is sexual assault a good college essay

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Even If You’re Broken: Essays on Sexual Assault and #MeToo

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“ From the bestselling author of Life of the Mind Interrupted comes an essay collection ‘rich in vulnerability and candor. ’ How do we make a good life in a world where sexual violence always lurks in the shadows? Katie Pryal, a rape survivor, a former law professor, and a bestselling author, takes on the rapidly changing legal and social landscape of #MeToo, Title IX, and the lawsuits they ’ ve empowered women to bring. Moving between the deeply personal and the socially critical, the essays in this collection are incisive dispatches from survivor territory. In these fiery essays, Pryal documents reporting her rape to a university Title IX office, in grim, yet hilarious, detail. She turns her law-trained eye to the Bill Cosby case and to musician Kesha ’ s struggle to break free of her recording contract because of alleged abuse by her producer. This book is for survivors, those who love them, and those who want to make the world a better place for them. These stories strip away shame. They burn off fear. They lay bare the injustices women face and how we can fight them. Most of all, Pryal shows how she has fought those injustices herself-and by showing us, she inspires us to do the same. ” -- Provided by publisher .

Pryal, Katie Rose Guest. Even If You’re Broken: Essays on Sexual Assault and #MeToo . Chapel Hill, NC: Blue Crow Books, 2019.

Thoughts about sexual assault on college campuses

Subscribe to the center for economic security and opportunity newsletter, martha nussbaum martha nussbaum ernst freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics - the university of chicago.

October 21, 2021

22 min read

This interlude is from Martha Nussbaum’s book, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accountability, and Reconciliation , published by W. W. Norton & Company in May 2021.

So far we have traced the evolution of legal standards for sexual assault and sexual harassment, and their current defects and challenges. There is, however, a significant area of our national discussion that is not fully covered by these discussions, because it involves a complex and uneasy mixture of federal law (Title IX, discussed in Chapter 5) and informal tribunals: sexual assault and harassment on college campuses. Because my previous discussions have covered the most salient issues in each area of law, I need not devote a full chapter to this case, nor do I wish such a disproportionate focus to suggest that women who attend college deserve more attention than women who do not. Unequal access to higher education is already a major problem of justice in our society, compounding other disadvantages based on race and class. There is no reason to perpetuate the injustice by paying more attention to the problems of those women who have managed to arrive at a college or university. One of the great strengths of the traditions I have described is the fact that working-class and minority women (for example Cheryl Araujo, Mechelle Vinson, Mary Carr) have been among their salient plaintiffs.

Yet, because the institutional structures are different, the topic of campus assault requires separate treatment, albeit briefly. Nobody knows exactly how large a problem this is, but one recent survey by the Association of American Universities found that around 20 percent of female undergraduates are victims of sexual assault or sexual misconduct at some point during their college life. 1 Other studies have found frequent sexual abuse of males as well, amounting to 6 to 8 percent. Although there are disputes over methodology and definition, there’s no doubt about the severity of the issue. It would appear, however, that attending college does not make a woman more likely to suffer sexual assault. 2

Sexual harassment and sexual assault have long included abuses of power between faculty and students, but on the whole, these cases have been understood as workplace abuses of power, and are dealt with under clear public rules, in much the manner of other workplaces. Thus, Chapter 5 has already basically dealt with these cases. In this Interlude I focus on student-student assault and harassment.

The literature on this topic is vast and controversies are heated, in part because the Obama administration guidelines have now been replaced by different guidelines developed by the Department of Education under the aegis of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. However, the controversies cross political lines. Thus the group of Harvard Law School professors who protested against the Obama guidelines as unfair to accused men, anticipating the DeVos critique (I’ll describe their intervention as Stage Two below) included some conservatives, but also faculty from the left and even extreme left of the faculty.

I’ll cover the salient issues briefly, without discussing all the ins and outs of all the controversies. Thus the intention of this brief discussion is to indicate, in a general way, how my overall view in this book’s detailed chapters would approach campus cases, rather than to construct a comprehensive argument. 3

A large proportion of sexual assaults and alleged sexual assaults occur when one party, or usually both parties, have been drinking heavily. Heavy drinking makes memory gappy and adjudication very difficult. In general campuses need to do much better with alcohol education and treatment. But one recommendation that most college administrators would support is: lower the drinking age. This approach seems counterintuitive, but it is really sensible. Right now, if adults are present where there is under-age drinking (and most students are under twenty-one), they can be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. So they refrain from providing badly needed supervision, including help for students who have passed out. If the drinking age were reduced to eighteen, adults could attend parties and be prepared to give assistance.

Another alcohol-related issue that needs addressing, in both education and adjudication: sex with a person who has passed out or is close to that point is an assault. This is a species of my point about affirmative consent, but it needs to be repeated again and again. The standard, however, is far from clear in application. Many cases before campus tribunals concern the thorny and as yet unresolved question of how impaired a person must be in order not to be capable of decision-making. Since the evidence comes, typically, from two impaired individuals, it is hard for them to remember how impaired they were. Third-party evidence is usually helpful, but is not always available.

Campus Tribunals

There is considerable confusion in the public mind over why campuses do not simply turn accusations over to the police. So it’s important to point out that campuses have membership conditions, usually spelled out in the admissions contract, that go beyond the letter of the law and that need to be enforced by the campus itself. Plagiarism, not attending class, cheating on exams–all of these things are likely to be punished, sometimes with suspension or expulsion, even though they are not crimes. Similarly campuses may adopt sexual requirements that go beyond the law. Some of these are extreme: honor codes at some religious schools penalize all non-marital sexual conduct. I think such restrictions are counterproductive, creating cultures of silence (if a woman discloses that she has been raped, she can be penalized for engaging in sex). But there are also some reasonable requirements, such as affirmative consent, that are not necessarily the law of the land.

Moreover, the criminal justice system takes a long time, and victims need swift justice in order to deal with the trauma and go forward as students.

Finally, if a perpetrator is convicted in the criminal justice system, that record is ruinous for future life and employment. Campus convictions come in degrees, and many involve mandatory counseling and other lesser penalties. For this reason, having the criminal justice system as the only option, would deter reporting and bringing charges, since victims often hesitate before ruining the perpetrator’s life, and yet they seek some measure of recognition. They want the wrong done to them to be acknowledged—both that it happened and that it was wrong—and they want accountability for the perpetrator; but typically they are not seeking maximal revenge. Nor do they want lengthy involvement with the formal criminal justice system.

These are reasons why campus tribunals are not replaceable by the criminal justice system. However, it must also be said that these tribunals often do their job poorly. Faculty and administrators who serve on them are rarely well trained, and they do not always understand the quasi-legal issues with clarity. Procedures are often poorly defined, and the accused, who typically lack legal representation, are at a disadvantage.

Procedural Issues for Tribunals

How, then, can these tribunals be made to work better?

In this section I’ll refer to several key stages in the debate. Stage One was the “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Obama administration, laying out standards to which all universities must conform to receive federal money. 4 Stage Two involved a series of objections to these standards, some issued by Betsy DeVos once she became secretary of education, 5 but similar objections were raised earlier by legal professionals—most famously by a group of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, drawn from both the left and the right, in a letter published initially in the Boston Globe but widely reprinted. 6 Next, in Stage Three, came the new Department of Education draft rule, which, like all administrative rules was subject to “notice and comment,” 7 and received over 124,000 comments. 8 Finally, in Stage Four (May 2020), the Department of Education issued its Final Rule, which is now legally binding on all colleges and universities that receive federal money. 9 I’ll proceed issue by issue.

First, all involved need to get clear about the best burden of proof. This issue has been one of the largest political disputes. Three standards are currently in use in our legal system. The most stringent, used throughout the United States in the criminal justice system, is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Many countries do not use this standard for criminal trials, but our tradition has judged that convicting an innocent person is more heinous and more to be avoided than letting a guilty person go free. Together with this exacting standard, our criminal justice system gives the accused a constitutional right to the “effective” and cost-free assistance of legal counsel, although great disparities still exist between public defenders provided free of charge and the sort of lawyer that a more affluent defendant typically would engage—not always because of quality, but because public defenders are overworked and usually don’t have enough time to devote to each client. But at least there is cost-free representation. Furthermore, our Constitution’s “confrontation clause” gives accused parties the right to confront witnesses testifying to their guilt. Over time other rights have been inferred from constitutional guarantees, the most famous being the Miranda warnings that must be read to defendants on arrest, warning them of their right to counsel and their right to remain silent. So our system is protective of defendants in multiple ways.

In civil trials, the standard, instead, is “preponderance of the evidence,” which means anything over 50 percent. Obviously this is a much weaker standard. Nor are free lawyers always provided in civil cases (some states do, most don’t). Still, the civil litigation system has firm procedural structures that safeguard the parties—especially a lengthy period of “discovery,” which gives both sides a chance to examine the other side’s evidence. Without such structural safeguards, and without legal counsel assisting the parties, many people feel that the “preponderance” standard is likely to lead to error.

A third intermediate standard is “clear and convincing evidence,” which is used in ways specified by the relevant state laws, often in areas such as paternity and child custody. This standard is typically thought to mean that it is about 75 percent likely that the person did what is alleged.

Before the “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Obama administration, 10 most universities used “clear and convincing evidence” as the standard in sexual assault tribunals. The Obama administration insisted, instead, on the civil “preponderance of the evidence” standard. The Harvard Law School faculty letter, and DeVos in her own remarks, held that this standard was not protective enough of the accused. So far, it seems that nobody favors the “reasonable doubt” standard, which would be very difficult to apply in the informal and evidentially challenged situation of a tribunal. So the choice is between the other two standards, and in the end the Department of Education’s Final Rule gives every college that choice.

It’s important to be clear that a college tribunal will not take away a defendant’s liberty. That dire consequence is our legal system’s primary reason for choosing reasonable doubt. Courts, however, have repeatedly held that educational opportunities are economic or property interests, not matters of freedom. So it seems that there is nothing at all odd about using either the civil justice standard of preponderance, or the tougher standard of clear and convincing evidence. This is where the debate occurs.

In real life, both sides have merit. Preponderance defenders believe, rightly, that in the typical alcohol-fueled interaction any stronger standard will be very difficult to meet. However, it is also true that education, albeit a property interest, is one of special defining importance in our society. So it’s important to be protective of the accused. And the civil standard is probably a bad idea in a setting that lacks the procedural safeguards that are usually present in civil trials. Clear and convincing makes more sense, I believe; but if a school should opt for preponderance—as I said, the Final Rule ultimately, and rather surprisingly, gives institutions a choice between these two—a careful tribunal would probably think in terms of a kind of preponderance plus, not necessarily convicting someone where the evidence suggests a mere 50.5 percent likelihood of guilt. The 50.5 approach would really not be protective enough of the accused. Many preponderance-based tribunals actually interpret the standards somewhat more strongly. Whatever the standard, members of tribunals need better training about the whole issue of evidence and the burden of proof.

A second issue of great importance is the definition of sexual harassment. The campus process typically runs together the two things our legal system has carefully kept apart—namely sexual assault or abuse, and (workplace) sexual harassment. There is no harm in this combination so long as sub-definitions are clearly drawn. Sexual assault is typically defined as a single act, not a pattern of actions: you only need to rape a woman once to be guilty of rape! Sexual harassment, by contrast, has two forms. If there is a quid pro quo, a single act suffices. But in “hostile environment” harassment, the plaintiff needs to show a pattern of actions that are sufficiently “serious” and “pervasive,” as well as “unwelcome.” One demeaning comment or gross overture will not suffice. This distinction seems correct.

In terms of this legal background, the Dear Colleague letter was far from adequate. It defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, non-verbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature.” This meant in practice that one gross or demeaning comment, with no prior evidence of its unwelcomeness, would be actionable. The Department of Education’s Final Rule, by contrast (Stage Four), hews closely to legal standards accepted elsewhere in our legal system. There are three categories of sexual harassment: (1) “any instance of quid pro quo harassment by a school’s employee,” (2) “any unwelcome conduct that a reasonable person would find so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it denies a person equal educational access”; and (3) “any instance of sexual assault as defined in the Clery Act [a federal statute dealing with campus security], dating violence, domestic violence, or stalking, as defined in the Violence Against Women Act.” In other words, a single unannounced act can still be sexual assault or a quid pro quo, but verbal harassment must form a pattern that meets the Supreme Court standard of pervasiveness and severity, as determined from the point of view of a reasonable observer. The Final Rule protects someone who makes a deeply offensive remark without advance notice of its unwelcomeness and who does not persist.

On most grounds the Department of Education’s Final Rule is an advance over the Obama administration’s rule, and also over the Department of Education’s first rule (Stage Three), under DeVos, which did not include dating violence, domestic violence, or stalking. The Final Rule is perhaps too narrow in its requirement that the accuser show that the harassment is not just severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, but that it also has a deleterious effect on the person’s equal educational access. Campuses are academic organizations, but they are also social organizations. Social harassment does not always affect someone’s ability to study, and why should that need to be shown? Why isn’t the poisoning of the person’s campus social life sufficient? There are other issues that have been raised, but on balance the “notice and comment” process seems to have worked pretty well.

I shall not go into the details of the various discussions of the questioning and confrontation process in the old and new rules. What I want to focus on, instead, is what I consider to be one of the largest problems with campus tribunals, which has not been addressed by any of these rules: the lack of access to free legal counsel for the accused. Most institutions not only do not provide a lawyer for the accused party; they actively discourage the hiring of lawyers. Typically the accused is permitted to have one supporter or advisor, but when the accused asks if this person can be a lawyer, they are usually discouraged. This is wrong. “Advisors” are typically faculty or administrators who have no legal training and who cannot do an energetic job of defending their client’s rights. And it is also wrong to require people to hire their own lawyers. Free legal assistance would go a long way to dispelling the worries of the twenty-eight Harvard Law School faculty members (Stage Two) about the system’s unfairness. Columbia University does provide free legal counsel for the accused, and so, now, does Harvard Law School (though not the rest of Harvard). My own university has recently begun to implement a policy offering free legal counsel to both defendants and plaintiffs. I have not been able to find out how many other institutions do this. And some federal grant money is available to support accused students at state universities. But the linchpin of our justice system is legal representation. Perhaps this requirement could be waived for minor offenses for which the likely penalty is alcohol counseling, for example; but in cases where the accused faces expulsion it should be mandatory, no matter what it costs. Colleges and universities have many doctors, nurses, and psychologists on their payrolls. And they do have a staff of lawyers, only not for this purpose. They should enlarge their legal departments to include lawyers at the service of students, for just this sort of problem.

I’ve said that tribunals are often poorly trained. The best solution to this problem, since membership of tribunals rotates, is mandatory sexual assault and sexual harassment training for all faculty and administrators. Such training is now required in most universities, as it is in most businesses. At the University of Chicago, each administrator and faculty member must complete the course online every year. It is not perfect, but it does supply a uniform level of awareness.

The Title IX Process

A welcome element of experienced professionalism is now supplied by the presence of Title IX offices on campuses. Typically they do face-to-face training as well as online training, though not as often. But they also play a crucial role through a strong norm of mandatory reporting, which is helping to close the information gap. If a student discloses sexual harassment or assault to any faculty member or administrator, that person is required immediately to inform the Title IX coordinator, giving the complainant’s name. The coordinator will then contact the complainant, typically promising her complete confidentiality and anonymity if she requests it. The complainant usually also has decisional autonomy: nothing will be done, and the alleged perpetrator will not be contacted, unless the complainant gives a go-ahead. Meanwhile the coordinator can advise the complainant about how the process works.

Mandatory reporting is controversial. Many have feared that it will discourage disclosures: the minute you open up to someone you trust, the information also goes to someone else you don’t know. But on the whole mandatory reporting seems wise. The Title IX staff, in my experience, behave with restraint and professionalism, protecting confidentiality. Once faculty and administrators have experience with the coordinators, my experience is that they do come to trust them. And faculty (and others) are relieved of a huge burden of dealing with the whole of a traumatized person’s subsequent life and choices. Faculty usually are not equipped to shoulder this burden, however well-intentioned they are.

