Professor Allen will discuss her proposal for reframing sexual assault messaging around public health concerns. This approach, she believes, holds more promise than criminal law interventions do as a way of shifting societal perceptions around sexual assault, denormalizing rape, and ensuring better outcomes for victims.

Professor Avalos will discuss her proposal for refocusing criminal law’s sexual assault lens in order to scrutinize a common but overlooked scenario – “first encounters” where the parties have never before shared sexual contact. She argues that in these first encounter scenarios, the crime of sexual assault should be reframed to consider whether the perpetrator meaningfully sought the victim’s consent before initiating sexual activity.