00:00 Mo Lewis: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding responding to and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I'm Mo Lewis, the Prevention Specialist at NSVRC. On today's episode, I'm talking with Kari Kesler. One of the lead authors of the Flash Curriculum about sexual health education and sexual assault prevention in schools. [music] 00:38 ML: Hi, I am Mo Lewis, with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and I'm here today with Kari Kesler, who's one of the lead authors of Flash. And Kari, we've known each other for a really long time, and I've been so lucky to be able to work with you through this project and some other projects, and I'm just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about yourself. 00:57 Kari Kesler: Yeah, I would be glad to. Thanks, thanks for having me here. I'm excited to be here and talk to you today. So like you said, my name is Kari Kesler, I work for public health of Seattle in King County, who is the publisher, the developer and publisher of the Flash Curriculum, and I am one of the lead authors of Flash. I have been at public health now for over 15 years, but I did come to this work originally through my work in the sexual violence prevention field, so I did work previously, I'm here in King County doing sexual violence prevention work, and then I really wanted to... I really wanted to keep addressing sexual violence prevention, and it became more and more clear to me that the way to do that was to go broader and be able to look at sexuality and sexual health more broadly, and look at sexual violence prevention within that context. And so I was really lucky that public health hired me to do that, and I've been here ever since, and I've been working... Flash has been the bulk of my work for about the last, maybe seven or eight years, but also over the time that I've been here at public health, I've done a lot of work in schools and with teachers and young people, done a lot of trainings with doctors and nurses about a whole variety of sexual health-related topics, so not only sexual violence prevention, but sexual health much more broadly. 02:32 KK: And that is how I came to be here. And so then you and I, Mo, we got to work together on the Flash Sexual Violence Prevention lesson, so I was really lucky to get to work with you and Becky Reitzes from our team at public healthy and Rebecca Millman from Harbor View, we all worked really hard on the sexual violence lessons. And then Andrea Gerber who’s the other lead author of curriculum. She and I have worked on them a lot since. And obviously she and I have worked on all of the rest of the lessons. So, it was just a really solid team over all and I think its reflected in the quality of the lessons. 03:03 ML: I agree, it was really so much fun and I learned so much doing that process with you all. As someone who doesn't live in Seattle, I live outside of King County, I was really surprised at how everybody really knows about Flash, it's really ubiquitous, it's a sexual health education that a lot of kids have gone through and gotten, and so I'm just wondering, for the folks who are not as maybe familiar, maybe don't live in the King County area, can you tell us more about Flash and what it entails and encompasses? 03:36 KK: Yeah. Yeah, I'd be glad to. So Flash is a comprehensive sexual health education curricula. We have elementary, middle, high school and special ed lessons. So each of those are kind of a different binder of lessons, and it was developed... Flash was originally developed here in King County in the '80s actually to just really fill a need that we saw locally for high quality sexual health education lessons that teachers could use in their public school classrooms, so obviously it has been updated since the '80s, both for medical advances, but also as what we've learned about how to do effective sexual health education has changed, that field has grown a lot in the last 20 years, and so we update Flash as we... When we know better, we do better, and so we've updated it in that way, and even though it started here just in King County, Flash is used now all over the United States... In all parts of the United States, I think in the last... We were just looking at this, and in the last five years, I think we have sold Flash in... I think it's 41 different states here in the US and internationally. 04:52 ML: Wow. 04:52 KK: Yeah, so it just has really... I think that need that we saw here and King county is the same need that exists elsewhere, and the lessons were really developed, as you know, because you were part of helping to develop some of those lessons, they're really developed with teachers and students in mind, and they're developed in partnership with schools, and we get a lot of feedback from schools and we refine and revise them, so I think one of the other reasons that it tends to be so popular is that it is just such a good match for schools, whereas some other curricula have been developed for use in out-of-school settings and then get sort of lifted and adapted for use in the classroom, or school sometimes use textbooks which cover information that you need, but don't have more of that, but don't have that same kind of theoretical backing that sex ed, evidence-based sex ed curricula have, and so Flash kinda fills this, hits that sweet spot really of being well-designed for schools, but also being firmly grounded in Public Health land and being a curricula that's designed to change behavior so that it can prevent pregnancy and STDS. 06:09 KK: Is that what you asked me or did I just start talking about a whole bunch of stuff? 