The letter by the twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors objected to too much centralized power being vested in the Title IX office, in the scheme at first proposed by Harvard Law School in its attempt to institutionalize the Obama administration standards. The main problem they identified was that the Title IX office did both investigation and adjudication. Their letter was surely correct to say that this setup is very unfair and unwise. Harvard Law School quickly heeded their criticism, separating the two functions. The primary function of the Title IX office should be—and by now for the most part is—investigative and advisory. The tribunals themselves typically consist of faculty, and sometimes administrators, and are constituted according to procedures subject to faculty autonomy and faculty governance. They have many defects, but they are not an alien bureaucracy invading the campus, as the Harvard letter had feared.

We now need to address the gaps in the process that remain, particularly in the area of legal representation.

We have all learned a great deal from these somewhat painful debates. And progress has been made. Although in some ways DeVos has been a polarizing figure, the Final Rule adopted by the Department of Education under her aegis, thanks to the notice-and-comment process, is debatable but still arguably fair. It seems distinctly superior both to the draft rule and to the standards articulated by the Obama administration. We now need to address the gaps in the process that remain, particularly in the area of legal representation.

Nick Anderson, Susan Svrluga, and Scott Clement, “Survey: More than 1 in 5 Female Undergrads at Top Schools Suffer Sexual Attacks,” Washington Post, September 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/survey-more-than-1-in-5-female-undergrads-at-top-schools-suffer-sexual-attacks/2015/09/19/c6c80be2-5e29-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html.
Charlene L. Muehlenhard et al., “Evaluating the One-in-Five Statistic: Women’s Risk of Sexual Assault While in College,” Journal of Sex Research 54, no. 4 (May 16, 2017): 565, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2017.1295014. As discussed there, evidence does not support the assumption that college students experience more sexual assault than nonstudents.
In this area, my two research assistants did such superb and meticulous work on this topic, which naturally interested them greatly, that their work is worthy of note in itself and is on file with me: Sarah Hough, “Legal Approaches toward On-Campus Sexual Violence in the US: A Brief Overview,” unpublished paper, July 1, 2019; and Jared I. Mayer, “Memo on De Vos’s Changes to Campus Title IX Proceedings,” unpublished paper, May 20, 2020.
National Sexual Violence Resource Center, “Dear Colleague Letter: Sexual Violence” (US Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, 2011), https://www.nsvrc.org/publications/dear-colleague-letter-sexual-violence. The NSVRC website also contains much helpful background information.
See “Department of Education Issues New Interim Guidance on Campus Sexual Misconduct,” US Department of Education, September 22, 2017, https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-education-issues-new-interim-guidance-campus-sexual-misconduct.
“Rethink Harvard’s Sexual Harassment Policy” (Opinion), Boston Globe, October 14, 2014, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/14/rethink-harvard-sexual-harassment-policy/HFDDiZN7nU2UwuUuWMnqbM/story.html.
For an overview of the notice-and-comment system of regulation making, see “A Guide to the Rulemaking Process,” Office of the Federal Register, January 2011, https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaking_process.pdf.
“Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance,” Federal Register, November 29, 2018, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/29/2018-25314/nondiscrimination-on-the-basis-of-sex-in-education-programs-or-activities-receiving-federal.
See 20 U.S.C. § 1681(a) (2018). A helpful memo clarifying the content of the Final Rule is Apalla U. Chopra et al., “Analysis of Key Provisions of the Department of Education’s New Title IX Regulations,” O’Melveny & Myers LLP, May 15, 2020, https://www.omm.com/resources/alerts-and-publications/alerts/analysis-of-key-provisions-of-doe.
National Sexual Violence Resource Center, “Dear Colleague Letter.”

Economic Studies

Center for Economic Security and Opportunity

Phillip Levine

September 3, 2024

Zachary Billot, Annie Vong, Nicole Dias Del Valle, Emily Markovich Morris

August 26, 2024

Online only

11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape Policy

At many schools, the rules intended to protect victims of sexual assault mean students have lost their right to due process—and an accusation of wrongdoing can derail a person’s entire college education.

This is the first story in a three-part series examining how the rules governing sexual-assault adjudication have changed in recent years, and why some of those changes are problematic. Read the second installment here , and the third one here .

Kwadwo “Kojo” Bonsu , 23, was on track to graduate in the spring of 2016 with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Bonsu, who was born in Maryland, is the son of Ghanaian immigrants. He chose UMass because it gave him the opportunity to pursue his two passions, science and music. He told me he hoped to get a doctorate in polymer science or chemical engineering. At UMass he was a member of the National Society of Black Engineers. He also joined a fraternity (he was the only black member), played guitar in a campus jazz band, and tutored jazz guitarists at a local high school.

In the early hours of Saturday, November 1, 2014, Bonsu, then a junior, was at the house where many of his fraternity brothers lived. There he ran into another junior, whom I’ll call R.M., a white female marketing student. According to a written account by R.M., who declined to be interviewed for this story, the two started talking and smoking marijuana; eventually they kissed. As she wrote, “It got more intense until finally I shifted so that I was straddling him.” She told him she wasn’t interested in intercourse and he said he was fine with that.

Then, she wrote, “I started to move my hand down his chest and into his pants.” R.M. interrupted this to take a phone call from a female friend who was also at the house and trying to find her. The call ended and then, R.M. wrote, “I got on my knees and started to give him a blow job.” After a short time, “I removed my mouth but kept going with my hand and realized just how high I was.” She wrote that she felt conflicted because she wanted to stop—she said she told him she was feeling uncomfortable and thought she needed to leave—but that she also felt bad about “working him up and then backing out.” (In Bonsu’s written account, he stated that R.M. said she needed to leave because she was concerned her friend might “barge in” on them.) The encounter continued for a few more minutes, during which, she wrote, he cajoled her to stay—“playfully” grabbing her arm at one point, and drawing her in to kiss—then ended with an exchange of phone numbers. R.M. had not removed any clothing.

R.M. then went down to the kitchen to find her friend. As she explained in her statement, “[My friend] knows I was with Kojo. She probably told all the brothers in the room, and they’re gonna hate me when they find out”—she didn’t explain why. “I can never come back here.” Her friend started teasing her, asking how it had gone. R.M. was a resident adviser in her dormitory—someone tasked with counseling other students—and at that moment, she wrote, “as my RA training kicked in, I realized I’d been sexually assaulted.” She wrote that while in retrospect she should have left if she didn’t want to continue the encounter, she hadn’t wanted to be a bad sport—“that UMass Student Culture dictates that when women become sexually involved with men they owe it to them to follow through.” She added, “I want to fully own my participation in what happened, but at the same time recognize that I felt violated and that I owe it to myself and others to hold him accountable for something I felt in my bones wasn’t right.”

As she talked with her friend, R.M. wrote, she became distraught. She contacted the RAs on duty and reported that she had been sexually assaulted. The RAs called the campus police, who notified the Amherst police. R.M. gave her clothes to a police officer for evidence, although she said she was not ready to file charges. Then she went to the hospital, where she was given a battery of medications for possible STDs.

Just before Thanksgiving, according to a federal lawsuit filed against the university by Bonsu’s attorney, Brett Lampiasi, R.M. went to the dean of students and filed a complaint against Bonsu. She also reported him to the Amherst police. The police investigated and closed the case with no charges filed. On January 12, 2015, Bonsu got an email from a school administrator informing him that a “very serious” allegation had been lodged against him and that until a hearing was held, he was subject to “interim restrictions”: He could not contact R.M., he could visit no dormitories other than his own, he was limited to eating at a single dining hall, and he was forbidden from entering the student union.

The restrictions meant that Bonsu could no longer play with his jazz ensemble at a weekly Sunday brunch. Nor could he attend the meetings of the other organizations he’d joined. He was warned not to talk about the allegation, so he couldn’t explain to his friends why he was suddenly withdrawing from his activities. R.M. soon complained to the school that Bonsu had violated his no-contact order by trying to friend her on Facebook. Bonsu vehemently denied the allegation to administrators. He offered the university full access to his Facebook account and phone records. According to the suit, the university declined the offer. He later sent the records anyway. But in a February 4 letter, Bonsu was told that because of the later allegation, a new set of interim restrictions was being put in place. Effective immediately, Bonsu was banned from all university housing and was allowed on campus only to attend classes. His mother and an uncle drove up from Maryland to help him appeal his restrictions, but were largely unsuccessful.

He reached out to a student group that helps minority and other underrepresented college students, explaining in an email what had happened with R.M., protesting his innocence, and describing his treatment as discriminatory and unlawful. The student who received the email forwarded it to the group’s listserv, adding a note about spreading the news in order to organize a rally on Bonsu’s behalf. This email got back to campus authorities, the lawsuit says, and because Bonsu had used R.M.’s name, he received a new interim restriction: a total ban from campus.

Bonsu’s lawsuit describes the period that followed as one of extreme stress, during which he lost weight, contracted pneumonia, and was forced to drop two courses because the restrictions placed on him precluded him from attending class during his midterm exams. His hearing was on April 2, 2015. By then he was living back home in Maryland, sick a second time with pneumonia and in a state of emotional collapse. His lawyer asked for the hearing to be rescheduled, but the school refused, so it went on without him. He was found not responsible for sexual misconduct. But he was found responsible for using R.M.’s name in the email asking for assistance and for sending her the Facebook friend request.

The university listed Bonsu’s offense as “failure to comply with the direction of university officials.” His punishment: suspension until May 31, 2016—by which time R.M. was expected to graduate—and a permanent ban from living on campus. He was also required to get counseling to address his “decision-making.”

Bonsu decided never to return to UMass. He applied to universities in other states, but was not accepted. He spent a year studying music at a community college, unable to pursue his engineering degree. Eventually he was accepted into the engineering program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, for the fall semester of 2016, a year and a half after he had left UMass. He is on track to finally graduate from college in the fall of 2018. UMass denied Bonsu’s allegations against it and otherwise declined to comment. Last September, his lawsuit against the university was settled for undisclosed terms.

T he way in which Bonsu’s case was handled may seem perverse, but many of the university’s actions—the interim restrictions, the full-bore investigation and adjudication even though R.M.’s own statement does not describe a sexual assault—were mandated or strongly encouraged by federal rules that govern the handling of sexual-assault allegations on campus today. These rules proliferated during Barack Obama’s administration, as did threats of sanctions if schools didn’t follow them precisely. The impulse behind them was noble and necessary—sexual assault is a scourge that should not be tolerated in any society, much less by institutions of higher learning. But taken in sum, these directives have left a mess of a system, and many unintended consequences.

On too many campuses, a new attitude about due process—and the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty—has taken hold, one that echoes the infamous logic of Edwin Meese, who served in Ronald Reagan’s administration as attorney general, in his argument against the Miranda warning. “The thing is,” Meese said, “you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”

There is no doubt that until recently, many women’s claims of sexual assault were reflexively and widely disregarded—or that many still are in some quarters. (One need look no further than the many derogatory responses received by the women who came forward last year to accuse then-candidate Donald Trump of sexual violations.) Action to redress that problem was—and is—fully warranted. But many of the remedies that have been pushed on campus in recent years are unjust to men, infantilize women, and ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the fight against sexual violence.

The Trump administration has recently begun to reconsider—and in some cases, roll back—many of the rules and policies made by the Obama administration regarding campus sexual assault. It has encountered immediate skepticism and fierce pushback; given Trump’s own behavior, this reaction is not surprising.

That pushback grew more forceful in July, after Candice Jackson, the new head of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the arm of the Department of Education that governs the adjudication of sexual assault on campus, tossed off some made-up statistics in remarks to The New York Times that were broadly dismissive of assault. Many college administrators have said they will not alter the adjudication policies now enshrined on their campus even if recent federal guidelines are rescinded; capacious campus bureaucracies that were created at the behest of Obama’s OCR are likely to resist change.

The Trump administration has amply demonstrated that its words cannot be taken at face value, and that its policy views, in many cases, are born of ignorance or calculated to inflame. Even so, a reconsideration of the policies surrounding sexual assault on campus, and public debate about them, is necessary.

This article, the first of a three-part series, examines how the rules governing sexual-assault adjudication have changed in recent years, and why some of those changes are problematic. Part II will look at how a new—and inaccurate—science regarding key characteristics of sexual assault has biased adjudications and fostered unhealthy ideas about assault on campus. Part III considers a facet of sexual-assault adjudications that demands considerably more attention than it has received.

On April 4, 2011 , the country’s more than 4,600 institutions of higher education received an unexpected letter from the Obama administration’s Department of Education. It began with the friendly salutation “Dear Colleague,” but its contents were pointed and prescriptive. The letter, and other guidance that followed, laid out a series of steps that all schools would be required to take to correct what the administration described as a collective failure to address sexual assault. Its arrival signaled the start of a campaign to eliminate what Vice President Joe Biden called an epidemic of sexual violence on campus.

The most significant requirement in the “Dear Colleague” letter was the adoption, by all colleges, in all adjudications involving allegations of sexual misconduct, of the lowest possible burden of proof, a “preponderance of evidence”—often described as just over a 50 percent likelihood of guilt. (Many universities were already using this standard, but others favored a “clear and convincing evidence” standard, requiring roughly a 75 percent likelihood of guilt. Criminal courts require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the highest legal standard for finding guilt.)

Severe restrictions were placed on the ability of the accused to question the account of the accuser, in order to prevent intimidation or trauma. Eventually the administration praised a “single investigator” model, whereby the school appoints a staff member to act as detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury. The letter defined sexual violence requiring university investigation broadly to include “rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, and sexual coercion,” with no definitions provided. It also characterized sexually harassing behavior as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including remarks. Schools were told to investigate any reports of possible sexual misconduct, including those that came from a third party and those in which the alleged victim refused to cooperate. (Paradoxically, they were also told to defer to alleged victims’ wishes, creating no small amount of confusion among administrators.)

In total, the procedures laid out by the letter and subsequent directives triggered the creation of a parallel justice system for sexual assault, all under the aegis of Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits discrimination in educational opportunities on the basis of sex. Colleges have traditionally addressed various forms of student misconduct, including sexual misconduct, through a combination of investigation, adjudication, and mediation. But they generally deferred to the criminal-justice system for the most-serious crimes. Today, colleges are required to conduct their own proceeding for every sexual allegation, even if a police investigation or criminal-justice process is under way.

The letter was merely the first of a series of administration reports and actions. In 2013, in a joint finding, the Departments of Education and Justice seemed to further expand the definition of sexually harassing behavior, noting that the standard of whether an “objectively reasonable person” of the same gender would find the actions or remarks offensive was not appropriate in judging whether a violation had occurred. (This contradicted a Supreme Court ruling that sexual harassment in a school setting must be “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” and raised civil libertarians’ concerns about freedom of speech.) Some schools have since written codes that make flirtatious comments or sexual jokes punishable.

These and other measures flowed from a genuine—and justified—belief within the administration that college women faced daunting challenges in seeking justice for sexual assault, and that many colleges had not taken sexual assault seriously enough, at times even disregarding allegations. (Of course, men can be victims of sexual violations and women can be perpetrators, and government regulations regarding assault are written to be neutral to gender and sexual orientation. But it is clear that the Obama administration rightly viewed campus assault overwhelmingly as something male students do to female ones.) In a particularly egregious case, Eastern Michigan University did not publicly reveal the 2006 dorm-room sexual assault and murder of one its students, Laura Dickinson, until some 10 weeks after the fact; by then, students could no longer withdraw from school without forfeiting their tuition.

Pressing schools to improve what were sometimes haphazard procedures surrounding sexual-assault allegations; to provide clear rules about what constitutes consent and to publicize those rules on campus; and to encourage students to look out for one another—these were all worthy ends. Biden said regularly that one sexual assault is too many, and that is inarguably true.

Joe Biden is seen sitting at a table with college presidents and others.

