Abstract
Laura Beth Nielsen on balancing response with prevention efforts.
The numbers are so unnerving that many of us just try to forget. During their college years, between 20 and 25% of women students—and 5 to 10% of men students—will be sexually assaulted. More than half of those assaults will occur during the "red zone," before Thanksgiving break, usually during a student’s first year on campus. Those students who experience sexual assault are at urgent risk of severe consequences, including vastly a higher likelihood that their grades will plummet, they will drop out of school, they will increase risky behaviors like drinking and drug use, and that they will endure depression and suicidal thoughts and/or attempts.
Okay, it’s bad. Really bad. So, what are we doing about it? Universities have poured resources into policies, procedures, training, and support services that have done little—except, perhaps, to protect those institutions from liability.
For decades now, universities have poured resources into policies, procedures, trainings, and support services that have done little—except, perhaps, to protect those institutions from liability. Certainly, they have failed to reduce the numbers of sexual assaults happening on campuses. My own research with Kat Albrecht and Lydia Wuorinen in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis demonstrates that even after attending trainings, students do not understand Title IX policies nor the schools’ procedures. They do, however, understand the messages of the trainings as being more about the schools protecting their reputations than protecting the students from harm.
Meanwhile, policy debates about Title IX tend to focus on the particulars of disciplinary actions—say, on things like the standard for the burden of proof requirements in campus hearings (mini-trials) about sexual assault—instead of the problem of sexual assault, as recent work from Celene Reynolds, Elizabeth A. Armstrong, and Sandra R. Levitsky in the American Journal of Sociology demonstrates all too well. In other words, policymakers’ effort is often aimed at dealing with sexual assault after it happens rather than preventing it in the first place.
In keeping with what sociologists know about how people behave when they’re cynical about the law, vulnerable college students (mostly women and LGBTQ+) rely on one another to protect themselves from the sexual assault they know is so prevalent. They improvise and innovate a series of informal but practical protection strategies like whisper networks, blacklists, buddy systems, nonverbal signals, text check-ins, and a variety of other clever and possibly effective actions.
As for those who commit sexual assault, well, research shows that especially during the "red zone" period, the young male perpetrators (and they are overwhelmingly men) are unlikely to be irredeemable sociopaths who take pleasure in manipulation and cruelty. Some really don’t understand the depths of the harm they’re inflicting. Even in a deep blue state, some students will have come from abstinence-only sex education. Those students who have come from more restrictive backgrounds are particularly at risk for seriously misunderstanding and misreading others’ sexual intent and consent (because so many now in our institutions were socially isolated during the pandemic, they have had even less practice at navigating in-person social cues). Further, we know that college years are when many young people explore alcohol, drugs, sexual intimacy, and personal identity. And these are young men who grew up awash in hegemonic masculinity, making it all a volatile mix.
Speaking of which, sociologists of sex and gender often use terminology like "hegemonic masculinity" (a term coined by R.W. Connell in Gender and Power), but it’s worth saying it plainly. Culture has taught young men—and often young women too—some questionable lessons. The taken-for-granted gendered social order in which we live makes it difficult even to notice how it coarsens character, erodes empathy, and degrades trust among people. Many may genuinely believe that their groping, grabbing, or even pinning someone down and penetrating them is acceptable, if not entitled behavior.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We actually can set up university Title IX policies so that they reduce sexual assault—while simultaneously building more empathy, civility, and cooperation on our campuses.
Over and over, the research has told us the best way to reach young men who might otherwise commit sexual assault: Put them in the same room as sexual assault survivors—and have those survivors tell their stories. Let those survivors speak from the heart about the gravity of the harm, the profound sense of violation and vulnerability, the lost months unable to get out of bed, the fear of intimacy, the difficulty with trust. The 2014 White House Task Force for Preventing Sexual Violence on College Campuses summarizes much of sociology’s own important research about using trusted and influential voices to address social norms.
This process only works face-to-face; a computer module or Zoom call won’t get through. But my respondents tell me that being required to attend a session where they met and listened to a survivor changed their attitudes profoundly. After these meetings, those who attend report genuinely wanting to be sure that their partner is as into the sex they’re having as they are.
Training won’t affect those who engage in predatory behaviors. But for most young men, it’s a huge shift to recognize that what they thought was harmless fun might ruin someone’s life. They don’t want that on their conscience. And awakening that empathy can contribute to realizing how else they might affect others—whether through unrecognized racism, religious bias, or some other interaction across difference.
Preventing harm and building empathy through face-to-face listening sessions with people who have experienced sexual assault is an inexpensive, effective, and research-based practice.
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Ensuring that everyone on campus actually speaks in person with a trauma survivor is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Yet there are resources already in place. For instance, if you have trouble finding young women and men willing to talk about their experiences with sexual assault, look around: Your campus might have its own group of survivors who are ready to tell their stories. If not, national groups like Know Your IX or End Rape on Campus have trained survivors willing to participate in campus trainings.
It’s high time that we focus on students’ health and safety more than we worry about campus liability.
Administrators will tell you it’s hard to find time in those jam-packed welcome week events to squeeze in one more thing—especially something that has to reach everyone, from the sexually experienced to those steeped in abstinence-only messaging. But research shows that this is exactly what works— unlike a click-through training that gives your institution a digital record of having complied with Department of Education regulations (crucially, those impersonal modular trainings on socially sensitive topics not only don’t work—they can spur backlash).
Notable feminists ask us to go further, to go past preventing harm and train young people to ensure mutual pleasure—that is, to make sure that young people understand that everyone involved in any sexual encounter should feel pleasure. This is a truly laudable goal, but one that’s a hard sell in our highly polarized climate.
Preventing harm and building empathy through face-to-face information sharing is at least a very good, research-based, and inexpensive way to start retooling our campus Title IX policies. It’s high time that we focus on students’ health and safety more than we worry about campus liability.