Sexual assault, according to criminal law professor Khiara M. Bridges, who outlines strategies to teach it properly:
[F]irst, I avoid any attempts at humor during the unit, which is a departure from my approach to the rest of the class. Criminal Law frequently involves people doing horrible things to other people. The fact patterns of the cases are awful much of the time. So, as a professor, one could go into the classroom and lament man’s inhumanity to fellow man for an hour and a half; or, one could treat it like a dark comedy. I typically choose the latter. I prefer the Fargo approach to the There Will Be Blood approach … except during the unit on sexual assault.
In the comments section, Andrew Selbst makes a salient point:
One thing that gives the sexual assault class an added sensitivity requirement is that you can be pretty sure no one in the class has been murdered, but it’s quite possible (likely, even?) in a large class that someone has been sexually assaulted. Even if you extend the consideration to people knowing someone who was a victim, rapes are much more common, yet harder to talk about. I’d be more likely to share that a friend was murdered than raped, because it’s less of a private thing. So perhaps there’s a gendered element to it, but I think there’s more to it than that, for sure.
The Dish 