Abstract
Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses is an edited volume that provides a comprehensive overview of the issues related to sexual assault, relationship violence, and stalking on college campuses. Chapters were written by researchers and academics from diverse fields, including criminology, sociology, social work, women and gender studies, and psychology, as well as by practitioners like Title IX coordinators, victim service staff, and student activists. The end result is a well-rounded collection of chapters that provide an orientation to the core issues related to gender-based violence on college campuses.
The book begins with a preface that acknowledges that the book’s publication coincides with a period of retrenchment in terms of the policies that direct campus response to gender-based violence. The drastic shift in policy around this issue actually heightens the need for a volume such as this one that carefully considers the scope, causes, and consequences of violence on college campuses as well as the historical evolution of policy responses.
The first section of the book includes chapters introducing the extent and context of sexual violence, relationship violence, and stalking on campus, as well as two contributing risk factors, unhealthy masculinity and alcohol use. Part II shifts attention to the major policies that shape campus responses, including chapters on Title IX, the Clery and SaVE Acts, and the White House Task Force, and how these policies have shaped campus services and reporting policies. Part III focuses on prevention and awareness efforts including campus climate surveys, bystander intervention, engaging men in antiviolence efforts, and student activism. The final section of the book points toward current dilemmas and future directions.
While the introductory chapters are important for orienting readers to the extent, nature and consequences of interpersonal violence on college campuses, they will primarily be useful to those with little to no familiarity with the issues. Some of the most important contributions of the book, however, are the chapters in Part II which detail the evolution of the policies that shape campus attention to sexual assault. These chapters provide a careful, thorough, and contextualized summary of how and why these policies came to be, the promise they offer in the long struggle to end violence against women, and the unintended consequences of policies like mandatory reporting. The chapter on student activism in Part III, written by a student activist, complements the policy chapters in Part II. The author, a survivor and student activist, aptly points out that student activism around sexual violence challenges narratives of victims as helpless and vulnerable while also detailing how students built on a historical legacy of antiviolence activism by turning their intellectual curiosity and academic training toward researching how Title IX complaints were being resolved and devising effective means of influencing policy through the savvy harnessing of social media. While researchers and practitioners in the area of campus sexual assault are one obvious audience for these chapters, students in courses on violence and victimology, public policy, and the role of advocacy and community organizing in the policy-making process would benefit from reading these portions of the book. These chapters cover the intricacies of the policies without being overly technical and could therefore be used successfully at a variety of educational levels.
While no book can cover all topics related to violence against women on college campuses, some notable topics that were not addressed with much depth in this volume include attention to college student perpetrators of gender-based violence (extent, nature, causes, or treatment), alternatives to adjudication including restorative justice, the full range of campus contexts and how these issues may manifest differently on community college campuses and at trade schools, and victim trauma and effective treatment. In addition, theory is only directly and deeply addressed in one chapter that focuses primarily on two feminist theoretical perspectives, male peer support theory and feminist routine activities theory.
Despite these few omissions, the book overall is successful at addressing a range of topics related to gender-based violence on college campuses. Social work audiences will appreciate that the book weaves together attention to individual experiences of victimization, organizational responses, and policy contexts.