06:13 ML: Oh, no, that's what I asked you, I think I asked you to tell me about it and you definitely did. 06:16 KK: Okay. Yeah. 06:18 ML: I really like Flash. I mean, the thing that I have noticed as we went through this process of updating it and pilot testing it, which is something that I was not super familiar with going into classrooms and leading lessons, is how interactive it is, and how much stuff there is for students to do that it's not just someone talking at them, there are really all these activities for people to engage with. 06:49 KK: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, what we do in Flash is we... Well, we have a few goals, so the goals of the program, of the middle and high school lessons in particular are to decrease teen pregnancy, to decrease STDS, including HIV, to decrease sexual violence, to increase family communication, and to just generally improve students' knowledge about sexual health and so we do that by being really grounded in the literature about effective sexual health and sexual violence programming, and being really grounded in the most current educational literature, and so we know that students learn best when they can be engaged, when the activities feel relevant and personal to them, where there's opportunities for them to contribute and be taken seriously, but where they're not put on the spot, right? Where they feel respected, where they're not judged or shamed, so we try to put all of those things together and then just really follow what the literature has to say about promoting positive attitudes and promoting positive peer norms and helping young people develop the skills that they need to be able to prevent pregnancy and STDS for themselves and to prevent themselves from committing an act of sexual violence. 08:23 ML: So why don't we get into a little bit about the sexual violence prevention lessons, because I know those were changed so much, and we went through a really long rigorous process of updating those, and so I'm wondering if you could share some of the changes that we made through that process and why we chose to do that. 08:43 KK: So the Sexual Violence lessons... You're right, we did really... When we... The high school curriculum was completely redesigned in 2015, and so the sexual violence lessons were a part of that redesign, but all of the lessons were really redesigned mostly to really align as tightly as possible with the most current research, and there was some new research about sexual violence prevention at that time, that was really helpful to us. So the sexual health lessons align with primarily with a set of risk and protective factors that were identified by Karin Coyle and Doug Kirby at ETR and Associates, and you can find those in a publication called Emerging Answers, and so those protective factors are really what let us know that we needed to focus on promoting positive attitudes and positive peer norms... So positive attitudes about birth control, positive attitudes about abstinence, positive peer norms means that you believe that your peers are also doing these things like protecting themselves from pregnancy and STDs. So that's our approach in Flash. And around the same time that we were doing this re-development, not long before the sexual violence prevention field had also started to really... There had been an article that came out that the CDC really helped to distill and put up on their website in this really useful way that really laid out a set of... 10:27 KK: At the time, it was entirely risk factors, now there's a few protective factors also, but risk factors for committing an act of sexual violence, and I think that's a really important thing to point out. The literature in general is really clear that the way that you prevent sexual violence is that you help prevent people from committing acts of sexual violence as opposed to trying to help people prevent their own victimization... The research is clear that there's not a lot you can do to help people prevent their victimization, and that at a population level, even if you could prevent individual people from being victimized, if you don't stop that act of sexual violence, then it's just that a different person becomes a victim, you haven't actually lowered your overall population levels of sexual violence, so anyway, just to be super clear, that's the approach that we take in Flash, and that's the approach that the CDC takes, those risk factors on their... That they've laid out so nicely, if you just Google CDC Sexual Violence Risk Factors, you'll just pop them right up. So we used those risk factors in the same way that we use risk and protective factors and the rest of the curriculum to design our lessons to try to impact those risk factors, which were primarily attitudes and beliefs just the same as... Right? 12:00 ML: Right. 12:01 KK: So it fits overall into the theory of reasoned action, which is the overall theoretical underpinnings for the curriculum, so it really helped us put together this very cohesive package and a chunk... A sizable chunk of those risk factors, we also have to think about What are risk factors that we can meaningfully impact in a classroom setting. So there may be risk factors that exist in, say, the neighborhood level that we can't do a lot about, or risk factors that are related to a person living in poverty when... And although we could... Certainly that schools can't partner with other organizations to do things to alleviate that, in a sex ed curriculum, that's not a thing that we can make a big impact on. So really drilling down on what do we think we can impact, and we do think that we... We know that we can impact attitudes and beliefs in the classroom, and most of those attitudes and beliefs are actually about gender, so the CDC very clearly lays out that rigid belief in gender stereotypes, and in particular, hostility towards women and hyper-masculinity that these are all risk factors that place people at risk of committing an act of sexual violence, so those are not the only things that we look at in the sexual violence lessons, but it certainly is a very important thing that we look at, both in those lessons and really across the curricula. 