A federal judge has denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against Arizona State University and a trial date will probably be scheduled soon. The lawsuit alleges that ASU re-enrolled a football player who had been kicked off campus for threatening behavior directed towards other students and staff members, including exposing himself to female students and staff. After being allowed back into school and on to the team, he raped another student. This former student is now suing under Title IX, alleging that the university ignored the known risk this football player posed to her and other women on campus, and thereby subjected her to a trauma that interrupted her education.

Title IX specifically prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Since sexual assault disproportionately effects women, failing to protect students from known sexual assault risks causes many more female than male students each year to fail classes, take a leave of absence, transfer, or drop out of college altogether, discriminating against women’s educational opportunities on the basis of their sex. For more information on a college or university’s responsibilities under Title IX, check out this fabulous new fact sheet for student activists put together by the amazing ACLU Women’s Rights Project. It’s designed to help you understand how you can use Title IX to encourage your school to be responsible and offer the kind of sexual assault prevention and response policies that you know your school needs - and that will keep them from being sued for Title IX infringement.

Share on Facebook

This article buries the lede just a smidge.

The article, titled “Evergreen State College student arrested on suspicion of rape,” discusses a recent assault, which reportedly occurred on Saturday night. It’s not until the very last paragraph that we get to this:

The female student went to Evergreen’s Health Services on Monday to report the rape. She said she waited until then because they were closed Saturday and Sunday. On Tuesday, the woman had a rape exam at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia. Photographs taken of the woman’s injuries supported her account of what had happened, the declaration says.

(emphasis mine)

Most of the evidence from a sexual assault is only there for a very short period of time. It can be worth getting a rape kit done for up to five days after the assault, depending on how good your hospital is, but time is of the essence. The best evidence is there within the first few hours of the assault. So this school A) had no one available to help this woman when evidence collection was most imperative and B) once contacted, allowed her to wait even longer to obtain the proper care and have evidence collected. Further, by pushing her visit to the emergency room back yet another day, they may have made it impossible for her to take emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy. At the very least, they’ve made it less likely that EC will work.

This is just one of the many reasons that every college should have crisis counselors and sexual assault nurse examiners on call and ready to handle cases like this 24/7. As this case shows, students are often reluctant to call local agencies, and will tend to turn to familiar, college-based programs, especially in a time of crisis.

The services weren’t there for this victim (and who knows how many others). I can only hope that the administrators at Evergreen State College will take this failure seriously.

Share on Facebook

One of our fantastic founders, and now SAFER advisory board member, Jeff, has recently started a job working to protect the rights of mentally ill clients. He asked me to share some information with you about the rights of students when it comes to mental health services on campus - a particularly important topic for sexual assault survivors.

The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law has a pretty thorough report on mental health for students at colleges and universities. “Campus Mental Health Know Your Rights: A guide for students who want to seek help for mental illness or emotional distress.”

College students seeking mental health services of various types have rights such as rights to privacy and confidentiality, and rights to reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) if one has a psychiatric disability. The Bazelon Center’s Know Your Rights generally does a good job of describing this.

It should also be noted that some universities have been sued for persecuting students who have had suicidal thoughts, depression or other mental health issues. The schools had been making the very having of suicidal thoughts a disciplinary infraction (this alone is close to a violation of the ADA). Two years ago George Washington University paid out a large settlement to a student who sued the school; the school had the student kicked off campus for the school disciplinary consisting of basically having and reporting suicidal thoughts. Here’s an article about that.

Some of the limited number of schools that did have policies that made suicidal thoughts a disciplinary infraction have changed their policies on this aspect.

Note: the author is not a lawyer and this should not be construed as legal advice in any way.

Share on Facebook

Kudos to reporter Chammarra Johnson and New University, the student newspaper of UC Irvine! Kudos also to Robert Buelow, UCI’s violence prevention coordinator, who undoubtedly shaped the direction of the article through what he had to say when they interviewed him.

What’s bringing on this fit of praise? This article - which address sympathetically a stranger rape that happened last week on UC Irvine’s campus - supports the victim, blames the perpetrator, and then turns the focus of the article to what UCI is doing to keep people from becoming rapists before closing with a short list of the services UCI offers those who are concerned about their safety on campus. None of it seems designed to freak women out or to subtly blame them for leaving their houses at night. All of it seems focused on putting the blame where it is due: on the rapist. And wow, Buelow sounds like he’s got great priorities for the preventing violence on UCI’s campus.