Yet from the beginning, the administration’s efforts showed signs of overreach, and that overreach became more pronounced over time. By early 2014, the terminology used by the federal government to describe the two parties in still-unresolved sexual-assault cases had begun to change. The 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter had used the terms complainant (and sometimes alleged victim ) and alleged perpetrator . But many subsequent federal documents described a complainant as a victim or a survivor , and the accused as a perpetrator .

Investigative practices also changed. OCR began keeping a public list of the schools at which it was investigating possible Title IX violations, putting them, in the words of Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration and current president of the University of California system, under “a cloud of suspicion.” (OCR does not publish similar lists for other types of investigations that are still in process.) And investigations, including those begun due to a single complaint, did not result in a narrow inquiry into a given case, but into every aspect of a school’s adjudication process and general climate, and a review of all cases going back years. OCR publicly threatened the withdrawal of federal funds from schools that failed to comply with the new rules, an action that would be devastating to most schools. By 2016, according to BuzzFeed , the average investigation had been open for 963 days, up from an average in 2010 of 289 days. As of March of this year there were 311 open cases at 227 schools.

These measures made sexual assault a priority for every college president. But it’s not hard to see how they may also have encouraged bias against the accused. Several former OCR investigators and one current investigator told me the perceived message from Washington was that once an investigation into a school was opened, the investigators in the field offices were not meant to be objective fact finders. Their job was to find schools in violation of Title IX.

OCR also catalyzed the establishment of gigantic and costly campus bureaucracies. Since its beginning, Title IX has required schools to designate an employee to handle sex-discrimination issues. For decades, this was usually a faculty or staff member who had myriad other duties. But in another “Dear Colleague” letter, issued in 2015, OCR urged all institutions of higher education to hire a full-time Title IX coordinator. Large universities were encouraged to appoint multiple coordinators. These people were to be independent of other administrative offices and to report directly to the school’s senior leadership.

Harvard now has 55 Title IX coordinators (though an undisclosed number of them have additional duties). Wellesley College last year announced its first full-time coordinator to oversee sex discrimination on its all-female campus. Ozarks Technical Community College, which has no residential facilities and has had one report of sexual assault since 2013, now has a full-time Title IX coordinator.

Pushed by federal mandates, activists, fears of negative social-media campaigns, bad press, and increasingly the momentum of their own bureaucracies, schools have written codes defining sexual assault in ways that are at times troubling. Some schools recommend or require that for consent to be valid, it must be given while sober, and others rule that consent cannot be given when a student is “under the influence,” vague standards that could cover any amount of alcohol consumption. Some embrace “affirmative consent,” which, at its limit, requires that each touch, each time, be preceded by the explicit, verbal granting of permission. At times, the directives given to students about sex veer squarely into the absurd: A training video on sexual consent for incoming students at Brown University, for instance, included this stipulation, among many others: “Consent is knowing that my partner wants me just as much as I want them.”

As Jeannie Suk Gersen and her husband and Harvard Law School colleague, Jacob Gersen, wrote last year in a California Law Review article, “The Sex Bureaucracy,” the “conduct classified as illegal” on college campuses “has grown substantially, and indeed, it plausibly covers almost all sex students are having today.”

D ue process is the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law and fundamental fairness in legal proceedings. The late Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas wrote in 1967 that it is “the primary and indispensable foundation of individual freedom,” and the high court has ruled that due process requires that laws not be “unreasonable, arbitrary, or capricious.” But many campus proceedings seem to fit that description. For example, it is not unusual for a male student to be investigated and adjudicated for sexual assault, yet to never receive specific, written notice of the allegations against him. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil-liberties group, found in a report released on September 5 analyzing due-process procedures at the country’s top-ranked colleges and universities that about half fail to offer this minimal protection.

To ensure the safety of alleged victims of sexual assault, the federal government requires “interim measures”—accommodations that administrators must offer the complainant before any finding of responsibility, including steps to ensure that she never has to encounter the accused, as in the case of Kwadwo Bonsu. Common interim measures include moving the accused from his dormitory, limiting the places he can go on campus, forcing him to change classes, and barring him from activities. On small campuses, this can mean his life is completely circumscribed. Sometimes he is banned from campus altogether while he awaits the results of an investigation.

Interim measures against the accused make sense in some circumstances, depending on the severity of the alleged incident, the apparent strength of the case, and other matters, but they are too often applied bluntly and reflexively. And even if the accused is cleared during an adjudication, schools can issue a standing no-contact order between him and the accuser. In a 2015 article for the Harvard Law Review , Janet Halley, a Harvard law professor, describes a case at an Oregon college in which a male student was investigated and told to stay away from a female student, resulting in the loss of his campus job and a move from his dorm. He didn’t know why he was being investigated, but it turned out he resembled a man who had raped the female student “months before and thousands of miles away.” He was found “innocent of any sexual misconduct,” but the no-contact order was not lifted. “When the duty to prevent a ‘sexually hostile environment’ is interpreted this expansively,” Halley wrote, indifference to the restrained person’s innocence will tend to follow. But “ending or hobbling someone’s access to education should be much harder than that.”

The preponderance-of-evidence standard demanded by OCR requires schools to make life-altering decisions even when there is great doubt. Penn State, for instance, instructs its adjudicators to find the accused guilty if they deem there is a 50.01 percent likelihood that a violation occurred, adding that this means they “may have considerable reservation” about their decision. Last year, the American Association of University Professors called for universities to be able to return to using the “clear and convincing” standard that many had used previously in Title IX cases. This year, the American College of Trial Lawyers similarly called for the standard of proof in Title IX proceedings to be clear and convincing evidence. Groups of professors at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School have each released open letters expressing their concern that OCR has undermined due process and justice.

Supporters of the preponderance standard, including Catherine Lhamon, the previous head of OCR, argue that preponderance is the standard that courts say to use in administrative and civil proceedings—and is hence fitting for campus adjudication. OCR guidance emphasizes the difference between a Title IX investigation and a criminal case, noting that the former “will never result in incarceration,” thus “the same procedural protections and legal standards are not required.” And the preponderance-of-evidence standard is held to be appropriate by the Supreme Court in civil litigation involving discrimination. But the Court has also ruled that the clear-and-convincing standard is appropriate for those civil proceedings where “particularly important individual interests or rights are at stake.”

What’s more, even in civil court cases, defendants have myriad protections not typically found in Title IX proceedings, such as receipt of a specific, written complaint; clear rules of evidence; knowledge of the testimony of adverse witnesses; and the rights to discovery, cross-examination, and the calling of expert witnesses. The absence of options and protections such as discovery and cross-examination sometimes works against complainants, too—it’s a bad system. But especially in a context where the standard for finding guilt is so low, it is particularly unjust to the accused. The 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter said that the basic right to question one’s accuser should be severely limited. To accede to OCR’s guidance, some schools ask the accused to assemble a list of questions for the accuser that campus officials can ask on his behalf, at their discretion. A number of young men have asserted in lawsuits that their questions were ignored.

In a 2014 Yale Law & Policy Review article, Janet Napolitano asked, “Should there be any recognition of an accused student’s rights against self-incrimination in the administrative investigation?” The answer has been no in recent years. If the accused declines to answer questions, he can be expelled. But whatever he says in an administrative hearing can be turned over to law-enforcement authorities and used against him in a criminal proceeding.

Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and its former dean, told me he believes that the integrity of the legal system requires rules designed to prevent innocent people from being punished, and that these same principles should apply on campus. But he is concerned that severe sanctions are being imposed without the necessary protections for the accused. As he wrote in HuffPost , “For a college or university to expel a student for sexual assault is a matter of grave consequence both for the institution and for the student. Such an expulsion will haunt the student for the rest of his days, especially in the world of the Internet. Indeed, it may well destroy his chosen career prospects.”

Stone also wrote that while campus codes of conduct say sexual assault is a Title IX violation, there is a widespread failure to clearly define sexual assault. Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob Gersen, in “The Sex Bureaucracy,” for example, document the frequent conflation on campus of the terms nonconsensual sex and unwanted sex, and explain why this is so concerning: “Many people, regardless of gender and sexual orientation, have consensual sex that is unwanted. Sometimes it is partially unwanted, not fully wanted, or both wanted and unwanted at the same time … Ambivalence—simultaneously wanting and not wanting, desire and revulsion—is endemic to human sexuality.”

Sometimes, of course, there is no ambiguity, as when a woman says no, or sends visible, consistent physical signals that she is not consenting to a sexual act. But many schools no longer require women to say or signal no in order for an encounter to be considered nonconsensual. Affirmative-consent rules, particularly when written or interpreted expansively, do that directly; in California, Connecticut, and New York, affirmative-consent codes for college students have been signed into law. So do policies that treat women who have been drinking—but who are not by any objective standard incapacitated—as unable to give consent.

The problem with both types of policies is that they are intrusive and impractical. Couples are especially unlikely to adhere to contract-negotiation-style bedroom interactions (and it is no small intrusion on privacy to require them to do so). The proscription on drinking before sex is certain to be widely ignored; sexually inexperienced students (and even experienced ones) often drink in order to lower their inhibitions. And yet ignoring these rules puts men in great jeopardy should their partner later reconsider what seemed to have been a consensual encounter.

In the world outside campus, people who are merely intoxicated, not incapacitated, can legally consent to sex, even if they make poor or regrettable decisions. In many states, sex with an incapacitated partner is a crime when the accused knows, or reasonably should know, about the incapacity and intends to act without consent. Recently, some schools have adopted clearer standards for incapacitation, including the requirement that the accused should reasonably know about the incapacity in order for consent to be invalidated. But on many campuses, no such knowledge or intent is required for an adjudication to determine that a violation has occurred.

A central tenet of advocates seeking greater accountability for sexual assault is that the complainant is virtually always the one telling the truth. As a 2014 White House report, “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action,” stated, “Only 2–10 percent of reported rapes are false.” Campus materials aimed at students make similar assertions.

But as Michelle J. Anderson, the president of Brooklyn College and a scholar of rape law, acknowledged in a 2004 paper in the Boston University Law Review , “There is no good empirical data on false rape complaints either historically or currently.” The data have not improved since that time. In a 2015 working paper, Lieutenant Colonel Reggie Yager, a U.S. Air Force judge advocate who has defended men accused of sexual assault, took a comprehensive look at the research on the incidence of false rape reports, and concluded that the studies confirming the overwhelming veracity of accusers are methodologically unsound.

For instance, consider Yager’s analysis of a 2010 study titled “False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases.” The study is one of the few to examine false reports with specific reference to campus allegations, and is frequently cited by government officials and activists. David Lisak, a former associate professor of psychology at UMass Boston and a prominent consultant on campus sexual assault, is the lead author; when he and his co-authors reviewed the reports of sexual assault at one northeastern university to determine what percentage were false, they concluded that the figure was not quite 6 percent. “Over 90 percent of reports of rape are not fabrications. They’re not false allegations,” he said in a videotaped interview describing the research.

Yager writes, however, that about 45 percent of the cases Lisak reviewed did not proceed, because there was insufficient evidence, or the complainant withdrew from the process or couldn’t identify the perpetrator, or the allegation did not rise to the level of a sexual assault. In other words, no one could possibly determine whether these claims were true or false.

“Policy is being driven,” Yager wrote in his analysis, by the idea “that false allegations are exceedingly rare.” But we simply don’t know how rare they are. What’s more, no legal or moral system purporting to be just can make presumptions about individual cases based on statistics. For many years, feminist activists have said that the legal system and culture tend to prejudge assault claims, with an inclination toward believing men over women, accused over accuser. They have rightly pointed out the deep injustice of that bias. But it is also unjust to be biased against the accused.

A troubling paradox within the activist community, and increasingly among administrators, is the belief that while women who make a complaint should be given the strong benefit of the doubt, women who deny they were assaulted should not necessarily be believed. The rules at many schools, created in response to federal directives, require employees (except those covered by confidentiality protections, such as health-care providers) to report to the Title IX office any instance of possible sexual assault or harassment of which they become aware. One result is that offhand remarks, rumors, and the inferences drawn by observers of ambiguous interactions can trigger investigations; sometimes these are not halted even when the alleged victim denies that an assault occurred.

A recent case at the University of Southern California that resulted in the expulsion of Matt Boermeester, 23, the kicker for the school’s football team, illustrates this. In January of this year, one neighbor thought he saw Boermeester hurting his girlfriend of more than a year, Zoe Katz, 22, a top USC tennis player. The neighbor, also a USC student, told another USC student, who told his father, a USC tennis coach. The coach was a mandatory reporter, and he told the Title IX office. A months-long investigation was launched, Boermeester was put on immediate suspension, and a no-contact order was placed on the couple (which they ignored when off-campus). Eventually USC found Boermeester responsible for violating the school’s student code of conduct, which prohibits intimate-partner violence, as well as for violating the no-contact order. He was expelled.

In a statement issued to the Los Angeles Times through a lawyer, Katz said that on the night in question the two were playing around and that nothing untoward happened. She wrote that Boermeester “has been falsely accused of conduct involving me” and that he “did nothing improper against me, ever. I would not stand for it. Nor will I stand for watching him be maligned and lied about.” She said the investigation went on despite her adamant objection; that Title IX administrators treated her in a “dismissive and demeaning” way and told her she was a “battered” woman; and that during “repeated interrogations,” her words were “misrepresented, misquoted and taken out of context.” Boermeester recently filed suit against the school seeking to have his expulsion overturned. In papers filed in response to the suit, USC has said that it stands by its investigation and has asked the court to deny Boermeester relief, citing the completeness of the university’s investigation and the due process afforded him during the school’s administrative proceeding. The school wrote that Katz “initially confirmed” the version of events supplied by the neighbor and other witnesses, that she asked for the no-contact order, and that she texted that she was worried Boermeester would find out she had spoken with the Title IX investigator. USC said her “attempts to protect Petitioner were consistent with a recognized pattern of recanting in intimate partner violence that may be motivated by love or fear of reprisal.” Katz called the university’s statements “ludicrous,” again denying its allegations, and noted that she and Boermeester are still dating.

There are no national data that let us know the prevalence of third-party reports, but they appear to be a significant source of allegations. The University of Michigan’s most recent “Student Sexual Misconduct Annual Report” says that the school’s Office for Institutional Equity “often receives complaints about incidents from third parties.” Yale releases a semiannual report of all possible sexual-assault and harassment complaints. Its report for the latter half of 2015 included a new category: third-party reports in which the alleged victim, after being contacted by the Title IX office, refused to cooperate. These cases made up more than 30 percent of all undergraduate assault allegations.

Mark Hathaway, a California attorney who has dealt with several no-complainant complaints, says that the zeal with which these complaints are sometimes handled can be wounding psychologically to both the accused and his partner. Hathaway represented a young man who was in bed with his girlfriend in her dorm room. They were fooling around but not having intercourse. In the next bed was the girlfriend’s roommate and a male student. They thought that the girlfriend had had too much to drink to be able to consent to sexual activity. They mentioned their concern to a resident adviser, who was obligated to report it to the Title IX office, which then opened an investigation. “The girl says nothing happened; it was all consensual,” Hathaway told me. “But the school still goes forward.”

Because the school considered her a witness, the girlfriend was compelled to answer questions; had she refused to cooperate, she could have been disciplined. (If she had been the complainant, she would have had the right to decline.) Hathaway told me she “was in tears because she was required to explain to total strangers intimate sexual details.” The school concluded, despite her statements to the contrary, that she couldn’t have consented to the sexual encounter, and suspended her boyfriend for a semester. He was also required to attend eight sessions with a therapist on the topic of alcohol and sexual relationships.

While police and prosecutors, after evaluating an on-campus or off-campus complaint, can make a discretionary decision about whether to pursue further action, OCR guidance makes clear that school administrators are not supposed to render such judgment. In response to any complaint, including those by third parties, they are supposed to investigate. Hathaway says of campus administrators, “There is a machine that needs to be fed, and they are part of the machine.”

