Gender-based Violence on Campus: A Study Looking at Sex, Power, and Assault

Bob Davis

Patchwork is a podcast from the Office on Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington. Patchwork offers a glimpse behind the scenes of a legal movement called the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA. OVW provides federal grants to help women at local, state and national levels. Patchwork explains how our awards are made, shows what happens after funds arrive in communities and share stories of help and hope. Patchwork brings you the voices of people on the front lines combating domestic and sexual violence. Our efforts to serve victims and hold offenders accountable create stories that knit us together and propel us forward.

Welcome to Patchwork.

One of the top priorities at DOJ is preventing violent crime. At OVW, one area we focus on specifically is sexual assault on campus. We provide grant funding to support a wide range of services to promote justice and support victims of gender-based violence.

No two colleges are exactly alike and the people addressing sexual assault on campuses face very different challenges. While much of their work is focused on what happens after an assault has been reported, we all share the same goal of preventing violent crime, preventing sexual assault.

Today, we're joined by the authors of a book that takes a close look at sexual assaults at Columbia University. Jennifer Hirsh is professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia. She's also a steering committee member of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality. Shamus Kahn, now a professor of Sociology American Studies at Princeton, was professor and chair of sociology at Columbia when they two wrote the book Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus.

Before we get started, I want to acknowledge those of you who are sexual assault survivors. I want to let you know that our discussion today involves stories of assault, which can be hard to hear. And as a reminder, help is always available through the national hotline 1-800-656-HOPE, or 1-800-656-4673. You can also reach them via rainn.org, which is R A I N N dot O R G.

As a note, we recorded this discussion early in the pandemic before I learned the sound production value of conducting interviews from inside my coat closet.

We began the discussion with me asking Jennifer and Shamus what is different about a college campus that seems to make sexual assault appear predictable. So, Jennifer, with your background in public health, why is it important to understand the college ecosystem when we are trying to prevent harm?

Jennifer Hirsch

The conversation around campus sexual assault has really focused at the interpersonal level on the harm that one person can do to another person, and our job in public health is to build communities where people can thrive, where there's where it's easier for people to act in ways that don't harm other people. And so when I was looking at the conversation around campus sexual assault in 2014, it really looked to me like that prevention piece was that people were doing prevention work. Obviously, they were, but that a lot of the prevention work was focused on telling people to act better. And telling people to act better, that's not our A game in public health. Our A game in public health is changing the environment. And so we started the Sexual Health Initiative to foster transformation with the idea that if we understood the environment better, we could identify parts of that environment, both on campus and before campus, that we could change to make sexual assault less common as an element of campus life.

Bob Davis

Shamus, as a sociologist, you've studied many aspects of modern life, one of them being privilege. From a criminal justice perspective, the young man who is a college senior coerces or forces sex with freshman girls, appears like a serial rapist or perhaps a sociopath. You found deeper issues, though, desires and needs for things even like accomplishments. What should people know who are trying to prevent sexual assaults on campus about these men who I might call a predator?

Shamus Khan

Sure, you know that the focus on prevention, which Jennifer was just speaking about, also highlights a central idea of the book, which is that sexual assault is not one thing - it's many different things. And so Jennifer and I don't deny that there are predators out there, but what we point to is, you know, drawing upon a range of data that it's it seems unlikely that it's only predators out there. And in fact, it seems far more likely to us that the vast majority of assaults are not committed by sociopaths.

One of the really sort of surprising findings that we had in the book is that when we talk to people who committed assaults, often they described what they were doing as having sex. So one young man that we spoke to, we call him Eddie in the book, he told us this story of, you know, it's a long story in the book, but know, the very short version of the story is he went out on a date with this woman. She'd asked him out to a kind of sorority formal where the women were asking the men and he was on an athletic team, and so he wasn't drinking. He was in the middle of the season and she was drinking a lot. And at the end of the night, they end up back in his room. He was hoping they wouldn't, but they did. And he described to us having sex with her. But what he described was having intercourse with her as she went in and out of consciousness. One way to look at and actually as he described this story, he described himself as the aggrieved party, that he had this obligation. He wasn't happy about it. He was worried about his spot on the team. He was worried about what was going to happen the next morning. You know, one way to think about Eddie is that he's a sociopathic predator. Another is to think about why it was that he thought about that as having sex and how it is that, you know, that maybe the reasons that he was having the kinds of sex as he imagined it that he was having might explain one kind of assault.

And so in Sexual Citizens, what we do is we provide a conceptual apparatus that helps us understand the many different kinds of assaults that are happening on campus with particular attention to the ones that we think of as preventable.

