Two peer facilitators, a room full of students. Sometimes it’s the afternoon, and students are hurrying in after classes. Sometimes it’s already dark, and tired students are filing in after dinner. Nevertheless, for that hour and a half, homework is discarded and midterms are placed on hold as students complete the required Sexual Violence Prevention Project session.
The purpose of the program, according to the Dartmouth Student Wellness Center website, is “to reduce sexual assault, relationship violence, stalking and harassment on Dartmouth’s campus through a comprehensive four-year prevention curriculum.”
In the 2025-26 academic school year, SVPP offered 271 in-person training sessions, with 98.5% of all first-year and sophomore students on campus completing their full sequence of sessions, according to Dartmouth Admissions.
In an email statement to The Dartmouth, SVPP director Ben Bradley wrote that the goal of SVPP “as a presidential initiative has always been to implement a four-year violence prevention experience for all undergraduates.”
The first iteration of SVPP was announced in January 2015 as part of former College President Phil Hanlon’s Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative, SWC executive director Caitlin Barthelmes wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth. The initiative encompassed a range of goals focused on increasing safety at Dartmouth by addressing “high-risk behaviors” on campus, according to a Dartmouth News release at the time.
Through the Moving Dartmouth Forward Program, the college administration “undertook a bunch of initiatives on binge drinking, hazing and sexual assault,” women’s, gender and sexuality studies professor Mingwel Huang said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
While SVPP is offered by the administration, the curriculum was developed by various staff, faculty, and students who “conducted an extensive literature review that informed the four behavioral outcomes of the SVPP (developing positive relationships and sexual behavior, intervening as active bystanders, accessing resources and fostering equity and belonging),” Barthelemes wrote.
The SWC References and Research website lists a non-exhaustive set of 57 sources that “guided the design, curriculum development and implementation of the SVPP.” The cited studies — ranging from bystander intervention to effective sexual assault prevention efforts — address many of the same topics discussed in SVPP sessions today. The Class of 2023 was the first to participate in both the freshman and sophomore curriculums during the corresponding years.
Prior to SVPP’s implementation, there were multiple other efforts to decrease sexual violence on campus that cumulated in the adoption of SVPP.
Rauner Library Edward Connery Latham ’51 Special Collections fellow Sonia Meytin ’26 wrote in an email statement that the first domestic violence prevention and awareness programming at Dartmouth was offered in the TERM of 1979 — seven years after Dartmouth’s first coeducational class matriculated — by the Women’s Resource Center.
As a part of the WRC program, around 200 members of the local and College community marched down Webster Avenue? — colloquially called “frat row” — as part of the nationwide “Take Back the Night” movement to combat and bring awareness to sexual and other violence against women. The movement is still ongoing.
Some other examples of early sexual violence prevention and awareness programming included a 1976 Tucker Foundation panel “on Contemporary Sexual Values, serving to provide social awareness education on the topic of LGBTQ+ identity,” and the founding of the Gay Student Support Group — later renamed the Gay Students Association — in 1977, which worked to educate students? Or also faculty, staff etc about sexual health and wellness primarily in the LGBTQ+ community in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
In 1987, then-Dartmouth director of health educationDr. Beverlie Conant-Sloane supported students’ efforts as they foundedthe first peer-led sex education programsm such as the Sexual Assault Peer Alliance, on campus, Meytin wrote. The Sexual Assault Peer Alliance is now known as the Sexual Assault Peer Advocates program.
SAPA, according to their website, is “a group of Dartmouth students dedicated to providing positive support to peers who have been impacted by sexual and gender-based violence.” In the 1980s, some of the alliance’s efforts to increase awareness about sexual issues included increasing student education about safe sex practices during the AIDS pandemic through educational pamphlets and sex safety kits.
In the 1990s, Dartmouth began the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program, a student-led program which lasted until the 2014, according to Meytin.
SAAP “tracked campus assault statistics, worked with GLASS on accountability in Greek life and provided institutionalized prevention training,” Meytin said.
The most immediate predecessor of SVPP was the Sexual Health and Healthy Relationships Peer Educators program, which ran from the 2000s until 2019. That program “ran peer education sessions and managed the Safer Sex Bar,” which is now run by the SWC, Meytin noted. The Safer Sex Bar, managed by the Student Wellness Center, offers free safe sex supplies in the library, at house community centers, in Dick’s house and other locations around campus.
The SHHRPPE program was offered as a physical education credit in 2018. The program was replaced by the mandatory SVPP sessions as the College shifted toward multi-year training.
Prior to implementing SVPP, there were also many campus discussions surrounding sexual violence on campus and how to combat the issue.
“In the early 2000s, there were a lot of stories in The Dartmouth about addressing sexual assault and frats about hazing,” Huang said. “In 2014, the editorial board of The D put ‘abolish Greek life’ on the front page of the Homecoming issue, so there clearly were a lot of campus discussions among students and the administration and faculty about specifically Greek life, sexual assault, binge drinking, probably hazing.”
In an October 2014 editorial titled “Verbum Ultimum: Abolish the Greek System,” The Dartmouth’s editorial board called on the College to “abolish the Greek system,” citing the “numerous accounts of hazing and abuse” documented.
The editorial was published amid boarder campus discussions after former College President Hanlon announced the Presidential Steering Committee, which was created to study high-risk drinking, sexual assault and inclusivity as a precursor to the Moving Dartmouth Forward Initiative. These discussions on campus ultimately culminated in the development of the SVPP model. Calls for abolishing Greek life, however, persist.
SVPP is not necessarily the end-all solution to sexual violence, Huang said.
“It is good that these programs exist and there’s education, but I don’t think if you just added more workshops and more curriculum and like that would solve it,” she said, referring to sexual violence. “There are larger kind of structural issues around power that are driving sexual violence on campus.”
Madeline Kahn Ehrlich '29 is a reporter from upstate New York. She is considering studying English and Public Policy. She enjoys creative writing, art and reading historical fiction.
