It’s the high-profile cases of campus sex assault that catch everyone’s attention. There was the Columbia University undergraduate who carried a mattress around the campus her entire senior year to protest what she believed was the institution’s mishandling of her assault complaint. And the athlete who was expelled for assault at the University of Tennessee but was allowed to return and graduate after a court said the institution had misjudged his case.
Those situations not only capture the public eye but also strain campus judicial systems, causing colleges to scramble to stay out of court and off the U.S. Education Department’s list of institutions being investigated for violations under the gender-equity law known as Title IX.
So, while they’re under scrutiny for their handling of assault complaints, colleges are also working to prevent such cases before they ever happen. They’re using in-person and online training programs, as well as social-media campaigns, to educate undergraduates about what constitutes assault and how they can help prevent it. Some professors are tucking messages about how to avoid assault into French, computer-science, and communications classes. And at least one institution, the University of Central Missouri, has begun tracking students who have already experienced assault to make sure they go on to graduate.
“Title IX response is so much bigger than having a code and a couple of investigators,” says Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law. “It’s a culture change.”
New regulations enforcing the federal Violence Against Women Act took effect last summer and require colleges to focus on preventing assaults before they occur. The regulations say all new students must be informed about safe options that an individual may take to “prevent harm or intervene in risky situations.”
Last year President Obama announced a similar campaign to end sexual assault, called “It’s On Us.” Well-known actors appear in a short video encouraging Americans to pledge to keep an eye on their friends — particularly in situations involving alcohol — and to step in and stop a potentially harmful scenario. “Get in the way by creating a distraction, drawing attention to the situation, or separating them,” says the campaign. “Never blame the victim.”
Mr. Lake says the focus on prevention is changing how campuses look at sex assault. “Training people how to adjudicate assault cases is Job One,” he says. “But campuses see how frustrating it is to try to defeat sex assault with adjudication techniques alone. Title IX coordinators are now starting to become almost like an academic department, teaching people about culture change.”
The most popular method of assault prevention on campuses is known as bystander intervention. The concept is to show students how to identify potentially violent situations and intervene safely and effectively. That’s the goal of one of the most popular programs, called Green Dot. It was developed in 2008 at the University of Kentucky by Dorothy Edwards, who directed the Violence Intervention and Prevention Center there. In 2010 she made Green Dot into a stand-alone, nonprofit company that now helps colleges deliver bystander training and other prevention strategies to faculty and staff members, administrators, and students. A green dot represents “any behavior, choice, word, or attitude that promotes safety,” says the organization’s website. The idea is that as more green-dot behavior develops there will be fewer “red dot” incidents — meaning sex assaults.
Getting students to step in and possibly stop a risky situation — say, a female friend is drinking heavily at a party with a new guy, and they decide to go off someplace on their own — can be difficult, says Ms. Edwards. “If it were easy, everyone would do it. But even good people who see something high-risk often don’t act. They say, I’m shy, I don’t want to be the squeaky wheel, I don’t want this to become a fight.”
Indeed, Rebecca Plante, an Ithaca College sociologist who studies the campus sexual climate, calls bystander-intervention initiatives “laudable but somewhat utopian.” The associate professor adds, “They presume a lot: That students at a party are sober and that they’ve paid attention to anything other than themselves.” Young people, she says, prize their independence. “They say: Anna and Joe just went into Joe’s room. I’ve heard Joe’s scum, but I don’t want to tell her who to sleep with, because I don’t want her judging me.”
Besides training students to be active bystanders, Ms. Edwards says administrators should try to educate the entire campus about sex assault and how to prevent it. When she was at Kentucky, she recalls, some professors simply included a syllabus statement noting that partner violence wouldn’t be tolerated. A professor of nursing trained students in how to react if a patient came to a clinic and said she’d been sexually assaulted. And a dean simply wore one of Green Dot’s green rubber bracelets to work every day.
“The question is, what do we do to establish the norms on a university campus that violence won’t be tolerated and that everyone is expected to do their part?” says Ms. Edwards. “We call it community mobilization.”
Professors on other campuses are getting involved. At Virginia Commonwealth University, the political-science department is offering a new course this spring devoted to Title IX. In a French course there, students read a text by Guy de Maupassant and its film version, by Jean Renoir, called A Day in the Country. In both works, there is a scene that may or may not be interpreted as sexual assault.
Gail Hackett, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Virginia Commonwealth, says students need a “safe space” to talk about issues of sexual violence, where professors can guide the conversations.
“The deep discussions needed for understanding and addressing issues of sexual violence,” she says, “are well suited to a classroom environment.”
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.