Bob Davis

That's fascinating, Jennifer, you know, that story raises questions for me about the just the environment that we're sending our kids into. Talk a little bit about how that story of Eddie speaks to you from a public health standpoint.

Jennifer Hirsch

One of the things that we talk about in Sexual Citizens is the sexual geographies that characterize campus life, the ways in which space influences people's behavior. If you think about students walking into a dorm room, there are four pieces of furniture in that room. There is a desk, a desk chair, a dresser and a bed. And so students pretty much if you invite someone back to your room, there are going to be in the bed together. And a bed has a sexual meaning.

I think in that in the story of Eddie, there were a lot of other ways in which the sexual geography produce vulnerability. But we saw time and time again, though, the ways in which the actual physical environment of campus created situations in which there were unequal power hierarchies; two people in a room together in one person's space. And then if it's your space, you have more control. So, the reason space is so important is because it's a big lever of change on campuses. Right? There's a there's an unexamined assumption that older students should get better space. And what that means is that this just amplifies the power that they already have by being more developed, further along in their developmental processes and having stronger peer networks, and feeling more sure of their themselves, frequently having more sexual experience. So that totally modifiable phenomenon of giving better housing to upper classmen is something that we could question in terms of what structural prevention would look like.

Bob Davis

As you were telling that story, I got a sense of the feeling of the of the power inequity, too, because the seniors have been in that environment for years and knows that environment. And the freshman is all wide eyed. And, you know, they may not even know where everything is on campus yet is. Talk a little bit about the power and the role of power.

Shamus Khan

Yeah, I mean, you know, that if we think about the ways in which often campuses enforce, for example, drinking policies, one of the unintended consequences of having strict enforcement of drinking policies in freshmen hallways is that we often drive freshmen out of spaces that they control into spaces that more senior students control. And so, these are the kinds of things that Jennifer and I point to again and again. And what we're building upon is a classic orientation of early feminist scholarship about gender and power and the relationship between gender and power and sexual assault. But what we layer on to that is sort of thinking about the multiple forms of power and inequality that exist on campus. So this means thinking about the spatial inequalities, but also how those spatial inequalities relate to other kinds of inequalities, like class race and sexuality. And here the dimensions of race and sexuality are incredibly important for understanding sexual assault.

So, for example, every single black woman that we spoke to had a story of unwanted sexual touching. It bears repeating every single one. And you can think about that as gender-based misconduct. But in some ways, that misses the deeply racialized dimension of what's happening where, you know, it's hard to explain why that would be without also thinking about the fundamental disrespect for black women's bodily autonomy and how that disrespect for black women's bodily autonomy is one of the drivers of sexual assault. And so, what we're hoping to do is connect in an intersection away the ranges of inequalities that are existing on college campuses and beyond and think about them as modifiable factors that may help us address and prevent sexual assaults.

Jennifer Hirsch

And I think there's a there's a really important and very, very simple take home for campuses doing prevention work, which is that it's to de-silo the sexual assault prevention from work on diversity, equity and inclusion. They're not separate projects and yet administratively, they're frequently entirely separate offices. And so thinking about how to integrate work that make sure that every student feels included with work that prevents campus sexual assault, that's like news you can use if you're front line programing.

Bob Davis

That really resonates with me, because the LGBTQ stories in the book really showed me new details about that experience that I really didn't have a good appreciation for. So, it sounds like what you're saying is there are other places where those conversations can be had to help students with their well-being. That's not just focused on sexual assault specifically.

Shamus Khan

Absolutely, I mean, you began with this question about sort of masculinity and power, and our point is not that masculinity and power don't matter, but it's also to point out that no generations now of sexual assault researchers have noted that some of the highest rates of assault are among the LGBTQ plus population. And the reason for that is not just we're not even close to just hegemonic or toxic masculinity. It's not the football team that is responsible for these kinds of assaults. It's frequently happening within that community. And so we have to ask, why is that the case? And what Jennifer and I point to is the ways in which sexual shame, silencing of particular kinds of identities, the sort of negation of the very existence of LGBTQ people in high school, sex ed in families and in broad communities like disproportionate risks that these students are experiencing. And so one of the things that we have to do is think about the sort of broad equity and inclusion project as part of moderating that risk.

Bob Davis

That's a great point.

Jennifer, I wanted to ask you where shame is talked about shame in silos. I mean, we're always really careful not to blame victims, have them feel blamed for being assaulted as a result. I think there's sometimes lessons from encounters that that could be shared. And reading these wonderful stories that folks shared with you really helped me understand better this environment that they're entering.