University administrators are in an unenviable place today. Students arriving on campus are, by many measures, less socially developed than were those of previous generations. They have dated less and spent less time hanging out with one another without adults present. They also have less experience with alcohol, but suddenly encounter an environment in which binge drinking is a norm. Without a doubt, these characteristics make many students particularly vulnerable to assault. They also create an environment in which sexual experimentation followed by shame or regret is common, as is poor communication by both parties.

Candice Jackson may have intended to say something like this in July. If so, she bungled and dramatically overstated her point, and had to apologize for being flippant. (“Ninety percent” of sexual-assault claims, she had said, were the result of drunken hookups and bad breakups, reported later as sexual assaults.) But the actions she has taken or publicly considered taking so far—she has scaled back investigations to initially consider only the complaint that was actually made; she has indicated that she may cease to publicly list the universities under Title IX investigation—are sensible. OCR is considering other measures, some of which may be announced as soon as September 7, in a speech on Title IX by Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education. Any reforms OCR eventually makes should receive a fair public hearing.

It’s likely they will not. Since Trump’s election, many college presidents and administrators have promised that they will not willingly change policies they now have in place. The president of California State University at Northridge, Dianne Harrison, wrote in an op-ed in February that she hoped DeVos would uphold the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter and added, “This is not something from which we or any campus should retreat, no matter what the U.S. Department of Education under the new administration may propose.”

Harrison won’t have to retreat on preponderance. That standard is already part of a California law governing campus adjudications; preponderance is also a requirement under an Illinois law soon to go into effect. Prescient activists, fearing that federal guidance might be overturned, have already begun lobbying state legislatures to enshrine as law much of the Obama administration’s Title IX sexual-assault guidance—California and Massachusetts are considering such bills.

And while some college administrators express concern about due process, that concern does not always appear to be top of mind, even though lawsuits are piling up. Some 170 suits about unfair treatment have been filed by accused students over the past several years. As K. C. Johnson, the co-author, with Stuart Taylor Jr., of the recent book The Campus Rape Frenzy , notes, at least 60 have so far resulted in findings favorable to them. The National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, one of the country’s largest higher-education law firms and consulting practices specializing in Title IX, recently released a white paper, “Due Process and the Sex Police.” It noted that higher-education institutions are “losing case after case in federal court on what should be very basic due process protections. Never before have colleges been losing more cases than they are winning, but that is the trend as we write this.” The paper warned that at some colleges, “overzealousness to impose sexual correctness”—including the idea that anything less than “utopian” sex is punishable—“is causing a backlash that is going to set back the entire consent movement.” Even so, in a February op-ed, Carol Quillen, the president of Davidson College, wrote that while “criminal justice is founded on due process and the possibility of innocence,” ideals she valued, these goals were inherently in conflict with other important goals. “Nothing about due process says to a rape survivor, ‘I believe you,’” she wrote.

Over the past several years of reporting and writing on this subject, the people I’ve spoken with who deal closely with campus sexual assault—school administrators, lawyers, higher-education-policy consultants, even investigators for the Office for Civil Rights—do not typically describe campuses filled with sociopathic predators. They mostly paint a picture of students, many of them freshmen, who begin a late-night consensual sexual encounter, well lubricated by alcohol, and end up with divergent views of what happened.

Lee Burdette Williams, who from 2009 to 2014 was the vice president for student affairs and dean of students at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, and before that was the dean of students at the University of Connecticut, spent some of her final years in academia overseeing such tricky cases. She told me that sexual assaults do, of course, happen, that allegations must always be handled seriously and with great care, and that she herself oversaw the expulsion of students who were found to be violators. But she also said that many of the cases she dealt with—especially recently—involved a female student who’d had a sexual encounter that had left her unsettled but that did not fit the definition of a crime.

She told me that one reason so many cases involved first-year students was that these students were particularly “inexperienced and clueless about how to talk to each other about sex.” Many of them didn’t know what they wanted or didn’t want, and many of them experimented, then later felt embarrassed or maltreated. Parsing allegations, considering intent, holding violators accountable, providing guidance and counseling to one or both parties when no violation could be established—these are crucial duties of administrators, and they require judgment and discretion. Williams came to believe that in recent years, this discretion—and the duty to dispassionately weigh the rights of both parties in an assault allegation—has been harmfully eroded. In 2014, she left her career to become a higher-education consultant and writer. She wrote a farewell essay in Inside Higher Education , stating that while she used to think of herself as “Dean of All Students,” her job had become “Dean of Sexual Assault.”

At its worst, Title IX is now a cudgel with which the government and school administrators enforce sex rules too bluntly, and in ways that invite abuse. That’s an uncomfortable statement. It does not cancel or diminish other uncomfortable statements: Women (and men) are assaulted on campus, those assaults can be devastating, and the victims do not always receive justice when they come forward. But we have arrived at a point at which schools investigate, adjudicate, and punish the kind of murky, ambiguous sexual encounters that trained law-enforcement officials are unable to sort out—and also at a point at which the definition of sexual misconduct on many campuses has expanded beyond reason.

Institutions of higher education must protect their students from crimes and physical harm. They should also model for their students how an open society functions, and how necessary it is to protect the civil liberties of everyone.

About the Author

Sexual assault and rape on U.S. college campuses: Research roundup

2014 review of government reports and scholarship on the issue of sexual assault and rape on campus, as well as prevention, risks and related cultural dynamics.

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by Kristina Mastropasqua, The Journalist's Resource September 22, 2015

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Institutions of higher learning across the United States have been rocked by reports of rape and sexual assault . Federal, state and local officials have become involved , as schools work to revise their policies and procedures to prevent further incidents. A survey commissioned by the Association of American Universities, the results of which were released in September 2015 , found that more than 27% of female college seniors reported having experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact since entering college. Meanwhile, two high-profile lawsuits have kept the topic of college sexual assault in the national spotlight. In 2015, a former Florida State University student filed a lawsuit against the school for its handling of her sexual assault report and another against former Florida State football star Jameis Winston, who she has accused of raping her in 2012 .

The research on many facets of these problems is incomplete, but new reports and data-rich studies can help deepen perspective. In December 2014, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report focusing on nearly 20 years of data related to rape and sexual assault among women ages 18 to 24. In 2014, President Obama appointed the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assaults. During the research phase, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) provided the White House with an extensive list of recommendations urging “the task force to remain focused on the true cause of the problem,” pointing out that rape is “not caused by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions of a small percentage of the community to commit a violent crime.” In fact, RAINN points out that research suggests 90% of rapes at colleges are perpetrated by 3% of college men — indicating a real issue of repeat offenders.

Part of RAINN’s recommendations includes a three-tiered approach to prevention: (1) Bystander intervention education: empowering community members to act in response to acts of sexual violence; (2) Risk-reduction messaging: empowering members of the community to take steps to increase their personal safety; and (3), General education to promote understanding of the law, particularly as it relates to the ability to consent.

Similarly, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Justice prepared a report, “ Preventing Sexual Violence on College Campuses: Lessons from Research and Practice ,” for use by the White House Task Force. The report cites the proven effectiveness of high-school sexual violence prevention programs, which might be effectively translated into college campaigns. One of the report’s authors, Sarah DeGue, cites a 2013 study — a systematic qualitative review of risk and protective factors for sexual violence perpetration — that finds a high correlation between sexual assault and alcohol use. Therefore, college campuses that can curb the number of nearby liquor stores and instances of binge drinking could potentially reduce the number of assaults.

Although there are thousands of colleges and universities in the United States, the CDC reports that just “over 125 college and university campuses across the U.S. have affiliations with CDC’s Rape Prevention and Education program to facilitate the implementation of sexual violence prevention strategies and activities.” While much more research is needed in order to determine meaningful methodologies in preventing rape and sexual assault on campuses, the report suggests, some significant first steps would be for universities to work to build trust between administrators and the student body and to implement routine anonymous surveys for students to safely express their experiences with sexual (mis)conduct on campus.

After conducting thousands of interviews with various stakeholders, the White House released its final report in April 2014: “ Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault .” By increasing awareness and researching new methods for prevention, the project’s goal is to dramatically reduce the number of students — primarily female — who are sexually assaulted on campus, which stands at one in five, according to the federal Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study of 2006. A 2014 report from the National Crime Victimization Survey suggests a lower rate among college students, and journalists have noted that there is now a “dueling data” quality to these conflicting reports. (The 2006 CSA Study found that 6.1% of college males were victims of either attempted or completed sexual assault.)

The “Not Alone” report makes a series of key recommendations that begin with gauging the scope of the crisis through routine, anonymous, campus-wide surveys. From there, the Task Force encourages universities to engage their male students and encourage them to step in when someone is in trouble and become part of the solution. In addition the government has created a new website, NotAlone.gov , which provides more transparency on the issue by providing information and pathways for reporting problems.

The report also encourages universities to work to clarify what is — and what is not — consent. This is a major debate that both Time magazine and Philadelphia Magazine have covered recently. A 2013 study explores variables, such as violence, intoxication, and prior romantic relationships, that can impact acknowledged versus unacknowledged sexual assault among college women. Research has found that incoming first-year college students subscribe to a wide variety of “myths” about rape.

Below is a selection of further studies that explore the general issue of sexual assault and rape on campus, as well as prevention, risks and related cultural dynamics:

“Sexual Assault on the College Campus: Fraternity Affiliation, Male Peer Support, and Low Self-Control” Franklin, Courtney A.; Bouffard, Leana Allen; Pratt, Travis C. Criminal Justice and Behavior , 2012, Vol. 39, 1457, doi: 10.1177/0093854812456527.

Abstract: “Research on college sexual assault has focused on offender behavior to understand why men perpetrate sexual violence. Dominant theories have incorporated forms of male peer support paying particular attention to the impact of rape-supportive social relationships on woman abuse. In contrast, Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory of crime proposes that low self-control predicts crime and other related life outcomes – including the kinds of antisocial peer relationships that the male peer support model contends causes sexual violence. The exclusion of measures of self-control on sexual assault may result in a misspecified peer support model. Accordingly, the current research empirically tests Schwartz and DeKeseredy’s male peer support model and examines the role of self-control in the larger male peer support model of sexual assault. Implications for theory and research are discussed.”

“A Randomized Controlled Trial Targeting Alcohol Use and Sexual Assault Risk among College Women at High Risk for Victimization” Gilmore, Amanda K.; Lewis, Melissa A.; George, William. Behaviour Research and Therapy , August 2015. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2015.08.007.

Abstract: “Current sexual assault risk reduction programs do not target alcohol use despite the widespread knowledge that alcohol use is a risk factor for being victimized. The current study assessed the effectiveness of a web-based combined sexual assault risk and alcohol use reduction program using a randomized control trial. A total of 207 college women between the ages of 18 and 20 who engaged in heavy episodic drinking were randomized to one of five conditions: full assessment only control condition, sexual assault risk reduction condition, alcohol use reduction condition, combined sexual assault risk and alcohol use reduction condition, and a minimal assessment only condition. Participants completed a 3-month follow-up survey on alcohol-related sexual assault outcomes, sexual assault outcomes, and alcohol use outcomes. Significant interactions revealed that women with higher incidence and severity of sexual assault at baseline experienced less incapacitated attempted or completed rapes, less incidence/severity of sexual assaults, and engaged in less heavy episodic drinking compared to the control condition at the 3-month follow-up. Web-based risk reduction programs targeting both sexual assault and alcohol use may be the most effective way to target the highest risk sample of college students for sexual assault: those with a sexual assault history and those who engage in heavy episodic drinking.”

“Correlates of Rape while Intoxicated in a National Sample of College Women” Mohler, Meichun; Dowdall, George W.; Koss, Mary P.; Wechsler, Henry. Journal of Studies on Alcohol , January 2004, Vol. 65, 37-45.

Abstract: “ Objective: Heavy alcohol use is widespread among college students, particularly in those social situations where the risk of rape rises. Few studies have provided information on rapes of college women that occur when they are intoxicated. The purpose of the present study was to present prevalence data for rape under the condition of intoxication when the victim is unable to consent and to identify college and individual-level risk factors associated with that condition. Method: The study utilizes data from 119 schools participating in three Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study surveys. The analytic sample of randomly selected students includes 8,567 women in the 1997 survey, 8,425 in the 1999 survey, and 6,988 in the 2001 survey. Results : Roughly one in 20 (4.7%) women reported being raped. Nearly three quarters (72%) of the victims experienced rape while intoxicated. Women who were under 21, were white, resided in a sorority house, used illicit drugs, drank heavily in high school and attended colleges with high rates of heavy episodic drinking were at higher risk of rape while intoxicated. Conclusions : The high proportion of rapes found to occur when women were intoxicated indicates the need for alcohol prevention programs on campuses that address sexual assault, both to educate men about what constitutes rape and to advise women of risky situations. The findings that some campus environments are associated with higher levels of both drinking and rape will help target rape prevention programs at colleges.”

“ Women’s Risk Perception and Sexual Victimization: A Review of the Literature ” Gidycz, Christine A.; McNamara, John R.; Edwards, Katie M. Aggression and Violent Behavior, September-October 2012, Vol. 11, Issue 5, 441-456, doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2006.01.004.

Abstract: “This article reviews empirical and theoretical studies that examined the relationship between risk perception and sexual victimization in women. Studies examining women’s general perceptions of risk for sexual assault as well as their ability to identify and respond to threat in specific situations are reviewed. Theoretical discussions of the optimistic bias and cognitive–ecological models of risk recognition are discussed in order to account for findings in the literature. Implications for interventions with women as well as recommendations for future research are provided.”

“Bystander Education Training for Campus Sexual Assault Prevention: An Initial Meta-analysis” Katz, J.; Moore, J. Violence and Victims , 2013, Vol. 28, Issue 6, 1054-1067.

Abstract: “The present meta-analysis evaluated the effectiveness of bystander education programs for preventing sexual assault in college communities. Undergraduates trained in bystander education for sexual assault were expected to report more favorable attitudes, behavioral proclivities, and actual behaviors relative to untrained controls. Data from 12 studies of college students (N = 2,926) were used to calculate 32 effect sizes. Results suggested moderate effects of bystander education on both bystander efficacy and intentions to help others at risk. Smaller but significant effects were observed regarding self-reported bystander helping behaviors, (lower) rape-supportive attitudes, and (lower) rape proclivity, but not perpetration. These results provide initial support for the effectiveness of in-person bystander education training. Nonetheless, future longitudinal research evaluating behavioral outcomes and sexual assault incidence is needed.”

“Fear of Rape among College Women: A Social Psychological Analysis” Pryor, D.W.; Hughes, M.R. Violence Vict. , 2013, Vol. 28, Issue 3, 443-465.

Abstract: “This article examines social psychological underpinnings of fear of rape among college women. We analyze data from a survey of 1,905 female undergraduates to test the influence of 5 subjective perceptions about vulnerability and harm: unique invulnerability, gender risk, defensibility, anticipatory shame, and attribution of injury. We include 3 sources of crime exposure in our models: past sexual victimization, past noncontact violent victimization, and structural risk measured by age, parent’s income, and race. Separate measures of fear of stranger and acquaintance rape are modeled, including variables tapping current versus anticipatory fear, fear on campus versus everywhere, and fear anytime versus at night. The data show that fear of rape among college women appears more grounded in constructed perceptions of harm and danger than in past violent experiences.”

“Necessary But Not Sufficient: Sexual Assault Information on College and University Websites” Lund, Emily M.; Thomas, Katie B. Psychology of Women Quarterly , August 2015. doi: 10.1177/0361684315598286.

Abstract: “The objective of our study was to investigate the availability, location, and content of sexual assault information presented on college and university websites. A random sample of 102 accredited, non-profit, bachelors-granting U.S. colleges and universities was selected for webcoding. Websites were coded for the availability and location of sexual assault information, including what resources and information were provided and whether topics such as date rape, consent, and victim blaming were addressed. Ninety (88.2%) of the 102 colleges and universities in our sample had sexual assault information available in their domains. University policy (83.3%) and contact information for law enforcement (72.2%) and other resources (56.7–82.2%) were often included, but most websites failed to provide information on issues related to sexual assault, such as discouraging victim blaming (35.6%) and encouraging affirmative consent (30.0%). Colleges and universities should consider updating the sexual assault information on their websites with the assistance of local, expert practitioners in order to provide more comprehensive, organized, useful, and user-friendly information on sexual assault prevention and intervention.”

