On the eighth floor of the Holyoke Center, a makeshift, blue and white sign quietly announces the arrival of the “Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.”

The temporary location of the office—squeezed in two bare rooms around the corner from each other—and the 8.5 by 11 inch sign are reminders of the newness of the office and its programs.

This fall, the newly-created University office has initiated a diligent campaign targeted at first-years to change the way—and how carefully—they consider rape.

Starting with “Sex Signals,” a skit performed by professional actors during Freshman Week, and now through workshops in first-year entryways, the office’s three-person team has thrown itself into the midst of the Class of 2007, trying to demystify the sometimes fuzzy relationship between sex, alcohol and rape.

Established last spring on the recommendation of the Committee to Address Sexual Assault at Harvard, the office is the outgrowth of over a year and a half of student-led agitation for the College to increase its focus on the issue.

As staff members prepares to settle into their permanent location on the Holyoke Center’s third floor, Director of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Susan B. Marine says she hopes the 24-hour support services and campus educational programs that the office is providing will become an important fixture on campus.

“Our main goal is to be visible, help students talk about this issue and help them get their questions answered,” says Marine.

The First-Year Front

The focus of much of the outreach so far has been improving sexual assault prevention education for first-years, who were required to attend “Sex Signals,” along with Freshman Week’s usual Safe Community Meeting, and answer the first of four surveys about sexual assault.

A grant from the Department of Education funds this four-stage evaluation, which was also sent out last week to House open lists for sophomores to complete.

The office will use the surveys to compare the attitudes of first-years who go through the revamped educational program to sophomores who did not.

Marine, education specialist Heather Wilson, prevention specialist Juan Carlos Areán and two graduate students are working on the office’s current big project: meeting with each first-year entryway for a workshop on sexual assault.

Wilson says the office has been conducting up to seven workshops a week, talking to first-years about “sexual assault, communicating, dating violence and the link between alcohol and sexuality—trying to get them to really think about the choices that they make and how that could affect the future both for the positive and negative.”

In the first-year workshops, a series of scenarios are presented for discussion, including what Wilson says are “typical hookup scenarios.”

One scenario builds off the “Sex Signals” presentation, reintroducing that presentation’s main characters, Matt and Joelle. Other scenarios involve two inebriated students who meet at a party and return home together, a long-term same-sex relationship and a study date. In some of the workshops, the entryway is divided by gender. In the single-sex workshops, Areán, who works at the office part-time, deals with the first-year males.