What would you want for people to glean from insights from stories that are really richly detailed? I mean, these stories where we're really we're really moving. How did you all do this? How what were the logistically how did you get people to open up so much? Because you talk to people who committed assault and you talked to victims. I mean, this is how the heck did you do this?

Shamus Khan

So this was part of a massive study, so Sexual Citizens is a qualitative study embedded within a broader study that Jennifer co-lead with a clinical psychologist, Claudette Mallon's, and that was the sexual health initiative to foster transformation in that broader study.

There were two quantitative survey instruments, one, a random population survey where we actually got a 66% response rate, which is pretty astonishing. And then a diary study that sort of looked at like people's experiences over time. And in addition to those quantitative instruments, Jennifer and I led the qualitative study. And in that qualitative study, there were sort of three ways in which we gathered information. The first is we interviewed students, so we interviewed 151 students. And these were about two-hour interviews about their experiences before college, their experiences in college, and then their experiences with sex and with sexual assault. And for 25 of those students, there was so much to talk about that we did up to three rounds of interviews, so spent about six hours with them. We also…

Jennifer Hirsch

Just to be clear, there's so much to talk about is multiple instances of assault and not just that they had a lot of things to say.

Shamus Khan

Yeah. I mean, and, you know, this drawing on the quantitative portion, you know, people who experience assault women in particular experience on average, three assaults. So when someone says that they've been sexually assaulted, that means on average they have been assaulted three times. And so for people who experience assault, there is a lot to talk about frequently. And sometimes these interviews were really crushing for Jennifer and I and for a team that we hired to do them.

So Jennifer and I hired a team of younger people as research bears alongside us, who represented a variety of experiences, racial identities, gender identity, sexuality, in order to sort of have a diverse research team that students would feel comfortable talking to so students could pick who interviewed them, for example. So in addition to those interviews, we ran another set of focus groups with nearly two hundred students to see about how they collectively spoke about sex.

And then I think the most important part of the ethnography was that we also did participant observation. And what this meant was embedding within campus life. Jennifer and I did this in public spaces. So we went to athletic events. We were in public spaces on campuses like the dining hall, things like that. But then the people we hired were embedded in other spaces. They were in fraternity basements. They were in religious student organizations. They played on intramural sports teams. They were on the bus on the way to varsity athletic events. And we were always public about what we did. So we were we were never spies. And that really gave us not just a sense of how people talked about their experiences, but what they actually did.

And I'll say two final things about this. We designed the research project as a community-based participatory research project. And what that means is that instead of sort of going in and just deciding what we were going to do, from the very start, we built in various stakeholders to our research design. So, we had a group of 20 undergraduates who we met with every Monday morning from 8:00 a.m. until 10 a.m. - two hours. And they served as sort of our guides into campus life. And this was everyone from the people who were responsible for the major sort of anti-Columbia and Barnard Sexual Assault Activism Group to the head of fraternity and sorority life, that we also had institutional advisors who were people who were like deans and critical actors who were responsible for making decisions. And they were built in from the beginning because, you know, most research just kind of sits on a shelf and doesn't do much and we wanted to make recommendations that would be enacted by the university.

And finally, I to say we were enormously fortunate in the leadership of Columbia that really had a vision of supporting us. So many sexual assault researchers experience a pretty high degree of hostility from their institutions. And, you know, Jennifer is really the origin of this project. You know, approached one of the vice presidents on Columbia's campus and said, I've got an idea for how to do research. And that woman, Suzanne Goldberg, really supported us all throughout the entire research project, making it possible for us to do this.

Bob Davis

Did that come from just a deeper understanding, like more of an understanding like you have, did the leadership know that this was a problem where they just simply curious?

Jennifer Hirsch

I think Suzanne had been hired to be the Executive Vice President for university life and I think in large part her mandate was to update and strengthen the university policies related to gender-based misconduct. And she and I happened to be a part of the same university-wide leadership group of people who lead units related to gender and sexuality. And so over the summer, as I saw the multi-campus study roll out, had been thinking, you know, we know sexual assault is a problem. Measuring it is important, but it's not going to solve the problem. Just like another prevalence study is not going to get us to where we need to go. And so I had this idea. And so at that fall meeting, I actually got there early to choose a seat next to Suzanne so I could pitch this idea to her. And she I think she was very receptive because she was looking for a way to map the problem. If you think about was what most campuses know about gender-based misconduct. Think about an iceberg. Right? So, there's like the little tip over the water and that's the very small proportion of cases that are adjudicated. But most campus sexual assaults, the only people who hear about them are the people's friends. Right? And so in Sexual Citizens, we dove beneath the waters. And that was what I proposed to, Suzanne. I was like, we can show you a range of the problem. And she got it immediately. She said, yeah, how can you solve a problem that you don't even know the dimensions of it?