13:35 KK: And then we looked at other effective practices like what was really the best way to reset a norm, for example, as we're looking at positive peer norms, so we incorporated a small norm like social norms campaign that draws on what they would call hyper-local data from that classroom to help students, if you're not familiar with social norms campaigns, it's about... It's based on this, on the phenomenon that people, all people, not just young people, believe that their peers or that other people are taking more risks than they actually are in real life. And that even though we would all like to believe that it's not true of us, it is true that we modify our behavior, based on what we think other people are doing, and so social norms campaigns help draw out that super local data to show people what the folks around them really do believe and what they really are doing, so that that can shift people's consciousness about what is normal, if you will, or a common typical behavior, and it leads everyone then to take less risk, so those social norms campaigns are used in public health about a whole variety of things, and we included a small social norms campaign in Flash. 15:02 KK: And then finally, one of the other really compelling pieces of evidence is that folks who commit acts of sexual violence are also more likely to have a... Is it called affirmation bias, I may have just said the wrong word, but they're basically they're more... They're more likely to interpret an ambiguous response as a yes, right. So they need help understanding, they need help really concretely understanding what is and is not consent, because they're more likely to interpret a vague response as permission to engage in sexual activity when in fact it's not. So we did a lot of work on really helping to get really crystal clear on consent. So those are some of the things that we did and that redesign that drew from what was a pretty new research at the time. And I'm just so excited that we were able to do it because you know, Flash is one of the only comprehensive sex ed curricula that have sexual violence prevention lessons in them, and certainly that have these kind of evidence-informed lessons in them. And then just one more thing... Then I feel I am talking a lot but I'll just say one more thing, which is that... 16:27 ML: It has paid off. 16:27 KK: So we were just able to evaluate Flash and I wanna say... 16:32 ML: That is what I was wondering. 16:33 KK: Oh yes, yes, we were able to. And I am sad to say that we weren't able to evaluate the sexual violence outcomes, but we will be doing some analysis on the gender beliefs and on the homophobia scale to see how we were able to impact those, and I know already that we had some positive impact on homophobia beliefs. And so I'm hopeful about some of the other stuff. We don't have that yet, but we do know that this model that I'm describing is an effective model because we did show that Flash was effective at changing behaviors and attitudes and beliefs that are related to teen pregnancy and STD, so Flash is now like a proven program or an evidence-based program related to teen pregnancy and STD prevention, and if we can ever find... Maybe there's a listener right now... 17:29 ML: Yes. Attention researchers who are listening. 17:34 KK: Yes, we would very much like to review Flash for its sexual violence impact because we feel... I mean, maybe we're wrong, but we feel really confident in this approach. It's very tightly tied to the research and so... But anyway, that was a long answer to your question. 17:57 ML: Oh, I think it's great. You're really getting at the things that I was hoping you would be able to share and talk about, and it brings back so many good memories of being in the classroom doing pilot testing and telling students like, "Okay, we're testing this, so tell us what we're messing up," and we messed up a lot of stuff with like... TikTok was not out yet, but we were like, do people go on Facebook still? And even then they were like, "No, not really," they have lots of corrections for us. And the social norms resetting survey was one of the most interesting pieces to me, just because you get to really get back data from the students and then, you know, you crunch the data, a little bit, but it's not too hard and you present it back to folks and it does make people go, "Oh, okay, people are really more like me than I thought, and that means that I can feel better in the good decisions that I'm making or the good decisions that I wanna make." And that was really fun. 19:00 KK: It's amazing Mo actually too that it works every single time. And we've taught this... Now those lessons in particular because of the evaluation, Flash has been taught so many times with exact Fidelity as a part of that evaluation, and then also, like I said two people just use it all over and every time... I mean, I know this and yet it continues to be surprising to me that every time in every classroom students think that their peers are less likely... That their peers value consent less than they do, that their peers are more likely to pressure or coerce or force someone to have sex than they would be. Just every time, in every setting, even in juvie, everywhere that we've done it, everywhere. It's really compelling to me. 20:00 ML: It makes me feel really hopeful, I feel like you could do a survey with people who do sexual assault prevention work, and we'd probably have a similar thing that happens where maybe that's just our human... The thing you were talking about, our human bias of that our decisions are better or... Yeah, better somehow... [chuckle] 20:19 KK: Well, or We really... Or we really underestimate our peers, or I don't know what... Or we're so influenced by other messages or... I don't exactly know what it is, but it's clearly true. 20:35 ML: I love it, and I love that it keeps happening. And it's so compelling, and it's such a good memory of that. So let me ask you this question because we were talking a little bit about the evaluation of Flash and how there's not a ton of things out there for sexual assault prevention that is considered evidence-based in this way, where there's a rigorous testing, a randomized controlled trial, all of that kind of stuff, we have a lot of things that are very specific to communities. A lot of frameworks that people can use and do really great work. So one of the things that I am wondering about Flash in particular, is that because students are not the same everywhere, it's being used in a lot of different places, and students are not all the same race or ethnicity, they don't all have the same cultural backgrounds or religious beliefs or family structure, or gender and sexual orientation, there's just so much diversity within groups of students and different populations of schools and students, I'm just wondering how Flash meets those needs as a single curriculum. 