Thanks again Reporter Johnson - I’ve seriously been waiting for just about a year to read an article about a stranger rape on campus that effectively turned the conversation to ending all rape on campus.

New University in general seems to be doing good work on this issue - check out a post from this summer on two other articles they ran.

Share on Facebook

The end of voter registration is arriving across the nation. Please register to vote if you haven’t done so already. As a college student, you have the right to register either where you go to school or where your parents live. Here’s the contact information and deadlines for every state, courtesy of the Federal Election Commission.

As a nonprofit, SAFER cannot and is not endorsing any candidate, but we are allowed to say that it is crucial that more college-aged folks vote in this country. Elected officials worry most about the laws that affect the people who are most likely to vote for them. Young people are notorious for not voting, thus elected officials are often less likely to write or pass laws that would help us the most. Turning out to vote in huge numbers would help change that, so please get registered today!

Share on Facebook

The following is a guest post from one the great people at GenderPac, Sasha Madway:

I identify as female even though I was born male and my college education has been fraught with difficulties as a result. I have been harassed in my residence hall, searched across my campus for gender-neutral restrooms, and have had to confront professors about their refusal to acknowledge and/or ignorance my preferred pronoun. Fortunately I have been lucky enough to escape with minimal physical violations, but I’m still too afraid to use any public restroom on campus, despite my knowledge of both campus policy and the law.

It is our responsibility and our duty to make sure that every student, every person has an equal chance to learn and succeed while attending our nation’s institutions of higher education? The 2008 Gender Equality National Index for Universities and Schools (GENIUS) released by GenderPAC reports that 45% of students have been harassed or witnessed harassment due to gender. Harassment and discrimination are epidemic throughout our college and university campuses.

I lived in single rooms from the second half of my freshmen year through the middle of my junior year. It took an administrative loop hole for me to be able to live with my female identified roommate the second half of junior year. It took an additional semester for us to advocate for and implement gender-neutral housing, which required intense lobbying with students and university staff. That program is now in its infancy and may not last after this year unless students are able to keep the momentum going. GENIUS reports that only 55 other U.S. schools offer gender-neutral housing.

It is time for us to ensure that educational institutions provide protections for everyone regardless of any innate human characteristic. GENIUS is designed to highlight those institutions that are at the forefront of the movement for GenderSAFETM campuses - safe, supportive, and equitable for all students. 225 campuses now protect their students on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. Although this number can be expanded to include campuses in states and municipalities which have a law covering gender identity and gender expression, it is not enough.

GenderPAC has also released a GENIUS Action Tool-Kit designed to empower students seeking to make gender inclusive changes on their campuses. This nationally-coordinated campaign is and must remain youth-led and student driven.

We learn best when we are safe and secure. I urge you to start working with students, faculty and staff to ensure that your campus is safe for every student. If my experiences as a student activist have taught me anything it’s that there is still a place for activism on campus.

To view a copy of the GENIUS Index please visit www.gpac.org/genius, or if you would like hard copies or to learn more about the GENIUS campaign please email me at: sasha.madway@gpac.org

Share on Facebook

Okay, I really, really am supposed to be working not blogging this morning, but I have to urge you all to please go read what Cara at The Curvature has to say about the “rape exception” in the proposed South Dakota abortion ban. The level of endangerment of women’s lives and well-being that is being promoted as “pro-woman” there is sickening. South Dakota is where all the new rhetoric is getting tested by extremist anti-women groups, and you need to be aware of what is coming out of there and how to argue against it.

Share on Facebook

It’s that time of year again, the time of year when you get a mysterious message in your email announcing that your “Notification of the Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Crime Statistics Act” or your “Campus Security Act Summary ” has arrived. Prior to working with SAFER, I fully admit that I deleted these unread. I felt fairly safe on campus and I generally assumed that my university was doing its best to keep me that way.