Bob Davis

I ask because you make the point that this is everyone's job. And I think that really drives it home. Because when you talk about geography, for instance, that's how we design space so that students can interact. It does seem like this is everyone's job to solve this.

Jennifer Hirsch

I think that the everyone's job extends even beyond the campus. One of the we also took a life course perspective in the research, one of the analyzes of the survey data, which we always like to call out because paper was led by my husband, John Santelli. It found that young women who'd had comprehensive sex education before college that included training and how to say no to sex they didn't want to have were half as likely to be raped on campus. And that is a big, for your listeners who are not quant people: that's a big effect size. And so when we say everyone's job, we mean every institution that forms young people on their way to college. So K through 12 schooling has a role to play. Families obviously have a fundamental role to play. Religious institutions should do more than just be spaces that are free from sexual harm.

Bob Davis

You know, back to your car analogy, I wonder if this is also just about the difficulty of talking about this, right? We've got to “Click It or Ticket” and we the don't drink and drive. We found shorthand ways to make this part of the of the community narrative, really. And I just it makes me wonder when you when you talk about, you know, people that education that they get cuts their risk of assault in half, right? Did I get that right? 

Jennifer Hirsch

Yeah.

Bob Davis

So what is that message is that is what's the baseline of… what those are those kids are learning that others aren't?

Shamus Khan

So, I mean, in that particular case, it's the practicing of refusal skills and the effect is for women. But, you know, it's sort of like instead of just conceptually transferring information to young people, you actually ask them to also put things into practice, right? To voice things. But just to think about that for a moment, I mean, part of the reason why the effect may be strong is to return to something we talked about earlier, the silence and shame that surrounds sex in general. And so, when we asked students about their sexual education, many of the kind of laughed and said, “oh, you mean my sexual diseases course?” Because, you know, and even those who had sex ed when we're asked to reflect on it, basically told us that they were shown images of sexual diseases and talked about the harms of sex and it was very biological in its education. And look, we're not against biological education, but to return to our car metaphor, you don't teach people driving by being like this is how the internal combustion engine works and this is the role of sparkplugs, right? But what we teach young people about sex is often like this is what ovaries are here is how they're connected to fallopian tubes and the uterus. And that is useful information. But as it turns out, it's not really essential for understanding sex and the siloing of sex education from all the other moral lessons that young people get is the real challenge. It's a real problem, excuse me. What Jennifer and I are calling for, and we're not the only ones calling for it, I think we're part of a range of voices within this area is for us to make conversations about sex more common and to tie them to a range of conversations about what it means to be a good person in the world.

And so, you know, sex ed, comprehensive age appropriate sex ed, that does not mean that you instruct four year olds and five year olds on condom usage. What it means is that you instruct four year olds and five year olds on the importance of bodily autonomy, about keeping your hands to yourself and respecting other people's spaces. And then later in life, you know, at an age appropriate point, you connect those fundamental lessons that you give kids in pre prekindergarten in kindergarten to the sex ed that they're having, where lessons about bodily autonomy and fundamental respect for other people is an essential component of the conversation.

Jennifer Hirsch

And I think that parents sometimes say to me, I am so I'm so worried about this and I don't know how to talk to my kid about sex. And he doesn't really want to talk to me about sex either. And I say, well, did you ever say to your child, “don't grab, use your words”, right? Because like, if you have children, that's a thing that you say a million times. You teach them to master their desires out of consideration for other people that like if the food on someone else's plate looks good, they somehow learn not to, like, reach over and take it. And so that's the job of parenting, is to teach people to manage their bodies in ways that don't hurt other people. And so letting parents know that actually, a lot of them are already doing this work, they just need to connect the basic lessons that they're teaching their children about how to be good people to sex, as opposed to thinking about sex as some other thing that's unrelated.

Bob Davis

Jennifer, Shamus, thank you so much. Really appreciate you taking the time. Really interesting work and I'm really grateful.

Thank you.

Shamus Khan

Thank you for having us.

Jennifer Hirsch

Thanks so much.

Bob Davis

Thank you for listening to Patchwork.

As a reminder, help related to sexual assault is always available through the RAINN National Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE or 1-800-656-4673. Please let us know what you would like to hear on a future episode by sharing your questions with us. You can tweet us at @OVWJustice, send an email to Patchwork@usdoj.gov, or give us a call at 202-307-6026.

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