By: Olivia Sherman, News Writer
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on March 14, 2024, to correctly note Adeyonu and Simsek are WAGE funded employees of the North Shore Women’s Centre.
Content Warning: Mentions of gender-based violence and sexual assault.
Flip the Script is a curriculum from experts and advocates to teach high school girls about sexual assault and gender-based violence. The North Shore Women’s Centre (NSWC) in North Vancouver runs a program with this curriculum in local high schools. The North Shore Women’s Centre is a hub for inclusion, care, and expertise in women’s health and well-being.
The Peak spoke with two NSWC researchers and project coordinators, Oreofeoluwa Adeyonu and Yasmin Vejs Simsek. Adeyonu and Simsek are both graduate alumni of SFU and WAGE funded employees with NSWC. The WAGE grant is a federal fund from the government of Canada for reputable organizations that encourage women’s equality, independence, and freedom from abuse and violence.
Simsek and Adeyonu explained the process of the twelve-hour long curriculum. “We go in being very honest” about gender-based violence, Adeyonu said. Flip the Script focuses on “acquaintance-based sexual assaults,” which is when the perpetrator is someone previously close to the survivor, such as a neighbor or coworker. Simsek explained how the most common safety advice for young girls is to “carry bear spray, or hold your keys in your hand or talk on the phone when you’re walking late at night.” However, these strategies don’t account for how the majority of sexual assaults are committed by acquaintances such as friends, family, and other trusted individuals. “Sexual assault is about power and control, it’s not necessarily about the sex, it’s not about what age you are,” Adeyonu added.
Educators like Adeyonu and Simsek go into local high schools with the main tenets of Flip the Script, which are to “Assess, Acknowledge, and Act,” as well as how to recognize and maintain healthy relationships and sexuality. The first course, “Assess,” teaches girls to assess the level of danger they are in. Flip the Script’s second course, “Acknowledge,” focuses on acquaintance-based assaults. This course offers space to recognize and process the mental toll of realizing when a trusted acquaintance has betrayed your trust.
The third course, “Act,” lets participants roleplay scenarios, including basic self-defense strategies, both physical and verbal. The last lesson teaches students about healthy relationships and sexuality. “If you don’t know how to talk about what you do want, how do you know how to talk about what you don’t want?” asked Simsek.
“One of the biggest things we tell them is that we’re just reinforcing their own strengths and capabilities, so it’s what they already know,” Adeyonu said. “All survival is successful resistance.
“In an ideal world, I don’t want to be teaching teenagers how to defend themselves, how to acknowledge when they’re in potentially risky situations. I shouldn’t have to do that. They shouldn’t have to give me twelve hours of their week for me to teach them that this is what the world is,” Adeyonu said. “However, we are not in an ideal world.”
Safe Dates is a similar program to Flip the Script, but is more gender neutral than Flip the Script’s focus on violence against women and AFAB people. Safe Dates has been used to teach high school boys about consent, abuse, and healthy relationships.
Flip the Script requires educators to be trained and well-versed on the topic of gender-based violence in order to teach students, meaning educators like Simsek and Adeyonu must go to high schools to teach the curriculum. Unlike Flip the Script, Safe Dates doesn’t require trained educators because the program can be carried out by high school teachers through the Safe Dates manual.
This raises a few problems, Adeyonu explained. First, due to the high cost of the Safe Date manual, the NSWC only has three books in circulation to loan to high school educators. Second, teachers often do not have the time to carry out the course. “One of the big things is that teachers, educators, and admin in schools are already overworked,” she continued. “They don’t have much time to then be taking time out to do Safe Dates while we’re doing Flip the Script.
“I think it’s important that we educate everyone,” Simsek said, but noted the difficulties with a limited budget, time, and access. Flip the Script educators have had issues contacting high schools in order to teach students. Simsek continued, “We are offering the program for free, the WAGE grant pays us to offer it for free [ . . . ] when things are free, people forget about them and won’t take it as seriously.”
“The only way sexual assault stops is if there are no perpetrators. And as long as there exists perpetrators, there continues to exist a reason for us to teach girls,” Adeyonu said.
