Drunk sex or date rape?

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Rachelle Elsea
  • 325th Fighter Wing Public Affairs
TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --  Tyndall Air Force Base recently hosted the Brett Sokolow program, "Drunk Sex or Date Rape," at the 53rd Weapons Evaluation Group auditorium, in an effort to raise awareness of sexual assaults in the military.

The 90-minute program was an audience interaction based event.

"It allowed the audience to make a determination on an actual case by weighing the facts and deciding whether they thought the incident was drunk sex or rape," said Mrs. Phylista Dudinski, 325 Fighter Wing sexual assault response coordinator. "Then, they were told the outcome of the case."

Mrs. Dudinski's job, as the SARC, is to create a way for the military to align all responses to sexual assault through one focal point and to provide victim care, should anything happen.

"It is typical to invite other people to come in and speak, but, we are not always able to make that happen so we do a lot of in-house training," said Mrs. Dudinski. "We believe that training component is a huge aspect to preventing sexual assault because with awareness comes the ability to step in and diffuse situations that might escalate."

The base has become extremely focused on bystander intervention training in order to prevent incidents before they happen.

"I think one of the most important things to take away from the training today is the fact that sometimes what we see is normal social behavior, just drinking and partying can be camouflage for someone who wants to offend," said Mrs. Dudinski. "We need to be aware of those situations and maybe step in more often. The goal of this training was to provide more awareness, especially with spring break kicking off; we know there will be a lot of partying going on. This is the perfect time to really talk about drunk sex and date rape."