21:49 KK: Yeah, it's such a good question. And I think it's really important to have some of these programs that you were mentioning that are really targeted, programs for youth who have been in foster care, programs for youth in urban settings, programs for native youth, programs for queer youth. I think those programs are really important, and I think from a public health perspective, it's also really important to have something that exists at the population level, and so because this is... Because I work for public health, Flash is very much a public health curriculum. That is what we try to do is create this thing that works in that way. And we thought that it did, and I would say that the evaluation helped us see that it really does. Our evaluation sites were in the Midwest and in the South, and they were in urban, rural and suburban districts, and we got a lot of feedback about how Flash worked, and it worked really well in all of those settings, so I feel confident now to say that the approaches that we use are pretty broadly applicable. There are modifications that people make sometimes primarily to the names and the scenarios and they need to make things feel more relevant, but there's also just... 23:16 KK: There are practices, I think, embedded in Flash that help it to be really responsive to whoever is there using it, so for example, the Flash value question protocol, which is just a really critical component, a core component of that curriculum is... 23:35 ML: One of my favorite things. 23:37 KK: It is? [chuckle] 23:39 ML: I feel like... Yeah. We could... I feel like we could all use it in our lives, like answering hard questions, or your kid gives you this question and you're like, I actually don't know how to answer that, and you can use that values protocol. 23:50 KK: Well, it's really helpful for when you're trying to... What it is, is that the protocol for answering a question about a value or about a value-laden topic, and so for teachers, it's really important that teachers not share their values about these topics, because that is exactly how you do not meet the needs of all of those students in the classroom, these students come with a whole variety of different values and beliefs, informed by their own lives, but also of course by their families, by their faith, by their culture, by their experiences, and we need to respect and really honor that diversity of opinion, and that's honestly that's also how you create a climate that is safe and in which everyone can feel like they can really learn this material. So anyway, that protocol, that set of steps that we have that helps teachers or facilitators answer questions in this way that shares a breadth of values about the topic as opposed to answering with a one concrete answer that would really alienate parts of your classroom, that's a really important way that we meet the needs of the diverse group of learners that's in front of us. We also have family homework assignments, that are about values. 25:19 KK: So students have homework, they're not required, they're optional assignments, but each Flash lesson has a either an individual or a family homework, so the students get to choose for themselves, and those homework assignments with parents or guardians with... We say with, we say with family or someone who is like family, is how we sort of... We wanted to be open so that people can talk to the folks who are meaningful in their lives, but we also are not really trying to invite predators to come and do these homework assignments with kids. And I can say that 'cause we're here on this Sexual Violence podcast, so people understand what I'm saying. 25:52 ML: Yeah. 25:54 KK: But those assignments are about... They give these adults, these meaningful adults and kids lives an opportunity to share values and expectations that are really specific to maybe, maybe not to their community, to their experience, to their faith. And so that's another way I think that we are really responsive and also really transparent and really just lay... These things are more... They lay the framework, you know what I mean? For that kind of responsiveness, because obviously we can't know all the places where Flash is being used, it's not as if we could say all the things, you know what I mean? 26:37 ML: Right. 26:38 KK: We do also really try and... To speak really concretely and matter factly about trauma, about oppression, about power imbalance, and we try to just name those things and be really upfront about them, which I think also helps. I think that helps the curriculum feel really responsive to all of the young people who are participating in it, and in terms of LGBTQ inclusivity in particular, that's one of the goals... Well, it's not a behavioral goal it's a curriculum, but it's one of the fundamental goals of the curriculum is to be a really inclusive curricula in that way. And so we have a whole set of strategies that we employ throughout the whole curricula to really make sure that queer youth really see themselves in the curriculum and see it as being relevant for them. 27:32 ML: I'm so happy to be talking to you about this and getting to hear how far Flash is going and how people are using it. I do have this question about the situation that we're in now, with... [chuckle] I mean, it's a thing. [laughter] Only people are not in school. And so I've just been really wondering this, and I don't know why I haven't reached out to you before now to say, what actually is happening, but I'm really curious about Flash being used online, is that a thing that can happen? Is it happening right now? Do you have information about that? 28:11 KK: Yeah, it's a really good question. People are doing... I mean, what a time for creativity, schools are trying and doing so many different things, so... It's just been