suggesting that dress codes prevent sexual abuse: ‘Why should we allow students to dress provocatively?’

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