What You Need to Know About Sexual Assault on College Campuses

Termed a “plague” by the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Education, Russlyn Ali, sexual violence on college campuses is rampant and a pervasive issue for both genders. One in four women and one in seven men are victims of some form of sexual violence during their college experience. Between the incoming freshman class and departing seniors, college campus populations tend to turn over every four to five years. Despite this movement, the percentage of sexual violence incidents remains consistent. More baffling than the persistence of this issue is that 70% of victims report that they knew their attackers, compared to the roughly 50% figure of all violent crime victims, and a reported 42% of them said they expect to be raped again.¹

In 2012, students at twenty-nine universities around the country brought legal action against the institutions, accusing them of negligence in the handling of sexual violence reports and being in violation of Title IX, the 1972 law protecting students from discrimination driven by gender. Their efforts culminated in the passage of the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, known as Campus SaVE, which seeks to address the violence women face on campus by mandating institutions to develop their own policies built around four themes: transparency, accountability, education, and collaboration.²

Introduced by U.S. Senator Bob Casey and House Representative Caroline Maloney, Campus SaVE has been credited as a turning point in our nation’s handling of sexual misconduct on college campuses.³ Its effectiveness in addressing this issue is yet to be determined, as school administrators have a year to design their policies before the act takes effect in March 2014. The twenty-nine universities whose legal actions prompted it represent only one third of one percent – 0.3 % – of the accredited higher learning institutions in America. This is a rather stark statistic considering that twenty-five percent of female students and fourteen percent of male students in college experience some form of sexual violence.

Given this context, the larger question for consideration is: why did so few institutions participate in the attempt to change policy?

Sexual violence comes in several varieties, with differing definitions and connotations, most notably sexual assault, sexual harassment, and rape, the latter of which is more prominent. The US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (DOJ/BJS) has attempted to distill rape into the framework:

Rape - [f]orced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion as well as physical force. Forced sexual intercourse means penetration by the offender(s). [This] includes attempted rapes, male as well as female victims, and both heterosexual and homosexual rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.

State legal definitions of rape have further muddied the waters. Georgia defines rape as an act that can only be enacted by males against females.⁴ Mississippi restricts this even further, defining rape as “assault with intent to ravish…any female of previously chaste character” (meaning virgins), while the District of Columbia requires the use of force.⁵ Across states these differences indicate a lack of consensus about what actually constitutes sexual violence and its various forms. Scholars have conducted numerous campus and nationwide studies yielding statistical data that have shed light on the seriousness of sexual violence on college campuses. Sexual violence is not an incident that contains a start and end date; its impact is long-term and ranges from health to psychological problems that include chronic illnesses, injuries, sleep disturbance, sexually transmitted infections, depression, humiliation, suicidal ideation, and trouble concentrating.⁶In addition to unwanted pregnancy, negative effects of sexual violence for women extend to their ambition, contribution, and self-esteem, particularly for those in ethnic minority groups such as African Americans and Hispanics.⁷

Increased research has prompted several legislative acts directed at preventing sexual violence on college campuses:

• Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act of 1990, which was renamed in 1998 to the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act; Campus Sexual Assault Victim’s Bill of Rights of 1992⁸
• Campus Sex Crimes and Prevention Act of 1998⁹
• National CampusSafety Awareness Month of 2008¹⁰
• Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008¹¹

Most widely known amongst these acts is the 1998 legislation, now commonly referred to as the Clery Act.¹² Under this act, schools receiving Title IV financial assistance funding for students must disclose their policy on sexual assault, the programs they provide to promote awareness of sexual assault, andtheir annual statistics for sex offenses^.13 In conjunction with the Clery Act, Congress funds the Office of Violence Against Women, which encourages the development of programs intended to address dating violence, stalking, and sexual assault on college campuses.

Advocates and college administrations have responded to this legislation by implementing awareness and risk reduction and preventative measures. Programs of this nature are aimed at increasing students’ knowledge about the dangers of sexual violence, teaching women strategies for reducing their likelihood of being victimized, and educating bystanders about how to recognize situations, which promote sexual violence, and how to intervene in a safe and effective manner.¹⁴ Examples of such programs include the Men’s Project, Green Dot program, and the Bringing in the Bystander program.

The use of alcohol is an additional and intricately related factor frequently theorized to play a causal role in sexual violence on college campuses.¹⁵ Approximately 50-70% of all sexual violence cases involve alcohol.¹⁶ A report produced by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) College Task Force in April of 2002 asserts that preconceived expectations of alcohol’s effects may be just as important as its actual pharmacological effects, a sadly credible analog of the placebo effect.  Alcohol may lead to perpetrators ignoring refusal cues or misperceiving sexual interest. It can also affect victims, causing them to disregard risk cues. Socially, alcohol is often used as a justification, a mechanism by which victims are blamed, and a weapon in sexual violence. Its use has led to unwanted, pressured, or “regretted” sexual activities becoming common occurrences among college students.¹⁷ A male college student described the following about parties at his (non-fraternity) house:

Girls are continually fed drinks of alcohol. It’s mainly to party but my roomies are also aware of the inhibition-lowering effects. I’ve seen an old roomie block doors when girlswant to leave his room; and other times I’ve driven women home who can’t remember much of an evening yet sex did occur. Rarely if ever has a night of drinking for my roommate ended without sex. I know it isn’t necessarily and assuredly sexual assault, butwith the amount of liquor in the house I question the amount of consent a lot.¹⁸

There is also gender bias in perception of how alcohol consumption affects responsibility for sexual assault.  Joanna Bourke wrote that:

On the one hand, the consumption of alcohol is viewed as making women more responsible for their own rape: by choosing to get drunk, women are deliberately increasing their risk and should be prepared to face the consequences. On the other hand, male consumption of alcohol is viewed as making them less responsible for their actions: by choosing to get drunk, men increase the chance of inappropriate behavior and should not therefore be required to pay the price for their actions.¹⁹

The Task Force of the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has suggested that as campuses continue their focus on primary prevention of sexual violence, they should target their efforts toward examining and revising campus policies according to changing campus culture, recognizing that students are the primary source of this data. More specifically, these suggestions drive toward establishing campus/community coalitions to support campus policies regarding alcohol use and the control of alcohol access by students, enlisting support and involvement of large social groups such as fraternities and athletes (i.e. Peer Opinion Leaders) to take a stand against high-risk drinking and/or forced sex , and increasing collaboration between college health administrators responsible for prevention of both alcohol and sexual violence.²⁰

Traditional infrastructures such as fraternities and sororities that allow the free flow of peer pressure, intensified by substance abuse, create a recipe for pervasive attitudes that promote sexual violence. Student institutions however are not the sole perpetuators of this culture of sexually-charged behaviors. School administrators also play a striking role. Dartmouth University’s Board of Trustees reacted to student protests regarding the University administration’s inability to foster a safer environment by cancelling classes for a day of “reflection and alternative educational programming.²¹” In addition, they referenced a “decline in civility” on campus and cast student protester actions in the same light as those making threats of physical harm to the Board.²² The Center for Public Integrity highlights two particular institutional barriers that contribute to the low reporting rate for sexual violence incidents: administrators’ unsupportive responses and campus judicial processes that are difficult to understand and follow. Students who were discouraged because of these barriers either transferred or withdrew from their schools, while their alleged attackers were almost uniformly unpunished.²³ In another case, a student at the University of North Carolina alleged that when she reported her rape she was told by a university administrator that “rape is like a football game, Annie. If you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback and you’re in charge, is there anything that you would have done differently in that situation?²⁴” These incidents beg the question of to whom university administrators are responsible - the student body or another entity.

While lauded and certainly well intentioned, the Clery Act may not have the effect its proponents hope. The Department of Education (DOE), which regulates schools under the Clery Act, had as of 2010 only levied six fines against offending schools.  A $350,000 fine, the largest sanction issued as of the report, was levied against Eastern Michigan University after administrators covered up the 2006 rape and murder of 22-year-old Laura Dickinson and letting her parents think she had died of natural causes.²⁵ If college administrators, much like the Perpetrators above, believe there are no consequences for their violations, they will continue to defy the law.

Recommendations

Preventative efforts such as the Green Dot program and legislation like Campus SaVE have been hailed as solutions that can, over time, successfully decrease or even eradicate the incidence of sexual violence. These programs are said to create a common consensus around what constitutes sexual violence and its many forms.  They can increase awareness and lead to new policies among the student body and school administrators. 

This increased awareness- of the nature of rape, of its scope on college campuses, and of the various failures to properly address it- is an essential first step in crafting a cultural framework within which to respond to the crime.  A primary reason that the problem continues is lack of accountability.  Perpetrators shift responsibility to victims (for “allowing” the crime) and to institutions for creating a cultural tolerance for it.  Institutions similarly blame victims, but also point the finger at perpetrators.  We as a culture need to promote the fact that sexual violence victims are not appropriate targets for blame.  We need to acknowledge that institutions need to change their culture and practices/training processes, and finally we need perpetrators to take full responsibility for their actions. 

One aspect of this is education regarding the effects of drugs and alcohol on judgment.  Substances certainly aren’t the root cause of rape, or even of college rape culture, but our culture’s permissiveness regarding their pervasive use turns a blind eye to their magnifying effects.  Institutions need to take the lead, take responsibility for campus culture, and educate and enforce drug and alcohol use laws on their campuses. The Campus SaVe Act is one step in this direction, giving universities the 2013-2014 academic year to craft their own policies to address sexual violence. Unfortunately, the Act doesn’t provide a large enough ‘stick’ to ensure that universities will truthfully and diligently address and equip their campus with the tool to successfully decrease incidences of sexual violence in their own backyards. How can we ensure that the next time student protesters claiming to be victims of sexual behaviors will not be lulled by university officials with a day of reflection?

Sexual violence persists because the issue is housed within an environment of impunity. The following is a summary of several contributing factors:

•  varied definitions on what constitutes sexual violence
• a culture of institutional dismissiveness and blame-shifting
• lack of administrator knowledge/training on handling sexual violence reports,
• Lack of enforced substance use rules on campuses
• loosely defined protocols of accountability and subsequently a lack of regulation by the Department of Education to prosecute institutions

In attempting to answer the question posed earlier in this report - why did so few institutions (0.3%) participate in the 2012 attempt to change policy – we can deduce that they did not see the need. To instill a greater sense of need, efforts should be driven toward two particular tracks:

• Research toward sociocultural change:
    - Support for continued research on preventative measures aimed at the role of agency
       (one’s actions)
     - Support for required substance use/abuse education across the country

•  Accountability:
      - Implement stricter accountability measures from top-down (i.e. DOE willingness to fine where 
        appropriate)
      - Implement informed training and processes for health administrators
      - Require institution-local police partnerships and regularly communicate procedures to    
        campus community in simple, understandable terms

For college students, attending university is supposed to represent a time to gather knowledge and build the foundations for tomorrow’s successes – not a time where being subject to sexual violence is commonplace.