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USC's consent week ran through the rain, and the best evidence on such programs is about attitudes
USC ran a week of student-led events on consent, boundaries and health from October 19 to 23, 2026, and closed it with a drag show. The best-studied campus programs shift attitudes more reliably than behavior.
Rain fell across the University of Southern California's annual week of student-run events on consent, relationships and health, and nothing was cancelled, the Daily Trojan reported on October 26, 2026. The week ran from October 19 to 23 in Los Angeles, with panels, an information tent on McCarthy Quad on October 21 and a closing evening of performances.
Three panels, a tent and a closing evening
The programme opened on Monday with two discussion panels, one on women's health and one on LGBTQIA+ health, and a third on men's health followed on Tuesday, according to the Daily Trojan. Students could submit questions anonymously, and the panels covered consent, infection testing and medical exams, among other subjects.
The rain changed nothing in the schedule, the paper says.
USC Student Health, which supported the week, describes the same sessions in its own account. The women's hour looked at health beyond reproductive care and at the taboos that make it hard to talk about consent. At the men's hour, students discussed how ideas about masculinity shape relationships, and treated what Student Health calls "consent as an ongoing conversation". A third session, run with the LGBTQ+ Student Center, was about setting boundaries inside LGBTQ+ communities and pointed students to the counseling the center embeds.
The centerpiece came on Wednesday, October 21. At the tent, Erin Tillman, an educator and intimacy coordinator, and Nicoletta Heidegger, a licensed marriage and family therapist, answered anonymous questions about intimacy and relationships, according to Student Health. Clubs tabled around them. The Daily Trojan adds that the tent held raffles for adult products and kink guides, and that one club ran a trivia wheel of questions on pregnancy, contraception and infections, with candy and free condoms at the table.
The week closed with an evening of performances in the same quad, listed on USC's schedule for 5:00 p.m. on October 21. Student Health names a singer with a guitarist, a drag show organized by the Queer and Ally Student Assembly and the university's a cappella group, the Trojan Men. The Daily Trojan reports a craft contest in which students shaped adult novelty items out of Play-Doh, and that the event went on as planned despite the rain.
Student Health also ran a station at a Residential Education harvest event, where 200 participants had access to infection-testing kits.
That is the only figure either account gives. Neither says how many students came to the panels or the tent, so the size of the audience is not known.
What the organizers say it is for
The Daily Trojan puts the aim in one sentence: the week is meant to promote an open attitude toward sexual wellness while raising awareness of consent and boundaries, especially on campuses. Four student groups sponsored it, the two student governments among them, with support from Student Health.
Brandi Junious, assistant director of violence prevention at the university's confidential advocacy and education support center, told Student Health that education of this kind helps people understand what consent is, how to say what they like and do not like, how to set boundaries and how to exercise autonomy.
Adrian Nevarez, a student health ambassador, put the method more plainly: "We want to break the awkward talk and let everyone know that asking questions is okay."
The students quoted by the Daily Trojan describe a modest result. Miki O'Connell-Joshua, a senior in legal studies and one of the week's co-leads, said it had shown her how many campus resources exist. Devan Walker, a sophomore in cinema and media studies, said she valued how openly people talked about subjects usually left unspoken, and that it helped to learn that other students had the same questions.
Both accounts come from the university's own health service and from a student newspaper covering an event its readers could attend. Their descriptions of what the week achieved are the organizers' and attendees' own. USC's schedule page, for its part, sells the week as fun, inclusive and interactive, with a chance to test products and pick up freebies. A framework for agreement that can be withdrawn at any moment is a serious thing to put next to a raffle, and the sources do not say how the two sit together.
The critics and a long quarrel
The week has opponents. When The College Fix wrote about what it called USC's inaugural week, it quoted Nathan Harden, a former editor of that site and the author of a book on his years at Yale. Harden credited Yale with starting the campus tradition and described it as a festival of sleaze and debauchery dressed up as education. That is a critic who also worked for the outlet carrying his words, and the piece does not hide it.
The College Fix piece adds a little history. Such weeks began at Ivy League universities more than a decade earlier, dozens of student groups followed, and they paused during the pandemic years before returning. USC's own list of past coverage of its week starts in 2022.
The critics' complaint is about content and about the label of education. This year's tent, with its raffles and its craft contest, gives them material, and the organizers' reply, in the students' own words, is that people had questions they could not ask elsewhere. Neither side offers a figure for what the week changed, which leaves the argument at the level of taste.
What the research measures
The most cited campus evidence is narrower than the programme USC ran. A 2013 meta-analysis by Jennifer Katz and Jessica Moore in the journal Violence and Victims pooled 12 studies of college students, 2,926 people in all, on in-person bystander training. It found moderate effects on bystander efficacy and on intentions to help someone at risk. Effects on self-reported helping behavior, on attitudes that excuse assault and on proclivity toward it were smaller but significant. There was no effect on perpetration. The authors asked for longitudinal work measuring behavior and the incidence of assault.
Michael Flood, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology, reaches a similar view in 2021 notes on consent education. Programs among young people can reduce factors linked to violence, he writes, if they are done well, and he calls that condition significant. Their effect on actual perpetration and victimization is weaker, because most interventions have not been evaluated, and many evaluations measure attitudes rather than behavior. Only a few school-based or university-based group programs show a drop in perpetration or victimization.
His notes also bear on what a week should teach. Consent curricula, he writes, must move beyond slogan-like no-means-no messages, which is close to the framing Student Health gives its men's hour, consent as an ongoing conversation. A US study of undergraduates that he cites, by Santelli and colleagues in 2018, found lower rates of assault victimization since entering university among students who had received comprehensive education before age 18, including refusal skills. Abstinence-only teaching did not protect in the same way.
On power, he cites Haberland's 2015 research: programs with content on gender and power were five times as likely to be effective as those without it. The outcomes in that research were pregnancy and infections, not consent, so it shows that naming power in a classroom has been associated with better results, not that it prevents assault.
The programs Flood lists as showing a drop in perpetration or victimization at universities are built differently from a week of events. They include a multi-session program for men in a university residence, a four-by-three-hour assault resistance program for female students and a multi-session program for first-year students of mixed gender groups. What they share is repetition: the same students come back, session after session.
None of these studies evaluates USC's week. A week of panels, a tent and a closing evening is not a program in the evaluators' sense, since it has no repeated sessions, no comparison group and no measure of what students did afterwards. Anyone claiming it prevents harm is borrowing evidence from elsewhere, and anyone claiming it does not is doing the same.
What the framework asks of the next edition
The week did leave a procedure intact: questions were anonymous, a therapist and an intimacy coordinator took them in public, and the university's health service named the topic of agreement in its own account. That is a framework with a visible owner. What it lacks is a published record of results.
USC's page invites student organizations to propose their own programs and to suggest activities and experts for 2027. Planning for the next edition begins in July, with weekly Friday meetings.
The audio version of this article is read by an AI-generated synthetic voice.