Rice University plans to add a required freshman course covering healthy relationships and sexual consent, a rare move as universities nationwide struggle to stem campus rapes and harassment.

The private Houston university of about 4,000 students hopes the five-week course along with multiple workshops will help prevent violent crime and sexual misconduct on campus and give victims the courage to report such incidents. Weekly lesson plans will cover communication, consent, domestic violence, stalking, harassment and how to intervene in dangerous situations.

In the domestic violence session, for example, students will define intimidation and emotional abuse. In the communication session, students will learn how to discuss expectations in a relationship. Students will come away with a greater understanding why groping, making sexual advances in person or via social media and using vulgar language, even while drinking at a party among friends and acquaintances, is unacceptable behavior.

"If a student fails to understand the concepts that we're giving them, they have a high probability of hurting someone else," said Rice's undergraduate dean John Hutchinson, whose office approved the new course called Critical Thinking in Sexuality. "And it's that, we can't put up with."

A national trend

The course followed outcry over results of a campus survey about sexual assault, domestic violence and harassment, which Rice released in the fall of 2015. Nearly a quarter of surveyed female undergraduates and 7 percent of male undergraduates said they had an unwanted sexual experience, ranging from being kissed without consent to rape. Those harrowing results saddened but did not surprise Rice leaders, Hutchinson said.

Nationally, the numbers are similar. A survey commissioned by the Association of American Universities last year of students attending the top U.S. research universities found that almost one in four female students and nearly 6 percent of male students said they were victims of sexual assault or rape. The survey is the most extensive nationwide on the topic, with responses from about 150,000 students at 27 of the country's most prestigious private and public colleges, including University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University.

In Texas this year, Baylor University's high-profile sexual assault scandal has underscored the depth of this problem on campus. Baylor's regents have said 17 women reported being victims of sexual violence - four of them alleged gang rapes - by 19 football players since 2011. After the allegations emerged in the spring, they led to the dismissal of head football coach Art Briles and the demotion and eventual departure of university President Ken Starr.

The national conversation on campus sexual assaults hit a fever pitch over the summer when former Stanford University student athlete Brock Turner received a six-month prison sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman after a fraternity party. He was released from jail after serving half the sentence. The victim wrote a chilling account of the explicit details of the attack on her that went viral. Her words prompted an emotional essay of support from Vice President Joe Biden.

At Rice, students last year began talking more openly about sexual assault on campus after the university's survey.

Jazz Silva, then a senior and the student government president, recalled a forum with hundreds of students. Many comments stressed a lack of education on the issue, and the idea for the course dawned on her then, she said. She began drafting ideas for the class using guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Her idea for the course wasn't immediately popular. Some students, Silva said, cited religious objections.

"It felt like we were speaking a different language," she said of the disconnect between supporters and critics of developing the new course. Organizers responded to concerns by moving some information on contraception, pornography and sexually transmitted infections to optional sessions beyond the mandatory program.

Teaching to prevent

Rice freshman Shomik Sen said the lesson from the Stanford case is that teaching information that could prevent sexual violence is extremely important. There's now "no debate" on campus that the new course is a good thing, Sen said.

Heather Imrie, who has nearly 20 years of experience working on campus sexual health and gender stereotype issues, said Rice's mandatory course is part of a nationwide shift in college sexual health education. Once, students were urged to keep an eye on their drinks at parties and park their cars in well-lit areas. Now, she said, best practices are thorough and preventative: "How do we change the behavior so that it doesn't happen in the first place?"

Imrie, program development director at educational consulting firm Catharsis Productions in Chicago, applauded Rice for breaking up the material into five weeks of lessons and making it a required course for freshmen.

"To my knowledge," she said, "I have not heard of any other school making this kind of commitment."

Allison Vogt, Rice's director of sexual violence prevention and Title IX support, will teach the pilot course in the spring. After that, she expects to hire contract employees with experience working with domestic and sexual violence victims to be instructors for the fall semester when the course becomes a requirement.

Student homework could include watching documentaries or reading journal articles, she said.

"We need more information about this in our time here, as much information as can be given" said Raena Panicker, a Rice senior from Houston studying cognitive science and psychology.

Setting a standard

A 2013 federal law mandates U.S. colleges and universities to teach sexual assault prevention to new students. Many Texas colleges meet the requirement by distributing written information to students or through student orientation sessions and online training.

Previously, new students at Rice learned about these issues in a 90-minute session during orientation week, an approach that resembles programming at many colleges statewide.

"If our pilot is successful, which we're optimistic that it will be, we do think this will set the gold standard that other universities are going to want to emulate," Hutchinson said. Several campus administrators and longtime education program experts interviewed could not name an existing mandatory course like this in Texas.

The University of Houston's Coogs Get Consent orientation session addresses dating and domestic violence, stalking and sexual assault. At University of Texas at Austin, in an hourlong mandatory session called Longhorns Take Care of Each Other, student volunteers act out scripted situations that new students may face, including substance abuse, sexual assault and stalking.

New students at Texas A&M University must attend an orientation session on how to report and intervene in a potential sexual assault. A separate program, like UT's, features performed scenes about consent, dating violence and sexual assault.

"It's more about bringing awareness to some of the situations you might face," said Cynthia Hernandez, assistant vice president for student affairs at Texas A&M.

Rice students interviewed recently said they barely remembered the sexual assault prevention session they attended during campus orientation. The week of programs before classes began was packed with information that blurred together, they said.

"It was hard to take it all in," said freshman Michelle Nguyen. Spreading it out in classes over five weeks is "a good idea," she said.