“The Role of University Health Centers in Intervention and Prevention of Campus Sexual Assault” Buchholz, Laura. Journal of the American Medical Association , August 2015, Vol. 314. doi: 10.1001/jama.2015.8213.

Summary: This article offers insight into the role that university health centers play in preventing campus sexual assault and providing support to assault victims through programs in areas such as counseling, medical care and survivor advocacy.

“To Whom Do College Women Confide Following Sexual Assault? A Prospective Study of Predictors of Sexual Assault Disclosure and Social Reactions” Orchowski, Lindsay M., Gidycz, Christine A. Violence Against Women, March 2012, Vol. 18, No. 3, 264-288, doi: 10.1177/1077801212442917.

Abstract: “A prospective methodology was used to explore predictors of sexual assault disclosure among college women, identify who women tell about sexual victimization, and examine the responses of informal support providers (N = 374). Women most often confided in a female peer. Increased coping via seeking emotional support, strong attachments, and high tendency to disclose stressful information predicted adolescent sexual assault disclosure and disclosure over the 7-month interim. Less acquaintance with the perpetrator predicted disclosure over the follow-up, including experiences of revictimization. Victim and perpetrator alcohol use at the time of the assault also predicted disclosure over the follow-up. Implications are presented.”

“Community Responsibility for Preventing Sexual Violence: A Pilot Study with Campus Greeks and Intercollegiate Athletes” Moynihan, Mary M., Banyard, Victoria L. Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community, October 2008, Vol. 36, Issue 1-2, 23-38, doi:10.1080/10852350802022274.

Summary: “Previous research has noted higher incidences of sexual violence on campus among members of campus Greeks and athletes and the need to do prevention programs with them. This article presents the results of an exploratory pilot study of a sexual violence prevention program with members of one fraternity, sorority, men’s and women’s intercollegiate athletic team. The program, experimentally evaluated and found to be effective with a general sample of undergraduates, was used to determine its efficacy specifically with Greeks and athletes. The model on which the program is based calls for prevention efforts that take a wider community approach rather than simply targeting individuals as potential perpetrators or victims. Results from repeated-measures analysis of variance indicate that the program worked overall. Future directions are discussed.”

Keywords: crime, higher education, sex crimes

About The Author

Kristina Mastropasqua

Making campuses safer

Psychologist-designed programs are showing some success at preventing sexual assault on college campuses, but there are no one-size-fits-all solutions

By Lea Winerman

October 2018, Vol 49, No. 9

Print version: page 54

14 min read

Psychotherapy
Sex and Sexuality
Sexual Assault and Harassment
Physical Abuse and Violence

At Stanford University, a varsity swimmer was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious young woman behind a dumpster. At Columbia University, a student carried a mattress around campus for a year, a performance art piece designed to rebuke the school for its failure to discipline a fellow student she claimed had assaulted her. At Baylor University, the president, athletic director and head football coach resigned or were fired after an investigation revealed yearsof neglecting to follow up on claims of sexual assaults by football players.

Over the past few years, the list of these and other big-name schools roiled by big-time sexual assault scandals has mushroomed. And the headlines only begin to reveal the extent of the problem. There are no definitive numbers—it's notoriously tough to gather data on the prevalence of sexual violence on campus, and most assaults go unreported. But the most common estimate is that about one in five college women will be the victim of a sexual assault during her years in school, an estimate backed up by surveys from the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Association of American Universities , among others. (Estimates on male victims of sexual assault are more variable, but they range from about one in 10 to one in 20 students.)

The growing public awareness of these numbers—and a 2014 legislative mandate from Congress to address them—has sent colleges and universities looking for solutions. That's not entirely new: Efforts to educate college students about sexual assault date back at least to the 1970s, when community and student activists began organizing Take Back the Night marches and, later, Sexual Assault Awareness Month events in cities and on campuses. "In the past few years," however, "schools have been moving away from just these ‘awareness' options and thinking much more about primary prevention," says psychologist Sarah DeGue, PhD, a senior scientist in the Division of Violence Prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prevention isn't easy. Schools face many challenges, including inadequate resources, students' limited attention spans and simply gathering accurate data on the scope of the problem. But increasingly, administrators have been turning to psychologists and other researchers to figure out what might work.

From awareness to action

Psychologist Dorothy Edwards, PhD, says that when she arrived at the University of Kentucky to found the Violence Intervention and Prevention Center in 2005, "I'd already been doing work on campus sexual assault for about a decade, and the common theme of that decade was my failure. I couldn't help but notice that my work wasn't gaining momentum, and the numbers of sexual assaults weren't coming down."

Frustrated by the inadequacy of available resources, Edwards went on to develop the Green Dot program, now one of the nation's most widely used sexual violence prevention programs. In the multipart program, some students—men and women selected because they are student leaders or social influencers—take a six-hour, multisession class that teaches them how to be an "active bystander." They learn to recognize high-risk situations in which someone nearby is at risk of becoming a victim of sexual assault, to understand the social and other barriers that might keep them from intervening and to overcome those barriers to stop the potential assault. The program also includes a one-hour training for the rest of the students on campus, as well as a faculty/staff training portion.

The idea, Edwards says, came from digging into the psychology literature on how to change behaviors and shape social norms. "We'd only been talking about two characters: the potential victim and the potential perpetrator," she says. "And because of disproportionate statistics, we lumped all men into perpetrators and all women into victims. But there's a third character—the bystander. And that third character can be the most important, because if you can mobilize those folks, it allows you to change what will and will not be tolerated."

For example, a young man might see his fraternity brother about to take a drunk young woman upstairs during a party. The young man could intervene directly, but if that feels too risky, he could also distract the potential perpetrator, even saying something like, "Hey, man, your car is being towed."

"It's not about convincing [the bystanders] to do something they don't want to do; it's about giving them the tools to do what they want to do anyway," Edwards says. "It's about doing what we can to make the university a less hospitable environment for assault, and everyone has a part to play in that."

Edwards was inspired by a similar program developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s at the University of New Hampshire called Bringing in the Bystander . The two programs differ in details—for example, Bringing in the Bystander began by training men and women in separate groups, while Green Dot programs have always been co-ed—but the philosophy is similar.

"They are getting at the same core components," says Vicki Banyard, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of New Hampshire who has conducted several evaluations of the Bringing in the Bystander program.

Over the past decade or so, her studies and others have found evidence that bystander-intervention programs can change students' attitudes and behavior. In one of the first rigorous trials, Banyard and her colleagues studied 389 undergraduates randomized to either an intervention group that received Bringing in the Bystander training or a control group that did not. They found that those who completed the training were less likely to accept "rape myths"—for example, that women are responsible for being assaulted—and were more likely to say they would intervene in risky situations than students in the control group who hadn't received the training ( Journal of Community Psychology , Vol. 35, No. 4, 2007 ). A larger follow-up study found that those effects could last up to a year after the intervention, and that they were effective at both a rural and an urban college ( Journal of Interpersonal Violence , Vol. 30, No. 1, 2015 ).

Meanwhile, a study of nearly 7,500 undergrads by epidemiologist Ann Coker, PhD, of the University of Kentucky, and colleagues found that students who had completed a Green Dot training were significantly less likely to believe rape myths and more likely to engage in bystander interventions than students who didn't undergo the training ( Violence Against Women , Vol. 17, No. 6, 2011 ).

Spurred in part by research like this, the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act required all schools that receive Title IX funding to provide bystander training to their students, though it did not specify what that training should include.

Still, bystander training is not an all-purpose solution to sexual assault on campus, researchers say—and there is still much work to be done in refining and evaluating the programs. For one thing, while there is good evidence that the training can change students' attitudes and self-reported behaviors, there is not yet as much evidence that the programs work to actually reduce the number of assaults on campus. That's simply because it is difficult to get those data, Banyard says.

Some evidence is beginning to emerge. In a five-year randomized controlled trial that included nearly 90,000 students at 26 Kentucky high schools, Coker and her colleagues found that schools that implemented a high-school-adapted version of the Green Dot program saw rates of student-initiated sexual violence drop by the third and fourth years of the program ( American Journal of Preventive Medicine , Vol. 52, No. 5, 2017 ).

And in a smaller (nonrandomized) study that surveyed students at three universities, Coker and her colleagues found that students at the University of Kentucky, which had a bystander-training program in place, reported rates of sexual violence victimization 17 percent lower than students at two comparison schools that did not have the program ( American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2016 ).

Now that the SaVE Act requires many colleges and universities to implement some form of bystander training, the time is ripe for more research to find out how well it is working, according to Coker. She and her colleagues are in the midst of a four-year study to evaluate bystander programs at 24 universities. The schools use a range of programs, including Green Dot, Bringing in the Bystander, "home-grown" adaptations of each, and other in-person and online-only training. Coker and her colleagues are using administrative and survey data to figure out what the schools are doing and whether it's working.

"We're looking at attributes of the programs—how they're delivered, to whom, and the efficacy of those programs," she says.

Teaching resistance

Even at its best, however, bystander training cannot work in every situation and cannot stop every assault.

"Bystander programs help all the students on campus take responsibility to intervene—but there isn't usually a bystander there," says Charlene Senn, PhD, a psychology professor and Canada Research Chair in Sexual Violence at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. A young woman alone in her dorm room with a potential assailant—be it a friend, an acquaintance or a date—needs other tools to resist coercion.

So far, research suggests that the program works. In a randomized controlled trial with almost 900 undergraduate women, Senn and her colleagues found the program cut the incidence of rape almost in half: After one year, 5.2 percent of women who had completed the program reported being the victim of a rape, compared with 9.8 percent of those in the control group who received only informational brochures on sexual assault. In addition, just 3.4 percent of those in the EAAA intervention reported experiencing an attempted rape, compared with 9.3 percent of the control group (The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 372, No. 24, 2015 ).

Two years later, Senn and her colleagues surveyed the same group of women and found that the program's effects persisted: Students who took part in the intervention were 30 percent to 64 percent less likely to experience rape, attempted rape or nonconsensual sexual contact over the two years than women in the control group ( Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2017 ).

The program has been hailed as a rare clear-cut success in the field, but it has also attracted controversy. Some feminist activists believe it hearkens back to the kind of risk-reduction strategies that place too much of a burden on women for preventing assault.

Senn doesn't see it that way. "I am a feminist who has been appalled at the kind of interventions that tell women what they shouldn't do—that they shouldn't drink, shouldn't go where they want," she says. "But that's not what this is about. I don't find the term ‘risk reduction' helpful; I use the word ‘resistance.' It's about saying, ‘We know the risks are there and we can trust our instincts when we feel things are going wrong. We have the right to live freely and to have our rights respected, and we don't need to be "nice" about standing up for ourselves.'"

In fact, Senn's study found that after completing the training, women in the program were less inclined to believe rape myths and to engage in "women blaming" than were control participants.

Changing the social fabric

Bystander interventions and the EAAA program are very different, but they are both forms of primary prevention that target individual students to change their attitudes and behavior. Some researchers, however, are taking a different approach—looking more broadly at the fabric of campus life to figure out what kinds of institutional and cultural changes could help make sexual assault less likely.

Claude Ann Mellins, PhD, a clinical psychologist and professor in the psychiatry department at Columbia University Medical Center, teamed up with her colleague, anthropologist Jennifer Hirsch, PhD, of the sociomedical sciences department in Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, after a sexual assault accusation and ensuing trial rocked the Columbia/Barnard community in 2013.

The two researchers had worked together in related areas, including HIV prevention. They realized, Mellins says, that the field of sexual assault prevention could benefit from a multidisciplinary approach that would garner a more nuanced understanding of students' social and sexual lives, as well as the social contexts in which campus assaults take place.

Over two years, they worked collaboratively with Suzanne Goldberg, an executive vice president at Columbia who oversees the Office of University Life, as well as an interdisciplinary team of investigators and both undergraduate and faculty/administrative advisory boards, to conduct a three-part mixed-methods study they called SHIFT—the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation.

One component was an ethnographic study that included more than 150 in-depth interviews with students, 17 student focus groups and more than 500 hours of observations in settings such as bars and fraternity parties. The researchers also asked 500 students to complete a daily diary study to gain a better understanding of the timing and context of assaults. Finally, they conducted a detailed one-time survey of 2,500 randomly selected students that asked about students' experiences, behaviors and attitudes related to sex, relationships, mental health, substance use, social life, family and other sociodemographic data. Because Columbia University faculty are mandated reporters, they also applied for and received a Title IX waiver so that they could promise students confidentiality about the information they received.

The study wrapped up last fall, and Mellins and Hirsch published their first paper in November 2017—an estimate of sexual assault prevalence and demographic risk factors at Columbia/Barnard. Overall, they found, 22 percent of students reported being the victim of a sexual assault while in college (28 percent of women and 12 percent of men). Many factors increased that risk, they also found, including nonheterosexual identity, difficulty paying for basic expenses, fraternity/sorority membership and binge drinking, among others.

Now, Mellins and Hirsch are talking to university administrators about how to interpret and use the mountains of data they collected. They have presented their findings to orientation leaders, the school's Title IX coordinator, the head of student life and the head of facilities, among others. After hearing their presentation, the head of facilities decided to keep one dining hall open all night to provide students a safe place—that is not a dorm room or bedroom—to hang out and find food at all hours if they've been drinking. Mellins says she hopes the work will lead to a continuing discussion of the complexity of the issues at hand in preventing assault. She and Hirsch are also talking to colleagues who are interested in conducting similar studies at other schools.

"We need a multisystem, multitarget approach," Mellins says. "We need interventions on the individual level, on the social level and on the institutional level. We need more than one approach on any given campus."

DeGue, the CDC scientist, agrees. "We've seen a real shift toward and growth in primary-prevention strategies, but they mostly still fall at the individual or relationship level," she says. "What we are really still missing are community-level strategies. What can we change about campus climates, the physical and social environment, to create an environment in which people's behavior can change more easily?"

Implementation challenges

If there's anything the field's researchers agree on, it's that there is no one solution to the problem of sexual assault on campus. All of these strategies—bystander programs, resistance programs, structural changes on campus—have a role to play. And in fact, the best programs and strategies will differ from school to school, they say.

Meredith Smith, JD, is the assistant provost for Title IX compliance at Tulane University in New Orleans. She and other administrators like her are on the front lines of this issue, charged with surveying their options and choosing the best prevention programs for their schools. At Tulane, for example, the city's drinking culture and lax enforcement of the minimum drinking age is a particular problem, she says.

Other issues are more universal. Among them is burnout: Right now, for example, Tulane students participate in a mandatory sexual assault education program during orientation. Fraternity members go through another one when they join a Greek organization, as do student athletes.

"So, some students have gone through this three times," says Smith. "By that time, where is their level of engagement?"

"Higher education is starting to learn that prevention is different at different schools," she adds. "We all want each other to succeed, and so there is an element of ‘Here, this worked for me … take it.' But we need to make sure that it actually fits our campuses' needs."

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University News | 10.15.2019

Campus Survey: Sexual Assault, Harassment Remain Serious Problems

Results from the second campus survey of sexual misconduct show that sexual assault and harassment remain serious problems at institutions of higher education nationwide..

On October 15, Harvard released the results of a survey intended to estimate the prevalence of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct among its undergraduate, graduate, and professional-school students. The survey, conducted during the spring of 2019, reached about 23,000 students, of whom 36.1 percent (about 8,300) responded. The data—echoing those from the 32 other private and public Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions that participated in this year’s survey— show that sexual assault and harassment are a serious problem. At Harvard, the prevalence of sexual assault (12.4 percent) was essentially unchanged since a similar survey was conducted in 2015 .

