Safe Dates is a three-to-four-day Hazelton Betty Ford Foundation course about healthy relationships, and for nearly 20 years, Buffy Queen has been bringing it to Haywood middle schools. 

She started at KARE House, a Haywood County advocacy center responding to child abuse and neglect through outreach and intervention, after a grant enabled the nonprofit to train a staff member through the nationally recognized curriculum. 

As grant funding began to dwindle — and eventually stopped — she still believed Safe Dates was necessary. So, in 2009 she started looking around.

REACH of Haywood County, a nonprofit “dedicated to supporting survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, elder abuse and human trafficking” through “comprehensive, trauma-informed services,” seemed the perfect place to house a long-term program.

Queen contacted then-Executive Director Julia Freeman and proposed Safe Dates exist within the organization through the lens of prevention.

Freeman immediately expressed her support.  

“[She] said, ‘Our boards just started talking about prevention, because we handle everybody who comes in who’ve had those violent relationships in their life, sexual assault, elder abuse, whatever. But we really need prevention,” Queen recounted.

That’s how she became responsible for REACH’s prevention arm.

For seventh graders, Safe Dates consists of three interactive workshops centering relationships through unhealthy and healthy communication: what each looks like, how to distinguish the former and how to use the latter.

“We do a lot of fun things, like dating bingo and all kinds of stuff like that. I give them a lot of gifts for doing their homework and for participating in class, helping me carry all my stuff in,” Queen said.

The eighth-grade curriculum also involves a review of healthy and unhealthy relationships — including psychological disorders that might play a role in the psychology of an abuser. The third session involves how to help a friend who might be going through something akin to abuse. This workshop, Queen explained, encourages empathy for rather than blame of assault survivors, even as students learn how to better protect themselves from this form of violence during the final class.

REACH sends each student home with a resource packet introduced by a letter about the class — it does not encourage early dating, is free of sexually explicit content and prepares children to identify red flags they might later encounter — addressed to parents and/or guardians.

Additionally, the packet encourages parents to believe their children in the event of an assault disclosure. It explains how to “keep your teen safe on a date” and how to spot warning signs of dating abuse.  

After reading through the handouts, parents usually express excitement with the material.

“The most [common] thing I get from parents and from kids who come tell me what their parents said, is their mom says, ‘Boy, I wish I’d had this when I was your age,’” Queen recounted.

But she’s been at it so long that some former students are now adults.

“I was going into the grocery store at Ingles and two young gals come out. They say, ‘Oh, hi, Ms. Queen,” she said.  

“I’m now starting to ask the baggers, ‘Were you in my Safe Dates class?’” 

KARE House

While no longer present at the middle school level, KARE house is still Haywood’s go-to for its elementary school education program.

The group was founded in 1981 as a prevention-based organization, after a group of advocates discovered Haywood was the top county for child abuse in North Carolina, according to Chief Executive Officer Abby Bearden.

While the curriculum has changed and developed over time, the foundation has continued.

Students discuss safe and unsafe touch and how to identify trusted adults using “fun and child-friendly and age-appropriate” course materials, Bearden said.

Children also learn the three rules of body safety and what to do if one is broken, such as saying no, leaving the situation and telling a trusted adult.

The program spans kindergarten through fifth grade and is largely repetitive, she told The Smoky Mountain News, likening it to a fire drill. In other words, while it’s uncommon for a body boundary to be violated, you want to be prepared in case it does.

However, the curriculum does not aim to instill fear; it is meant to empower.

“It’s really coming from a place of, ‘Hey, you have a voice. You can use it to speak up. You have people in your corner who love you and want you to be safe. You just have to talk to them, you know, you have to let them know,’” said Bearden.

And when students graduate elementary school, continuity is ensured through the Safe Dates program.

“When Buffy [Queen] goes in and is teaching kids about healthy relationships, it’s building on that same material of, ‘Hey, if anybody is crossing a body boundary in any way or making you feel uncomfortable or unsafe, you can do something about it,’” she said.

In the classroom

Queen began her fourth session on April 16 by posing two questions to the eighth-grade class at Waynesville Middle School: Who wants to avoid being a rapist, and who wants to avoid being sexually assaulted?

The group processed her inquiry, and hands shot up from the audience. Everyone was keen to stay clear of both.

The REACH educator, while emphasizing that sexual assault can happen to anybody, told students she’ll be sharing tools about how to recognize, prevent and defend oneself against it.

Then, she walked the room, giving all who had completed last night’s homework permission to grab a snack at the back table. After everyone had returned to their seats, she instructed the group to take out their packets and turn to the sheet with nine true-or-false statements related to sexual assault.

As students were evaluating the statements, Queen wrote a message on the whiteboard.

“Sexual assault is not about passion; it is an act of violence. S/A is a way of using sex as a weapon to gain power or hurt someone,” it said.

Individual answers were graded through a peer swap as one student volunteer read aloud and identified the correct answer to each statement.

During the exercise, Queen corrected the misconception that perpetrators appear mentally ill or creepy, emphasizing that most assaults happen between acquaintances. She explained that rape is any forced sexual activity, regardless of prior consented sexual activity — and that force usually involves verbal coercion, persistent attempts and teasing, rather than physical harm.

“We talk about active consent — that’s really, really important, and you must always know that your partner is very much OK and enthusiastic about what you might want to do with them on a physical, personal nature,” she told The Smoky Mountain News before the class, noting that this person must be sober, awake, enthusiastic and verbal.

“I let them know I’m not talking about necessarily, you’ve been dating somebody for six months, and you know when they would like you to kiss them … But if you’re first starting a relationship or you want to do something new with someone, always be sure that you have active consent,” she added.

But what happens if you’re on the other side of the equation?

Queen posed an example to the class involving someone tearing at your clothes with their arms wrapped around you.

“What can you do right then, to disable them, to stop them, just for a second, so you get away?” she asked.

“You can kick them. Then you can hit them with your shoe. You can slam the door on an arm. Whatever you want to do. You don’t have to kill them, but you can do whatever you need to do to stop it. Everybody understand that that is called self-defense. That’s allowed,” she said.