California is the first state to adopt the affirmative consent policy, but individual campuses already have (Chris Brown/ Flickr CC). 

This week, California became the first state in the nation to adopt an affirmative consent standard for sexual assault cases on university and college campuses. 

The standard, known as "yes means yes," applies to all public universities and private colleges that receive state funding. The law requires "an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity," and mandates training for all administrators and professors involved in the campus sexual assault adjudication process.

Sofie Karasek, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley and a co-founder of End Rape on Campus, worked with California legislators to pass the bill. As Karasek tells The Takeaway's John Hockenberry, she became an activist on this issue after being sexual assaulted during her freshman year of college. 

Michele Dauber, professor of law and sociology at Stanford University, explains how the standard operates in university settings. Dauber helped write Stanford’s "yes means yes" sexual assault policy, and she says that the mandated training is necessary to ensure that cases are properly adjudicated under an affirmative consent standard.

This story appears courtesy of The Takeaway.