Among undergraduates, the vast majority of nonconsensual sexual contact is student to student (82.5 percent), takes place in on-campus housing (more than two-thirds overall, and 79.4 percent in incidents of penetration or sexual touching by physical force and/or inability to consent), and involves alcohol (75.6 percent). Rates among graduate students, who are less likely to live in on-campus housing, less likely to go out drinking with friends, and less likely to be single, are lower, but on-campus housing remains the modal location for sexual assault. Although the rates at which students disclose these incidents have been climbing rapidly (the rate of disclosure increased 56 percent in fiscal year 2018) the majority of students do not disclose incidents to the University, the survey showed—and the prevalence of nonconsensual sexual contact has been unaffected by rising disclosure rates. Among all AAU institutions that participated in both the 2015 and 2019 surveys, the prevalence of nonconsensual sexual contact has risen slightly overall.

The most significant change to the 2019 survey is that it introduces “incident level reporting” for cases of both sexual assault and sexual harassment: students who indicate that they have been victims of sexual assault, for example, are asked a series of additional questions, such as the nature of their relationship to the perpetrator, where they were during the time leading up to the incident, where they were when the incident occurred, the perpetrator’s relationship to the University, and whether they contacted any of the resources or support services available to them on campus (see table 4, above). With incident level reporting, the assertion made based on 2015 data that among undergraduates “about 15 percent of incidents took place in single-sex organizations that were not a fraternity or sorority”—final clubs—appears incorrect. Among Harvard College students, “on-campus social events” and “restaurants, bars and clubs” figure more prominently in both “leadup location” and “incident location,” behind on-campus housing.

Questions about sexual harassment, as opposed to assault, were changed in the 2019 survey, meaning that the data can’t be reliably compared to the data from the 2015. Harassment, however, remains a serious concern: 39.3 percent of respondents reported experiencing harassing behavior, and 17.7 percent reported that the harassment interfered with their academic or professional performance, limited their ability to participate in an academic program, or created an intimidating, hostile, or offensive social, academic, or work environment. As with allegations of assault, most harassment was perpetrated by other students.

Since the 2015 survey, Harvard has expanded its support services and educational outreach to its student communities. In 2016, the University hired Nicole Merhill as its Title IX officer, and specified that she spend 50 percent of her time designing prevention initiatives. Since then, 65,000 students, staff, and faculty members have participated in online training, and in-person training has been increasing rapidly, too (by 41 percent in the past year). Merhill has created two Title IX liaison groups, one for students and another for staff. And she has made a number of changes designed to increase the likelihood that students will disclose incidents of assault and harassment to University administrators, including expansion of its system of more than 50 Title IX coordinators. “Bystander” training, another initiative, seeks to increase the likelihood that students, faculty and staff will intervene if they see behavior that presages sexual assault. Most recently, Merhill established an online anonymous disclosure tool in response to student concerns that reporting an incident might lead to their losing control over the ensuing process. The new tool is designed to allow University affiliates to communicate with the University Title IX Office without revealing their identity until they are ready.

Nevertheless, most students who reported an incident of sexual assault did NOT seek out aid, whether from University Health Services, the office of BGLTQ student life, the mental-health counselors, the Title IX office, the Office for Dispute Resolution, the office of sexual assault prevention and response, Harvard chaplains, or student peer supports. The principal reason students gave for not reporting an incident was that it wasn’t serious enough. However, a majority reported that they did speak with friends and family about the event.

In written recommendations to President Lawrence S. Bacow, deputy provost Peggy Newell and Cahners-Rabb professor of business administration Kathleen L. McGinn, co-chairs of the Harvard 2019 AAU Student Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct, wrote that:

Knowledge of support services and belief in the fairness of University processes for investigating reports of nonconsensual sexual contact and sexual harassment have both risen since 2015, but less than half of our students feel very or extremely knowledgeable about support services on campus and less than half of our students believe that the outcome of University processes related to reports of sexual misconduct will be fair. In spite of heightened attention to nonconsensual sexual contact and sexual harassment in society, in the media, and at Harvard, only a minority of students experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact or sexual harassment access any of the resources available on campus…. The steady and high rate of nonconsensual sexual contact experienced by Harvard students calls for a cultural change across our community.

President Bacow, in a letter to the Harvard community , wrote that:

the data support the reality that sexual assault and sexual harassment remain a serious problem at Harvard, and at institutions of higher education across the country….We must do more to prevent sexual and gender-based harassment and assault, and to encourage people to come forward to share their experiences and their concerns with us. And we must not rest until every member of our community has confidence in their institution’s ability to support them. This responsibility starts with the University leadership, but we can only truly effect meaningful change with your ideas and your commitment….

“Initiatives like bystander training,” he continued, “send the message to students that sexual misconduct is not acceptable." He has therefore “asked the Title IX Office to oversee the expansion of more of these bystander intervention initiatives across the University.” But he noted that “A change in culture can only come about through shared efforts by the administration, faculty, staff, and students,” and he invited all members of the Harvard community to a conversation about the issues raised by the survey at the Science Center on October 17.

“One of my highest priorities,” he concluded, “is to create a community in which all of us can do our best work. To achieve this, we must seek to enhance our policies and procedures, and build out new resources, that are marked by our humanity, and which remind us to care for one another. But most importantly, we must recognize that we all have a role to play in ensuring that each of us who calls Harvard home feels welcome, and safe.”

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AGNI is publishing this essay as part of The Ferrante Project.

“What would happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser asks in her oft-quoted poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” “if one woman told the truth about / her life? / The world would split open.” Over the past few years, I’ve begun to question the truth of that statement, especially as it relates to telling the truth about sexual violence. What is the purpose and function of writing about rape? More to the point, what to me is the purpose and function of writing when writing about my rape?

These questions grew more painful to consider after I published my first book, which examined the long-term effects of violence and survival, and more painful still when I learned this book had ended up on the reading lists of various feminist tastemakers on Twitter, one of whom noted that she was using the book as a writing prompt for her students’ exploration of violence. Thus my personal experience was to become a jumping-off point for others’ creativity, my descriptions of my assault disseminated and refracted through the exercises of strangers so they could understand the effects of such violence themselves. My assault would thus become both symbol and trope, something that could be parsed and imitated until all the rage and humanness drained out of it. I had always known, of course, that this one of the possible outcomes of publishing such a book, especially one that ended up in the maw of social media. But actually reading this student’s response to my essay, in which my assault was reimagined and repeated back to me in her language, made me feel both sickened and small.

Speak truth to power, writers and non-writers alike declaim, and now I’ve seen this phrase trickle through the feeds of people on Facebook and Twitter. The aim is to tell the truth of our lives as we see it, as directly and with as little remorse as possible. Such an outpouring of personal testimony has indeed cracked open the world, in part by reminding participants in social media that the things most American institutions want to forget about our nation—its violence against people of color, its killing of LGBTQ people, its seemingly implacable hatred of women and their bodies—stubbornly persist. There is indeed a power and value to truth-telling. But truth-telling relies on narrative, and narrative telling—even supposedly artless, immediate telling—is in fact crafted. It wants a particular response, and nothing crafts language so effectively as a Web format that requires you to express yourself in 280 characters or less, and sells these truth-telling nuggets in a stream of visual media, making it impossible for the audience to focus on any but the most extreme, compelling, and direct language.

Social media and truth-telling both encourage the reader, primarily, to emote. And having emoted, having felt all the things and thought all the thoughts the writer has asked us to think and feel within that limited format, we can walk away from the engagement satisfied with the blunt, brute fact of our feelings. Social media offers a veneer of authenticity that claims the authority of survivorship and thus makes autobiography and resilience satisfactory political goals.

A memoir about sexual assault guarantees a certain amount of attention, because it is sensational and because writing about violence encourages a kind of voyeurism. But while this may be one possible response, it is not this writer’s desire to make the reader participate in the imagined reconstruction of violence. And reconstructing another person’s trauma is not what we teach other budding writers about the purpose of testimonies of violence, in particular the testimonies of violence that women might produce. If anything, we argue, women’s testimonies should inspire not empathy (or not only empathy) but political outrage, in large part because women’s autobiographical writing has been so effectively suppressed over centuries. Women’s writing about violence serves as a public novelty, one which, if it does not always receive the social stamp of high art, at least promises an authentic expression of rage, of grief, of endurance and survival, and—most powerfully—of hope.

But I’m not actually that interested in resilience. I want jail time for offenders. I want politicians tossed out of office, priests defrocked, federal judges fired and replaced. I want a country that doesn’t treat violence against women as sexual entertainment.

Over the past year, I’ve begun to hate the book I published. The more I read from and talk about it, the more politically and aesthetically suspicious my own writing appears to me. Who had I written it for? Who did I really imagine as its audience? The project started, in part, as a reaction to the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which got me thinking about the ways in which sex discrimination has shaped my working life, which got me thinking about the sexual assault I experienced as a twenty-year-old woman at a coat factory where I worked one summer as a down stuffer along with several itinerant workers, one of whom attacked me. The book was finally published around the time that our current president, then a presidential candidate, admitted to grabbing women “by the pussy,” which made the #MeToo hashtag started by Tarana Burke in 2006 erupt into a firestorm. Into this storm my book was tossed, and while I was happy at first to add my voice to the movement, over time I began to feel that the book sounded less like me than an automated reply. Using the same language that has characterized the experience of so many other women certainly brings me into community with them, but that shared language also makes the stories of survivors feel depressingly interchangeable and flat.

Perhaps this flattening is created in part by our social expectations about female psychology and women’s writing, in particular our assumption that women’s writing is primarily or only autobiographical, not imaginative, and that it stems from an institutionally disadvantaged position that we equate with pain. This, too, enrages me. It feels as though, because I am female, I was born into this language and psychology; as a woman and a writer, I am a grievance waiting to be heard and endured. At times it feels that the best I can do is pay close attention to that grievance, to give it a slightly different shape and coloration. By writing about my assault, I confirm the most inarguably authentic position of the not-male, and also the not-white: the pained, the wounded, the helpless, the small .

To speak about one’s assault in a way that feels actually authentic is to thread the needle through an incredibly slender eye, made ever more narrow: by the pressure of therapeutic services, which argue that such narratives are not only good, but necessary for psychic healing; political and social institutions, where truth-telling makes for good rallying cries and possible legislation; and by social media, which argues for ever more devastating expressions of the self to be streamed and consumed and disseminated.

Effective writing about violence shares many of the aesthetic traits of political language, which is to say its directness resists excessive or subtle interpretation. It compresses time and context in order to focus on the moment at hand. Writing about violence authenticates itself through the performance of immediacy and vivid feeling. This is what suggests truth—and it is surprisingly, distressingly easy to duplicate.

The social media performances of grief, selfhood, and outrage I daily read feel suspiciously like masquerades. In my feeds, writers try to outshine and outthink the politicians and abusers inspiring our outrage, using language whose nuance rarely rises above theirs. In this way, we are shackled to victimizing doubles. As much as I despise the self-help books, the prayer circles, the thin whine of grief on Twitter and its overuse of the word trauma , the only identity that seems unable to be challenged or shamed is that of the victim. Thus I and others willingly write into and about how we have been diminished or shamed, to stop ourselves from being attacked by those claiming to be more morally progressive online, because the only way to keep yourself safe within that group, it seems, is to become the witting accomplice to your own self-objectification.

Refracting and repeating narratives of violence also risk downplaying or even ignoring matters of race and class in favor of the sensational act itself, even as race and class make violence a more or less likely experience for a person to have. It is not lost on me, for example, that I come from a middle-class family and was attacked by someone skirting the poverty line, that what brought us together was a coat factory that relied on both our labor to exist: me, the mixed-race college student earning money for her next year’s tuition; my attacker, a white man who moved from job to job, city to city, aimless and resentful of the opportunities I would have in a world he imagined pandered to minorities. It is not lost on my either that the stories we repeat most often online are those told by and about middle and upper middle class white women. Our retweeting and sharing of these stories replicates the culture’s co-opting of Tarana Burke’s #MeToo hashtag into the world of (largely) white and (largely) middle-class feminism.

The young student, consciously or unconsciously, performed this co-option when she imitated my writing. She understood that some part of writing about and against violence, especially the violence that women experience, is imitative and coercive. One does not have to be a victim of violence to render that violence believably or powerfully. The actual experience of an assault may be private, it may reveal the world to be artless and cruel, but the sharing of it depends entirely on creative skills, detailed images, and ideas of identities that can be appropriated.

Even as I write this, it strikes me that perhaps I’m wrong to think we’ve become numb to, or jaded about, female narratives of pain. I think back to that look on Arizona senator Jeff Flake’s face in the elevator as he fled the Kavanaugh hearings, the moment when a protester pried apart the elevator doors to demand he hear about the assault she’d survived. I see again the pain twist across his face. Perhaps the reason the #MeToo movement hasn’t achieved more substantial victories for women is not that its language has started to feel formulaic, but that it really is too painful for people to witness. It’s too painful because it asks those who have not suffered to imagine the limits of their physical invulnerability—to realize, if only empathetically, that their sense of self-protection is a fantasy. We turn away from the language of violence not because it has become anodyne, but because we see how easily each of us can be made a victim.

“Perhaps writers like us really can change the world,” one young woman wrote to me recently in a private Twitter message. “Your book inspired me to tell my own story. You can check out my feed.” I thumbed down the screen to read it, the words of this stranger who, like me, was humiliated and hurt, raw and furious, her own terrible story wedged now between video grabs from a Trump rally and a trailer for John Wick 3 . I stopped reading and her story flickered past. I wrote privately to thank her, added a few glib notes of praise, and told her I hoped she’d continue writing. Then I deleted her message.

The Ferrante Project: The freedom of anonymity brings together sixteen women writers of color (alongside sixteen visual artists in a linked project with the Warhol Museum) who anonymously contributed new works in response to, or critique of, the cult of personality, posturing, and preemptive celebrity of writers at the expense—sometimes—of the quality and provocation of the work itself. This is a collaboration between Aster(ix) and CAAPP: Center of African American Poetry and Poetics.

Contributors include Angie Cruz, Sarah Gambito, Dawn Lundy Martin, Khadijah Queen, Ru Freeman, Ayana Mathis, Vi khi nao, Cristina García Cathy Linh Che, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Deborah Paredez, Emily Raboteau, Paisley Rekdal, Natalie Díaz, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and Jamey Hatley.

This page collects the works of anonymous writers published by AGNI.

College Students and Their Knowledge and Perceptions About Sexual Assault

Original Paper
Published: 03 June 2020
Volume 25 , pages 58–74, ( 2021 )

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Adrienne Baldwin-White ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7305-4654 1

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Because college women are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault, it is imperative to understand the knowledge college students possess about sexual assault. They may possess potentially problematic perceptions that contribute to the perpetuation of sexual violence. Quantitative survey data was collected from 18 to 25 year old college students as part of a larger qualitative study to examine the attitudes and beliefs about sexual assault among college students. The current research examines the knowledge college students have about sexual assault using an adapted survey. Results demonstrate that college students are inconsistent in their knowledge about sexual assault. They possess both accurate and problematic understandings of sexual assault. This data furthers our understanding of what college students believe about sexual assault. It also demonstrates a need to address problematic beliefs into current sexual assault prevention programming in order to target those attitudes that can lead to sexual violence.

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Knowledge Survey

Please answer the following questions with True or False.