fascinating. We have been thinking... We've been working on developing some asynchronous online Flash lessons, and so we have some high school lessons developed now, that we're just piloting right now. And that should be available very soon for anyone who already... Has already purchased Flash or it would come with the purchase of the Flash license or the hard copy of the curricula. But the foundational practices of Flash to be inclusive, to be trauma-informed, to have healthy boundaries, to... You know what I mean? Thinking about how to do all of that stuff in an online format has been really interesting. Also we were like, Gosh it's... We decided really early on that we needed to be asynchronous because students just don't have equitable access to the Internet, and people don't have private spaces always in their home. And the home is the site of trauma for a lot of young people, and so asking them to sit and do a live Sex Ed class is... 29:49 KK: We just didn't think... We didn't think it was trauma-informed, we didn't think it was equitable, and we didn't think it was trauma-informed. But I understand why people are doing it, it's no shade to people who have made a different decision because also you can't really develop skills, if that's what you're trying to do with a fully asynchronous. There's very few skill... You can't do a condom demo, you can't... You know what I mean? You can't... It's... What you can do is limited. Also, of course, young people who are experiencing so much stress, they can only just sit and do a lesson or watch a video, or they can just only do it for so long, it's just like we would say... I'm from Texas, we would say, "It's like trying to get blood from a turnip." You can't. It's just... It's not there. You know what I mean? You just can't do it. So what we decided is that we just had to make some very hard decisions, we decided to focus on promoting positive attitudes because we felt like that was a thing that we could likely do, and we made lessons short and we made them asynchronous, and we made them such that they could even just be... 31:02 KK: The packets could be printed up and handed out out so that people didn't have to access the internet if they couldn't. So that's... Like I say, we're piloting all of that right now, but those were the considerations that we... The things that we took into consideration. And we also were very concerned about relatedly in asynchronous lesson, we were really concerned about handling students questions in this online format, we were concerned about people sending questions back and forth across the Internet to each other or typing them in the chat or... We just felt like it was... We really want people to get their questions answered, but we also were really concerned about how to really hold healthy boundaries. So I think what we had to just really remind ourselves is that there's some stuff you have to give up to do it this way, but obviously we're all giving up a bunch of stuff already right now, there's not a solution for this, just like there's not a solution for any of the rest of it, we just have to do the very best that we can do and be ready to let go of what can't be done. 32:14 ML: Yeah, that's so true. And I really like hearing the considerations that you have brought into thinking about what really rises to the top, What's the thing that we can do in this way that we're able to. And what's the most important, what can we get done. It is a time of weird creativity, there's some fun things that are happening that I think is really great, even in an unfortunate time. Well, this is really... I'm just so happy that we have gotten to talk about this, I have been actually taking some notes of things that you've mentioned so that I can put them in the podcast notes so that people can... 32:56 KK: Oh, Okay. 32:57 ML: Download them or find them. 33:00 KK: I think it's probably on the website where people can look at Flash. But I think I would also just say that if people had questions about Flash, they can email Flash@kingcounty.gov. And that's our Flash inbox and so we can answer their questions there, and I think... I also wanna say... I didn't get a chance to mention earlier some... So high school Flash is a 15-Lesson curricula that covers all these goals about STDs and pregnancy and sexual violence, but we also have had, in addition to schools, we've worked with a lot of sexual violence centers across the United States who have bought Flash specifically to use the sexual violence lessons that are in it, so just a reminder that that's a thing that can happen, because I know when I was working as a sexual violence prevention educator, I was just scrambling, looking for lessons all the time to teach with young people, I was adapting things or making things up or... So I think some folks have been so pleased to be able to buy the curriculum and then they have this ready-to-go set of lessons right there, and all the better if your district is using Flash and so it fits right into it, but even if they're not, they're just really solid sexual violence prevention lessons, and so people should definitely... Folks in the field should definitely think of Flash as a resource in that way. 34:32 ML: I agree. They're not too long either. They're pretty short and snappy and they give you the information, and they build on each other and... Yeah, I really like it. I'm such a fan. It's just been really nice getting to talk to you about this, getting to hear about the updates with Flash, how it's doing, especially about the evaluation and hearing all the people who are using it around the country. That's just so exciting. So thanks for being here Kari. 35:00 KK: Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been super fun to get to talk about this with you and I especially... You know that it's... Sexual violence prevention is near and dear to my heart, so especially when I get to talk with folks about the sexual violence component, I'm always so pleased to be able to do it. [music] 35:35 ML: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource On The Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.