Teaching about sexual violence in digital learning environments

The use of local and nationwide lockdowns has been a necessary public health measure in the battle against the spread of COVID-19. Lockdowns have affected the higher education landscape by requiring university staff to shift their face-to-face teaching to either fully online, or blended, delivery modes. This shift to online delivery presents a pedagogical challenge for teachers of sensitive topics, such as sexual violence. Teaching about sexual violence safely requires a careful, considered and trauma-informed approach, usually established through building trust and rapport with students in the classroom. Building trust and rapport in the online environment, however, requires a redevelopment of traditional teaching approaches to ensure student safety. This reflexive commentary provides an overview of our experience when required to quickly teach an undergraduate criminology course about sexual violence in an online environment, brought about by a sudden lockdown due to COVID-19. We discuss the strategies and techniques we employed to safeguard and protect students completing our course in an online environment. These strategies may be of benefit to other university staff who are contemplating teaching sensitive topics online.