Rape is only about sexual gratification. [F]

Rapes are rarely reported to the police. [T]

The way a woman is dressed or the fact that she is drunk is often why she is raped. [F]

Spouses cannot sexually assault each other. [F]

A victim usually knows the perpetrator who committed the sexual assault. [T]

Victims who have been sexually assaulted may be very calm and controlled. [T]

The culture of violence that we live in contributes to sexual violence. [T]

Men can’t help themselves. Once they are sexually aroused, they cannot stop. [F]

If a person willingly goes to someone’s room or house or goes to a bar, she/he assumes the risk of sexual assault. The perpetrator can’t be blamed for anything that happens. [F]

Women who don’t actually try to fight the man have not been raped. [F]

A weapon isn’t necessary for rape to occur. [T]

If a woman says “no”, she means “maybe” or is just playing hard to get. [F]

Women often lie about being raped. [F]

Certain behaviors, such as drinking or dressing in a sexually appealing way, make rape a woman’s responsibility. [F]

If a woman agrees to allow a man to pay for dinner, drinks, etc., it means she owes him sex. [F]

Rape is a pervasive problem in the US. It only affects a few thousand women per year. [T]

Alcohol and other drugs are often used in rapes of college women. [T]

Rape is committed by crazy, lonely, sexually unfulfilled men. [F]

Sexual assault represents the most rapidly growing violent crime in America. [T]

Looking attractive or sexy may have no connection to raping a woman. [T]

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Baldwin-White, A. College Students and Their Knowledge and Perceptions About Sexual Assault. Sexuality & Culture 25 , 58–74 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09757-x

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As the country comes to terms with the reality of our endemic sexual violence , the college campus has become a place of contention and reckoning. College-age women are at the age of highest risk for sexual assault, and on many campuses, sexual assault, like hazing, is a traditional initiation rite, carried out in secrecy and implicitly tolerated, if not openly celebrated. In one notorious recent celebration, fraternity pledges at Yale proclaimed their right to sexual domination outside a women’s dormitory, chanting, “No means yes; yes means anal!”

If the campus can be a place of danger for young women, it can also be a place of intellectual and political awakening. In recent years, a feminist alliance of student activists and legal scholars have given a name to campus “rape culture” and found creative ways to begin the long and complicated process of changing it. Because the college campus is a voluntary community, it has the potential to envision new customs and devise new rules for a culture of sexual equality and respect.

Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions. In the last decade, feminist activists have advanced the argument that the entrenched “rape culture” on college campuses constitutes a form of sex discrimination because it deprives women of equal access to education and that colleges have an affirmative duty to put an end to it. Title IX complaints against numerous colleges have exposed the many forms of institutional complicity, from passive indifference to active victim-blaming, that leave the survivors who dare to come forward often feeling as though they have endured a “second rape.”

During the previous administration, the Department of Education took an active stance toward this issue, developing new guidelines for institutional responses to sexual assault and conducting thorough investigations of Title IX complaints. Many colleges entered into consent decrees requiring them to develop new ways to educate the student body, to protect survivors, and to hold perpetrators accountable. The White House also sponsored an initiative, called “It’s On Us,” that encouraged bystanders, especially young men, to intervene when they witnessed sexually aggressive behavior.

Now, the current Department of Education is attempting to roll back the above changes. In December 2018, the DoE published a highly detailed proposal to change Title IX regulations so as to limit institutional responsibility, to restrict the forms of support that may be offered to sexual assault survivors, and to favor accused perpetrators in disciplinary investigations.

As in the case of other attempts to roll back gains for women’s equality, this proposal did not escape notice. By law, the public has the right to comment on proposals for regulatory changes, and the DoE must respond point by point to the comments they receive before any changes can be implemented. By January 30, 2019, the deadline for public comment, the DoE had received over 100,000 separate comment letters, most highly critical of the proposed regulations. Clearly, this issue has struck a nerve.

The National Women’s Law Center in Washington D.C. recruited me to write a comment letter to the DoE, focusing on how these proposed regulations would impact the mental health of sexual assault survivors. The NWLC also showed me how to post my letter so that colleagues in the mental health professions could add their signatures. I am grateful to the 902 colleagues who co-signed the letter. In Part Two of this blog, I will share the substance of the letter.

Judith L. Herman, M.D. , is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

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How Prevalent Is Campus Sexual Assault in the United States?

Sexual assault on college campuses continues to make national headlines. We know the victims suffer short- and long-term health problems, such as sexually transmitted infections, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, chronic illness and post-traumatic stress disorder. We also know that college students who have been sexually assaulted are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, such as binge drinking and drug use, and have lowered academic achievement, and they may be at greater risk for revictimization.

A number of government and campus initiatives aim to address the problem. For instance, in September 2014, the White House partnered with stakeholders to launch "It's On Us" and "Not Alone," national public awareness campaigns focusing on preventing and responding to campus sexual assault.

But to truly tackle sexual assault on college campuses, we must understand how often it occurs. How many college students are sexually assaulted, and what factors are associated with higher or lower prevalence rates?

Official estimates vary widely. To date, no studies have systematically reviewed prevalence findings in the research on college-based sexual victimization, which would provide greater insight into the extent of the problem, the types of sexual victimization that students experience, and how study methodologies influence the prevalence rates found.

To help fill this knowledge gap, we systematically gathered prevalence estimates for campus sexual assault in the U.S. that were published between January 2000 and February 2015. We defined "prevalence" as the reported percentage of study participants who reported sexual victimization since entering college or during a study follow-up period or time frame while attending college.

Learn about the definitions used in our review.

We examined peer-reviewed studies, dissertations and reports on a wide range of topics, such as health outcomes, risk factors, and evaluations of campus intervention or prevention programs. We assessed and synthesized prevalence findings, research designs and methods, sampling techniques, and measures, including types of sexual victimization.

Our goal was to better understand the range of prevalence findings currently available and the factors behind the variation. We also wanted to present recommendations for campus prevention and response strategies and propose research questions for future studies on campus sexual assault.

An Incomplete Picture

We found that estimates of completed forcible rape, incapacitated rape, unwanted sexual contact and sexual coercion on college campuses in the U.S. vary widely. Unwanted sexual contact and sexual coercion appear to be most prevalent, followed by incapacitated rape and attempted or completed forcible rape.

The variability is due in large part to differences in measurement and definitions of sexual assault among studies. To date, the majority of research on campus sexual assault has been limited to white, heterosexual, female students attending four-year colleges. Few studies measure prevalence among racial and ethnic minority students or other students who may be particularly at risk for campus sexual assault, such as lesbian and bisexual women, sorority women, students with disabilities, and students who have suffered prior victimization. Some studies included in our review found higher rates of sexual assault among these students.

Only one study sampled students at vocational and trade schools, so it is unclear whether the prevalence of sexual assault among nontraditional college students differs from that among traditional full-time students attending four-year colleges.

Despite the discrepancies, the studies we reviewed — even those with lower estimates — all point to the same troubling truth: A substantial proportion of college students are sexually assaulted.

Recommendations

Students experience different forms of sexual victimization, and prevalence rates for each form often vary from campus to campus. Schools should start with a detailed understanding of the types of sexual victimization occurring on their campuses and appropriately tailor prevention and intervention strategies, treatment for victims, and campus response.

We found a high prevalence of unwanted sexual contact and sexual coercion; therefore, prevention efforts should include a focus on the dynamics of these two forms of victimization. Further, the disproportionate rates of victimization among LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning) students, students with disabilities, and racial and ethnic minority students highlight the need for responses that are inclusive and culturally specific.

When researching campus sexual assault, it is important to clearly define and separately measure the range of experiences that may fall under "unwanted sexual contact," "forcible rape," "incapacitated rape" and "drug- or alcohol-facilitated rape." Standardized definitions can help us better understand how prevalence rates vary and how to develop appropriate prevention and intervention strategies for various types of sexual victimization. Studies should continue to include behaviorally specific measures, such as providing students with examples of unwanted sexual experiences. Also, measuring victimization "since entering college" will help distinguish campus sexual assault from childhood, adolescent and lifetime sexual victimization.

Future studies should measure sexual victimization among students who may be at greater risk for sexual assault, such as LGBTQ students, students with past histories of sexual victimization and students with disabilities. Future research should also explore whether sexual assault among students at alternative college education programs is similar to or different from sexual assault among traditional college students; this will help nontraditional programs develop appropriate intervention and prevention responses for students. Additionally, researchers should consider contextual and cultural differences between public and private universities — for example, small liberal arts colleges versus large public state universities — as well as four-year colleges and vocational or trade schools when measuring the prevalence of sexual victimization on different types of campuses.

Defining Sexual Assault

We used the following definitions in our review of sexual assault on U.S. campuses:

Prevalence: the reported percentage of study participants who reported sexual victimization since entering college or during a study follow-up period or time frame while attending college
Unwanted sexual contact: attempted or completed unwanted kissing, fondling, petting or other sexual touching using physical force, threat of physical force, verbal coercion or a combination of these, but excluding vaginal, anal and oral intercourse
Sexual coercion: completed unwanted sexual contact (kissing, fondling or other sexual touching) or completed vaginal, anal or oral intercourse through nonviolent means (such as intimidation, pressure, lies, threats to end a relationship or continual arguments)
Incapacitated or alcohol-related sexual assault: completed vaginal, anal or oral intercourse while victim was intoxicated or on drugs
Broadly defined sexual assault: involving multiple forms of sexual victimization, including rape, sexual coercion, incapacitated or alcohol-related sexual assault, and unwanted sexual contact
Physically forced completed and attempted rape: vaginal, anal or oral intercourse using physical force or threat of force

Return to text .

For More Information

For a detailed discussion of our review and findings, see " Campus Sexual Assault: A Systematic Review of Prevalence Research from 2000 to 2015 ," in Trauma, Violence & Abuse.

Learn more about NIJ's research on campus sexual assault.

About This Article

This artice appeared in NIJ Journal Issue 277 , September 2016.

About the author

Lisa Fedina is a graduate research assistant at NIJ and a Ph.D. student in the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Jennifer Lynne Holmes is a graduate research assistant at NIJ and a Ph.D. student in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. Bethany Backes is a social science analyst in NIJ's Office of Research and Evaluation, where she directs NIJ's program of research on violence against women.

Cite this Article

College Sexual Assault: A Call for Trauma-Informed Prevention

A national conversation has emerged regarding the prevalence of and strategies for addressing sexual assault on college campuses. Sexual assault includes rape, sexual coercion, being forced to penetrate someone else, and unwanted sexual experiences including those without physical contact [ 1 ]. We are now familiar with the statistic that one in five women will experience sexual assault in college. These frequently cited findings emerged from a study of more than 5,000 college women from two universities in the Southern and Midwestern United States [ 2 ] with similar findings shown in a recent study that assessed sexual victimization during the school year among more than 4,000 college women from eight campuses in the Northeast [ 3 ]. Although the prevalence of sexual assault victimization among men in college is poorly understood and likely underestimated, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey indicates that approximately one in 71 men will experience sexual assault in their lifetime [ 1 ]. Most sexual assault survivors (80%) experience their first assault before the age of 24 years, making college campuses a particularly important venue for prevention [ 1 , 4 ].

In this issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health , Carey et al. [ 5 ] present findings from a longitudinal study of 483 first-year female students attending a college in Northeastern United States. The study surveyed women when they arrived on campus, after fall semester, after spring semester, and at the end of the summer before sophomore year to assess the incidence of rape in their first year of college. This study, with its use of multiple measurements over time, bolsters findings from previous studies which suggest that rape is a common experience among college-aged women. Between 8% and 11% of women experienced rape in each semester during their first year in college, which is hypothesized to be a time of increased vulnerability to sexual violence [ 2 , 6 ]. This study also makes the distinction between incapacitated rape and forced rape, with incapacitated rape (defined by the study authors as rape involving drugs or alcohol) more commonly experienced during the study. Experts emphasize that alcohol does not cause sexual assault, although it may be associated with elevated severity and increased vulnerability to sexual assault [ 7 ]. Implications here are clear; efforts to reduce risky alcohol use on college campuses—whether in the form of campus policies and programs or brief interventions in college health centers–would benefit from incorporating universal messages about healthy relationships and healthy sexuality, which are, in fact, strategies for violence prevention.

Carey et al. remind us of a key fact, critical to informing responses to sexual assault on campus: college students are not “blank slates.” Rather, they come to campus with complex histories that include adverse childhood experiences (e.g., physical and sexual child abuse), sexual assault, and adolescent relationship abuse. For example, the 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System found that 20.9% of high school females and 10.4% of high school males experienced physical or sexual dating violence in the 12 months before the survey [ 8 ]. Why does exposure to abuse before college matter for sexual assault prevention in the college setting? Young people who have experienced physical and sexual abuse once are more likely to experience physical abuse and sexual assault again in adolescence and young adulthood [ 9 , 10 ]. Carey et al. [ 5 ] found that students who experienced incapacitated rape before entering college were six times more likely to experience incapacitated rape and more than four times more likely to be forcibly raped during the first year of college compared with women who had not experienced incapacitated rape before entering college. These findings are important not only for sexual assault prevention but for mental health promotion on campus as previous work has illustrated that multiple exposures to violence are strongly associated with poor mental health, including suicidality [ 11 ].

The findings of Carey et al. [ 5 ] also have implications for campus prevention efforts. At the recommendation of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, many campuses across the country have developed campus climate surveys to understand the extent to which their students have experienced sexual assault. Surveys assessing precollege exposure to sexual assault could help shape how campuses develop first-year orientation and programs for the larger student body and inform training for faculty, resident assistants, and other staff. Revised training and education for students and staff who are mandated reporters of sexual assault using campus climate survey data allow for institution-specific data to drive prevention rather than those of a standard “one-size fits all” approach that has been the norm on college campuses.

Importantly, such information would facilitate a trauma-informed approach to preventing and working with survivors of campus sexual assault. Trauma-informed prevention promotes empowerment and recognizes that sexual assault may impact everything about survivors moving forward, including peer relationships, academic progress, likelihood of engaging in subsequent risky alcohol use, and poor mental health [ 12 – 14 ]. It also guides us to approach all students as though they have experienced abuse, regardless of whether they have or not, so that we begin each interaction with students prepared to support them where they are. A trauma-informed approach does not necessarily seek disclosure, rather it shifts our frame of reference so that we are mindful of the myriad of experiences that may influence our students. It also equips us with language to normalize conversations about violence, an important step in shifting the culture on campuses from one plagued by silence to one that challenges the misconception that sexual assault is normal or acceptable. As colleges and universities focus resources on student support services and retention, trauma-informed practices would better publicize campus policies related to sexual assault and campus resources to support survivors. A coordinated, trauma-informed approach across disciplines (faculty, staff, administrators, health professionals) would create an environment where survivors feel more comfortable reporting sexual assault and have safe spaces to share their stories and where all members of the campus community feel empowered to challenge social norms, including hypermasculinity and homophobia, which perpetuate sexual violence [ 15 ]. Comprehensive prevention efforts must include training to promote positive bystander intervention and incorporate violence prevention messages into health and wellness education to engage the college community on an ongoing and sustained basis about this important issue.

Acknowledgments

Conflicts of Interest: H.L.M. is supported by NIH/ORWH Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health K12HD043441 scholar funds and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R01AA023260-01; PI: E. Miller).

Disclaimer: This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health.

Campus Sexual Violence: Statistics

Women ages 18-24 are at an elevated risk of sexual violence .

Statistic showing that women 18-24 who are not in college are at the highest risk for sexual assault, when compared to all women, and to women ages 18 to 24 who are in college.

Sexual violence on campus is pervasive.

13% of all students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation (among all graduate and undergraduate students). 2
Among graduate and professional students, 9.7% of females and 2.5% of males experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation. 2
Among undergraduate students, 26.4% of females and 6.8% of males experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation. 2
5.8% of students have experienced stalking since entering college. 2

Student or not, college-age adults are at high risk for sexual violence.

Male college-aged students (18-24) are 78% more likely than non-students of the same age to be a victim of rape or sexual assault. 1
Female college-aged students (18-24) are 20% less likely than non-students of the same age to be a victim of rape or sexual assault. 1

Sexual Violence Is More Prevalent at College, Compared to Other Crimes

Graphic depicts statistic that college women are two times more likely to be sexually assaulted than robbed. Graph compares figures for college-age women and for all women. For all women, there are 5 robberies for every 4 sexual assaults. For college women, there are 2 sexual assaults for every 1 robbery.

