Over 400 new first year students took part in Trinity College Dublin’s first workshops on sexual consent during Freshers’ Week. The workshops were available for first year students moving into Trinity Hall residences.
Due to the success of these consent workshops in Halls, TCDSU has announced these workshops will now be provided for all TCD students next year. These college-wide classes will be first held during Body and Soul week, which commences on November 21. The decision was inspired by the positive reaction from students outside first-year after media coverage on the Halls workshops.
The workshops were introduced following a mandate by the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) in the last academic year, where the Union’s class representatives voted in favour of introducing the workshops for incoming Halls residents. The mandate was proposed by the Students’ Union’s current president, Kieran McNulty.
The current TCDSU Welfare Officer, Aoibhinn Loughlin, worked on the project along with Padraig MacNeela, creator of SMARTconsent; Trinity Student Counselling Service, Aidan Seery, TCD Senior Tutor; and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.
Loughlin said of the workshops: “I am delighted that these workshops received such positive feedback from first year students in Trinity Hall. I have good faith that these students will, in future, feel more confident in asking for and giving both verbal and nonverbal consent, which will in turn hopefully decrease the incidences of sexual assault throughout their lives. The demand for workshops has since been very high, with students outside of first year asking for consent workshops to be available to all students in college.”
