In the following years of the Steeb Hall rape case of 1983 where six athletes were accused of rape of an OSU sophomore that concluded with no indictments and mild university repercussions, sparked a growth in efforts in rape education and prevention.  In March of 1983, a month after the incident, President Jennings approved a campus-wide rape prevention and education program after three anti-rape protests pressured him into it (Dill,1). The Center for Women’s Studies and Women Against Rape (WAR) would work together in implementing workshops and other preventative measures. WAR had been doing such initiatives for the last decade, but only then were they given the funds to expand their efforts (Schimpf, 1).

The rape education and prevention program called for an evaluation of the effectiveness of rape education, an evaluation that Mary Margaret Fonow and Laurel Richardson, employees of The Ohio State University at the time, and Virgina Wemmerus, a researcher at the Ohio Department of Mental Health, were interested in conducting. A few years after the implementation of the rape education and prevention program, Fonow and colleagues began the study, which was orignally published in 1988 (Pierce, 3). Below is a clip of an interview conducted with Mary Margaret Fonow, in which she provides insight into the effectiveness of rape prevention and education through the study, titled, “Feminist Rape Education: Does it Work?”.

The study consisted of 14 OSU introductory Sociology classes (a sample of 582 students), in which the classes were randomly assigned either a video, workshop, or no education. Students that were assigned the workshop or video were pretested with a questionnaire on rape, and were post-tested three weeks later (Fonow et al., 113). Using the “rape-myth scale”, which essentially included the who, what, when, where, and whys of rape, Fonow and colleagues found that  students who participated in the workshop or video had considerably lower rape-myth acceptance scores than students who received no rape education or only received the pretest (Fonow et al., 117). Likewise, students who were given the pretest only had lower rape-myth acceptance scores than those who had no education, even if only by a small percentage (Fonow et al., 116).

The study found that, even though rape education can help change perceptions of rape for the better, men had typically had higher rates of rape-myth acceptance scores and gender conservatism (Fonow et al., 118). Fonow and colleagues proved that even one questionnaire makes a difference in rape education, which is promising for future rape prevention education efforts that continue to be needed to this day.