Editor’s Note: This story contains discussions of rape or sexual assault that may be disturbing. Reader discretion is advised. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can find help and discreet resources on the National Sexual Assault Hotline website or by calling 1-800-656-4673.
RICHMOND, Va. (WAVY) — The future of education is here and teachers, including Virginia Commonwealth University social work professor Adrienne Baldwin-White, are taking full advantage of technology through a video game that’s now her most powerful training tool for sexual violence education.
“There’s something about video games that makes information memorable,” Baldwin-White said. “And so, also because this is a population that uses video games, they’d much rather be on their computer than face-to-face.”
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The innovative teacher is revolutionizing her students’ learning experience with this unorthodox approach. White programmed the browser-based game herself after years of researching gender-based violence on college campuses and beyond.
According to her research, she said about 40% of college students experience dating violence, while roughly 25% of college women and 7% of college men experience sexual violence.
“I realized that nobody was really paying attention to this population, or at least seeing them as vulnerable,” she said. “They’re also the population with the highest rates of mental illness. So if you compound the risk of violence with the already high risk of mental illness, we really need to focus a lot of our attention and resources on this population.”
The video game is played solo and is accessed via browser. It introduces students to real-life scenarios. From the interactive experience, the educator hopes the students will feel empowered to do the right thing.
“One example is, you are at a party with their friend who’s drunk, and the friend is pursuing someone else and being very aggressive and being overly aggressive with their behavior, and you are trying to stop them from doing that,” she said. “You are trying to make the right decisions to get them to stop. You’re presented with text messages, between you and your friends, they’re texting you, telling you what’s going on, what’s happening, and you’re presented with two options. And then you just respond how you would respond in real life. So if someone texted you, ‘Hey, I’m in this situation,’ we give you two options, you respond, and then that dictates how the story unfolds.”
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So far, she said it’s been a success in the classroom.
“I’ve gotten some really great feedback from students,” she said. “They really like it. They find it engaging [and] they find it better than other programming that they have to take.”
Later this summer, White said she will debut a second game for mobile with the help of Virginia Commonwealth University engineering students. It will focus directly on how sexual violence impacts marginalized communities.
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