Introduction to the Graduate Student Training Resource

Power Dynamics and Boundaries: A Sexualized Violence Prevention Workshop for Graduate Students is based on an environmental scan of sexualized violence education and prevention materials for publicly funded B.C. post-secondary institutions and community partners. It also involved interviewing key stakeholders and subject matter experts, and a limited literature review. The recommendations were published in the report Sexualized Violence and the Graduate Student Experience: Report on Existing Education and Prevention Materials in B.C. Post-Secondary Institutions (Hillman, 2023).

Data gleaned through this environmental scan and the accompanying literature review exposed key themes in the graduate student experience with sexualized violence. From these themes, several recommendations for planning and developing training programs. Relevant themes that emerged from the report are below:

• Due to the multiple and unique roles that graduate students can occupy in post-secondary institutions (e.g., student, teaching assistant, research assistant, sessional instructor), sexualized violence education needs to focus on appropriate relationships and boundaries between graduate students and others in post-secondary institutions, with particular attention to hierarchical power.
• Various aspects of existing training programs, including content and facilitation, need to be customized to be relevant and accessible to graduate students, including practice scenarios, support and resources, method and medium of delivery.
• Faculty and employee education are a significant factor in preventing sexualized violence involving graduate students. Engaging post-secondary staff in sexualized violence training has been historically challenging.
• Education on an institution’s sexualized violence policy and processes, including student and employee rights and responsibilities, needs to be included in future training programs.
• The institution’s administration and leadership should play a role by acknowledging a historical culture of entitlement, especially in some faculties. Sexualized violence policies and processes need to be robust, accessible, and survivor-centred, and prevention and education training should be mandatory whenever possible, for all members of a post-secondary institution.

The environmental scan identified two existing training programs as strong models on which to base this training: Navigating Power Dynamics and Boundaries as a Graduate Student by Possibility Seeds (Livingston, et al., 2023) and Professional Boundaries for TAs by Simon Fraser University (2020). This training draws on elements from both the Simon Fraser University and the Possibility Seeds training programs and provides significant new contributions, including a focus on power dynamics within the various professional relationships that graduate students must navigate. Graduate students from a variety of disciplines wrote the practice scenarios based on their unique experiences of sexualized violence.