About 1 in 5 college-aged female survivors received assistance from a victim services agency. 2
23.1% of TGQN (transgender, genderqueer, nonconforming) college students have been sexually assaulted. 2

College-Age Victims of Sexual Violence Often Do Not Report to Law Enforcement

Infographic explaining reasons victims cited for not reporting a sexual assault or rape to police. For students who don't report, 26% believed it was a personal matter, 20% had fear of reprisal, 12% believed it was not important enough to report, 10% did not want the perpetrator to get in trouble, 9% believed police would not or could not help, 4% reported but not to police, and 31% cited other reasons. For non-students who didn't report, 23% believed it was a personal matter, 20% feared reprisal, 19% thought it was not important enough to report, 14% didn't want the perpetrator to get in trouble, 10% believed the police would not or could not help, 5% reported but not to police, and 35% cited other reasons.

Only 20% of female student victims, age 18-24, report to law enforcement. 1
Only 32% of nonstudent females the same age do make a report. 1

Sexual Violence May Occur at a Higher Rate at Certain Times of the Year

More than 50% of college sexual assaults occur in either August, September, October, or November. 4
Students are at an increased risk during the first few months of their first and second semesters in college. 4

Campus Law Enforcement Has a Significant Role in Addressing and Responding to College Sexual Assault

86% of sworn campus law enforcement officials have legal authority to make an arrest outside of the campus grounds. 5
86% of sworn campus law enforcement agencies have a staff member responsible for rape prevention programming. 5
70% of campus law enforcement agencies have memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with local law enforcement. 5
72% of campus law enforcement agencies have a staff member responsible for survivor response and assistance. 5
Among 4-year academic institutions with 2,500 students or more, 75% employ armed officers, a 10% increase in the last decade. 5

View statistics on additional topics .

Understanding rainn’s statistics.

Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime. On RAINN’s website, we have tried to select the most reliable source of statistics for each topic. The primary data source we use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) , which is an annual study conducted by the Justice Department. To conduct NCVS, researchers interview tens of thousands of Americans each year to learn about crimes that they’ve experienced. Based on those interviews, the study provides estimates of the total number of crimes, including those that were not reported to police. While NCVS has a number of limitations (most importantly, children under age 12 are not included), overall, it is the most reliable source of crime statistics in the U.S.

We have also relied on other Justice Department studies, as well as data from the Department of Health and Human Services and other government and academic sources. When assembling these statistics, we have generally retained the wording used by the authors. Statistics are presented for educational purposes only. Each statistic includes a footnote citation for the original source, where you can find information about the methodology and a definition of terms.

Learn more about RAINN's statistics .

Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Rape and Sexual Victimization Among College-Aged Females, 1995-2013 (2014).
David Cantor, Bonnie Fisher, Susan Chibnall, Reanna Townsend, et. al. Association of American Universities (AAU), Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct (January 17, 2020). ("Victim services agency” is defined in this study as a “public or privately funded organization that provides victims with support and services to aid their recovery, offer protection, guide them through the criminal justice process, and assist with obtaining restitution.” RAINN presents this data for educational purposes only, and strongly recommends using the citations to review any and all sources for more information and detail.)
i. National Crime Victimization Survey, 1995-2013 (2015); ii. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Rape and Sexual Victimization Among College-Aged Females, 1995-2013 (2014).
Campus Sexual Assault Study, 2007; Matthew Kimble, Andrada Neacsiu, et. Al, Risk of Unwanted Sex for College Women: Evidence for a Red Zone , Journal of American College Health (2008).
Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Campus Law Enforcement, 2011-2012 (2015).

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I Sought Treatment for a Terrible Sexual Assault. It Made Me Worse Off Than I Was Before.

For many problems, endless talk therapy isn’t the answer..

I met my new psychologist in Manhattan’s ugliest office building. “Hello,” she said, opening her door with a big smile. She introduced herself as “Doctor” followed by her last initial. Let’s call her Dr. M. Dr. M was beautiful—blond blow-out, charmingly snarled teeth—and I was desperate. I’d put off seeking help for years, scarred by bad experiences as an adolescent that involved too many drugs, punitive treatments, and clueless counselors. Finally, at 25, I was here, doing the thing we are all supposed to do to be healthy, high-functioning humans: I was going to therapy.

I’d had a crappy childhood, with enough drama and betrayal to fill a 384-page memoir . I’d walked into Dr. M’s office for help with something very specific, though: At 17, I’d been sexually assaulted. Now, I was haunted by the memory of a middle-aged man calling me a bitch and yelling at me to swallow his dick. I’d never shared the details with anyone; over time, the memories tormented me more instead of less. I told myself it didn’t bother me, but really I’d just contorted my life to avoid any reminders. Simply seeing the word “rape” made me feel like flames had engulfed my limbs. Only exercise could purge the horror, but my two or three hours of daily workouts aggravated my back until my doctor prescribed opioid painkillers. The cozy comfort of tramadol terrified me: I could easily see a future in which I succumbed to addiction. Other days, I fantasized about jumping off my office’s 14 th -floor terrace.

“Trauma is one of my specialties,” Dr. M. assured me, smiling, when I told her I’d been assaulted.

So, I began recalling everything. I told her about staying in a hostel in Budapest. I was traveling by myself and, surprisingly, there were no other guests, just two employees who made small talk and offered me alcohol that I declined and coffee that I accepted. Then, one man left to get cigarettes. The other man talked to me for a long time, and asked me to kiss him. Then, he stood up and unbuckled his belt.

When I got to that point, Dr. M announced that our time had run out. She explained her fee was $220 a session and suggested I come twice a week. My high-deductible insurance plan meant that would cost more than my rent—but I figured I wouldn’t need that many sessions. I Venmoed Dr. M, assuming that the next time we’d pick up where we left off. When I walked into the warm evening, I felt buoyed by the promise of imminent relief.

At the next appointment, I sat down, ready to begin. “So the man,” I started.

Dr. M flinched. “What about your family?” she asked, interrupting me. “You haven’t told me at all about your childhood.”

My childhood? I wondered. I wasn’t here to talk about that. But Dr. M was persistent. And she was a professional, with a Ph.D. and research papers in her name. She must have known what she was doing, I told myself. So, I told her about my childhood. And every Tuesday and Thursday evening, I obediently returned to her futon.

In the weeks that followed, I tried to contort the conversation back to the assault. Each time I mentioned it though, she gasped, recoiled, and changed the topic. Often, she monologued. Since I was attacked in Hungary, she shared her experience growing up in Eastern Europe. “That’s just the way it is there: You walk in a room and”—she clapped her hands—“someone rapes you.” Instead of helping me work through the shame, these conversations added to it.

Five thousand dollars’ worth of sessions later, I finally brought up the problem directly: “I feel like you don’t want me to tell you what happened.”

“Well,” Dr. M replied, “we don’t have the alliance.” She explained that sharing details would only “retraumatize” me—unless I could voice them without being upset. How, I wondered, could I ever describe crying while a man ejaculated on my cardigan without being upset?

I asked how long it would take to build said alliance.

“Maybe 10 years,” Dr. M said.

“I don’t have 10 years,” I responded.

I wasn’t even sure I had 10 months before it became unbearable. I thought, longingly, about diving into traffic on the West Side Highway. But what Dr. M had told me fit a dominant narrative around therapy—that we should all be in it, forever. Real relief takes time, the story goes: There are no quick fixes or simple cures. If you don’t feel better, it’s because you aren’t doing the work. Peace only comes from plumbing our inner depths.

I believed this, despite having had plenty of bad therapy experiences as a kid. My mom was a hoarder who, instead of dealing with her own issues, took me to doctors who prescribed increasingly intense drugs until I was on antipsychotics at 13. I spent time in a locked facility and in foster care. “Treatment” felt like punishment, focused on coercing my obedience while ignoring my emotions.

What shocked me about Dr. M was that, even as an adult with incredible privilege, my therapy experience could still be so bad. I was a software engineer at Google, earning six figures. I lived in New York City, a hotbed of psychology. In college, at Harvard, I minored in statistics and was mentored by a preeminent historian of psychiatry, equipping me to comb through hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to read about what might actually help me (though in the meantime, I kept seeing Dr. M—I had to do something).

It was clear that I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Despite the rhetoric about amorphous “trauma” living in the body forever and leading to unnamable malaise , my own dive into the research told me that PTSD was imminently treatable—quickly.

Several short-term treatments often provided relief to patients in 10 to 14 sessions. One, called prolonged exposure therapy, seemed to work particularly well. Premised on the idea that PTSD is caused by avoiding upsetting thoughts, patients expose themselves to trauma triggers in a highly structured setting. You talk about the moments that you can’t get over, again and again, until they lose their power. The sessions are longer than typical talk-therapy sessions , and there’s daily homework—the process is intense. The approach makes intuitive sense, summed up by the adage “face your fears.” But it also flies in the face of the warm fuzzies offered by many talk therapists. Part of the point of prolonged exposure is to become as upset as possible, so that you learn that memories cannot actually hurt you. This is essentially the opposite of Dr. M’s claim that I would be “retraumatized” by speaking about the assault too much.

Like many short-term, evidence-based therapies, it was almost impossible to access. While prolonged exposure is the go-to treatment for veterans seeking care at the VA, I’d searched extensively for someone in private practice who offered it and came up blank. Part of this was surely economics, since a short course of treatment was far less lucrative than billing private insurance indefinitely.

In the meantime, it’s not just that my sessions with Dr. M kept me in a holding pattern. I actually started to feel worse. I could no longer sleep through the night. I went on a starvation-level diet. I almost called off my wedding. I fantasized about tumbling into a freezing lake, my limp body finally finding peace at the bottom. Dr. M didn’t know what was going on, because she never asked; like most therapists, she didn’t track or even really ask about my symptoms. She probably thought I was doing great and that she was, too, since research shows that therapists overestimate their skills and their patient’s progress . Even the patient who inspired the so-called “talking cure” wasn’t cured by it: Contrary to Freud’s claims in a famous case study, historical records show that “Anna O.” got progressively worse until she wound up institutionalized. She only got better after quitting analysis and taking up activism, a transformation that took a while to occur.

But studies suggest that short-term treatments can be hugely beneficial, fast. It’s not just for PTSD—phobias, OCD, and social anxiety all respond well to exposure. Experiments show reductions in symptoms from a single session —or as little as two hours with a primary care provider . According to one analysis, after a 10-to-14-week course of prolonged exposure, two-thirds of sufferers no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. In another, 83 percent no longer met the criteria six years later . The trouble is that these therapies can be difficult for patients to find.

I redoubled my search for exposure therapy, and learned that I could access it if I became a clinical research subject. In screening phone calls, young research assistants asked me questions like, “Can you tell me about what happened?” I would choke out my answer, only to have to them ask dozens more questions, about my sleep, my social life, and whether or not I could go to the grocery store or ride public transportation. These screening calls were exhausting, but when I hung up, I always felt better—in a way I absolutely had not after a session with my own therapist.

After several months, I was accepted into a study where I could receive prolonged exposure treatment—treatment that would change my life the way I’d once hoped talk therapy would. Having secured a new source of help, I finally broke up with Dr. M. In our last session, she informed me, “You are mad at the world and the people who hurt you. But I don’t see you trying to change.” I knew what she meant: I’d only gotten acupuncture once, despite her promise that bodywork could “unstick” the trauma; I refused to let Dr. M hypnotize me. I hadn’t upended my schedule to practice yoga or quit my job to attend silent meditation retreats. It wasn’t just Dr. M: It seemed like an entire culture told me that long-term therapy was morally good, no matter how much of an expensive slog it was. But I didn’t want to sacrifice my future to the pursuit of mental wellness. I wanted to heal. I wanted to get treatment, and then, to move on.

If you need to talk, or if you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the suicide lifeline at 988 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

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COMMENTS

Campus sexual assault: Fact sheet from an intersectional lens
Sexual violence is a significant health and human rights concern. It has extensive negative mental and physical health consequences (Campbell et al., 2009) and can also negatively impact academic performance (Jordan et al., 2014). Campus sexual assault (CSA) makes up the greatest proportion (43%) of total on-campus crimes in the United States ...
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"From the bestselling author of Life of the Mind Interrupted comes an essay collection 'rich in vulnerability and candor. ' How do we make a good life in a world where sexual violence always lurks in the shadows? Katie Pryal, a rape survivor, a former law professor, and a bestselling author, takes on the rapidly changing legal and social landscape of #MeToo, Title IX, and the lawsuits ...
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From her 2021 book, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accountability, and Reconciliation, Martha Nussbaum discusses sexual assault and harassment on college campuses.
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A 2013 study explores variables, such as violence, intoxication, and prior romantic relationships, that can impact acknowledged versus unacknowledged sexual assault among college women. Research has found that incoming first-year college students subscribe to a wide variety of "myths" about rape. Below is a selection of further studies that ...
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On October 15, Harvard released the results of a survey intended to estimate the prevalence of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct among its undergraduate, graduate, and professional-school students. The survey, conducted during the spring of 2019, reached about 23,000 students, of whom 36.1 percent (about 8,300) responded.
Notes on Writing about Sexual Violence
AGNI is publishing this essay as part of The Ferrante Project. "What would happen," the poet Muriel Rukeyser asks in her oft-quoted poem "Käthe Kollwitz," "if one woman told the truth about / her life? / The world would split open." Over the past few years, I've begun to question the truth of that statement, especially as it relates to telling the truth about sexual violence.
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Sexual assault on college campuses continues to make national headlines. We know the victims suffer short- and long-term health problems, such as sexually transmitted infections, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, chronic illness and post-traumatic stress disorder. We also know that college students who have been sexually assaulted are more ...
Campus sexual assault
Campus sexual assault is the sexual assault, including rape, of a student while attending an institution of higher learning, such as a college or university. [1] The victims of such assaults are more likely to be female, but any gender can be victimized. [2] Estimates of sexual assault, which vary based on definitions and methodology, generally find that somewhere between 19-27% of college ...
Sexual assault incidents among college undergraduates: Prevalence and
Introduction. Recent estimates of sexual assault victimization among college students in the United States (US) are as high as 20-25% [1-3], prompting universities to enhance or develop policies and programs to prevent sexual assault.However, a 2016 review [] highlights the variation in sexual assault prevalence estimates (1.8% to 34%) which likely can be attributed to methodological ...
College Sexual Assault: A Call for Trauma-Informed Prevention
Sexual assault includes rape, sexual coercion, being forced to penetrate someone else, and unwanted sexual experiences including those without physical contact [ 1 ]. We are now familiar with the statistic that one in five women will experience sexual assault in college. These frequently cited findings emerged from a study of more than 5,000 ...
Sexual Assault In College Essay
Decent Essays. 1420 Words. 6 Pages. Open Document. Sexual Assualt: End the Epidemic Jade does not receive adequate treatment from her counselor when reporting a recent sexual assault. Her integrity is questioned, and the counselor advises her to forget the incident ever happened. The rapist receives no punishment or consequences for his actions.
Sexual Assault
Read writing about Sexual Assault in College Essays. College Essays: Blurring Boundaries grows from Writing on Contemporary Issues,(S17). Writing & Experience,(F17) and Science Writing for the ...
Campus Sexual Violence: Statistics
Among undergraduate students, 26.4% of females and 6.8% of males experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation. 2. 5.8% of students have experienced stalking since entering college. 2. Student or not, college-age adults are at high risk for sexual violence. Male college-aged students (18-24) are 78% more ...
Sexual Assault In College Essay
Satisfactory Essays. 527 Words. 3 Pages. Open Document. Sexual assault among college students is a tragic incident that keeps reoccurring. There are three predictors I believe heavily contributes to sexual assault among college students. The first predictor is that an individual is in a college environment that promotes heavy drinking and ...
Sexual assault treatment: Endless talk therapy made things worse for me
In the weeks that followed, I tried to contort the conversation back to the assault. Each time I mentioned it though, she gasped, recoiled, and changed the topic. Often, she monologued.
Sexual Assault And Rape On College Campus Essay
Sexual assault and rape are serious social and public health issues in the United States and throughout the rest of the world. In particular sexual assault on college campus are prevalent at an alarming rate and leaves serious effects on the victims. This essay will focus on statistics and the prevalence and effects amongst college students ...