The materials in this collection come from three different sources, two of which are student clubs, and one of which is the administration.

The first student organization began its life as the Acquaintance Rape Peer Educators. The club was founded in 1991, after Kappa Kappa Gamma member Neeley Dillon attended a lecture on acquaintance rape hosted by Barbara (Panzl) Maxwell, the then assistant dean “responsible for Greek life, student discipline, and student leadership development” (1990-1991 student handbook). Dillon expressed interest in creating a group of students dedicated to educating fellow peers in acquaintance rape, and thus, the Acquaintance Rape Peer Educators was established, naming themselves after the policy Whitman adopted that same year (Whitman College Pioneer newspaper). The Acquaintance Rape Peer Educators would host forums (Pioneer) and weekly workshops. In 1998, the group would rename themselves to the Sexual Assault Prevention Educators, or SAPE (Pioneer). From 2000 to 2004, SAPE became inactive, but reorganized and rebranded themselves as Consent in 2005 (Pioneer). References to the Sexual Violence Prevention committee shortly predate Consent (Pioneer), and would eventually outlast the latter organization. As of 2025, the now Office of Sexual Violence Prevention is still active.

The second student organization is Whitman Involvement in Student Health, referred hereafter as WISH. Predating the Acquaintance Rape Peer Educators, WISH was founded in 1978, and sponsored events broadly dedicated to student health (Pioneer), and would even make appearances in the student handbook between 1984 and 1995 (student handbooks). Its inclusion in this collection is in regards to events associated with safe sex, such as sponsoring Love Carefully Month, the Speakeasy acapella charity performances, and the Renaissance Faire Fun Run (Collection). In 2003, WISH would host its eighteenth Speakeasy before being replaced by the Student Health Advisory Board, hereafter SHAC, in 2004 (Pioneer). While this replacement was not formally announced, SHAC would take over both WISH’s location in Welty Health Center, be listed in the student handbook (student handbooks) and begin conducting events formerly associated with WISH, such as the Speakeasy (Pioneer). The last SHAC event publicly advertised was the Speakeasy of 2011 (Pioneer).

Administration also accounts for documents in this collection. As previously stated, Whitman College adopted an acquaintance rape policy in 1991, and in 1992, the Student Union Building’s Women’s Center would host a Take Back the Night event (Pioneer). This event persisted into 2012, where it was most likely spear-headed by a separate student organization. Neal Christopherson would organize a sexual assault survey in 2006 and later publish those results in the Pioneer a year later (Pioneer). The college also subscribed to the Green Dot program in 2009 (Pioneer), but would later abandon the program some time after 2018. In 2023, the college would participate in another sexual assault survey, the Higher Education Data Survey Consortium; the results of the survey are also available in this collection. In 2024, the college adopted the “Culture of Respect” model for sexual assault response.