When my report arrived from Stanford this year, I read it cover to cover. (Or first PDF page to last PDF page - we need new idioms for the digital age here.) Like all institutions in a democracy, universities function best with the greatest level of public scrutiny, particularly scrutiny from the constituents who are most effected by their policies. Now that I know that a lot of universities don’t do many things that would create a safer campus and that there are many campuses where students feel so unsafe that they won’t even report a crime against them, I pay a lot more attention to what my university is doing.

Things I look for? What you care about most and what works at your school will of course depend on who you are and where you go, but there are some common things that you might want to see if your school does.

Number 1 thing: Go to the table with reported crimes and check to see how many forcible rapes were reported for each of the last 3 years. If the number is zero or even one or two, be very, very concerned. Research has consistently shown that having no rapes on a college campus in a given year is so statistically improbable in our culture at this point in time as to be up there with things like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. If your school is reporting no rapes, that means that (a) students at your school don’t trust your administration and so won’t report their rapes or (b) students did try to report and were actively discouraged by your administration from doing so. In either case, start talking to people about how scary that zero (or one or two) is.

Other things I looked for:

Who are the staff people that respond to sexual assault and do prevention programs? Are there such staff people? How many of them?

What kind of sexual assault prevention programs are offered - only the kind that tell women not to walk alone at night or are their programs directed at discouraging people from forcing someone to have sex?

Does the announcement tell you who to contact and what to do if you are sexually assaulted?

Do the crime statistics include a separate list of rapes or sexual assaults that were reported anonymously or confidentially? That’s a good sign, because it means your school has those options available, and it can also provide information on what’s actually happening on your campus.

Are there blue light call boxes on campus?

Are self-defense classes offered?

So for me, I’m medium happy with Stanford’s reporting rate (26 students reported their assaults to campus security or to confidential counseling services, a number that is certainly smaller than the real number but still means that a meaningful percentage of those assaulted are coming forward. And they’ve seen an upward trend in the last three years, which suggests better outreach to students and growing trust, and that’s very important.) and pretty happy with their services (on campus rape crisis program, sexual assault prevention programs, a standing advisory board on improving sexual assault prevention and services, etc.) How does your school look?

P.S. If you deleted your report from your email, like I used to do, just go to your campus security department’s webpage. They are required by law to make this report available at all times to students and so all of them should have it posted on their website.

Share on Facebook

Erin Burrows is currently a fifth-year graduate student in Women’s History at Sarah Lawrence College. She is working as the Policy Analysis Intern at SAFER. She hopes to see you on November 7th at Safer’s Benefit Show at the Galapagos Art Space, in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

How did you get involved in challenging how your school handles sexual assault?

I served as the co-chair of FLUX, our feminist club—Feminism Liberation Unity X. My first year there was a program called Access, which provided sexual assault awareness. It was funded by a federal grant that then expired, and instead of finding alternate funding [the Sarah Lawrence administration] fired the director and canceled the program. It was supposedly absorbed into other programs but nothing really happened.

Junior year we started working on policy itself. We started pulling it apart, just printed out copies and looked at what we wanted to change, really using Antioch’s policy as a comparison.

I was abroad when the movement building began, I can put in touch with others who were there. They put out a flyer that had an image of a fist from a self defense manual. It said, “We didn’t consent to the sexual assault policy, did you?” We put out a zine that listed everything we thought was wrong with the policy and asked for input from students.

There was a student body meeting and articles ran in the school newspaper. A lot of concerns were voiced, but there was little action.

When we came back in the fall, we picked up the campaign right away. A new president was being inaugurated, so we planned at our first meeting to do some kind of action at the inauguration. Everyone who was a member of the Sarah Lawrence community would be there, so we really struggled about what to do. We thought about all wearing red t-shirts and unrolling a banner, etc.

We ended up handing out half sheet flyers that said “Sarah Lawrence has no sexual assault policy” and gave the history of the school’s lack of action and our activities to date. We also draped two banners from two dorm’s windows.

Everyone was talking about it. All the FLUX members walked around handing out flyers, and everybody had one.

We got a lot of hell for it. They said that we had stepped in on her day, etc. But we ignored it, and in the end we got a meeting with the new President, the Vice President of Administration, the Dean of Student Affairs, the Dean of Students. Flux had a student representative for every class; I went as the senior.

We had tried to really prepare. We had written a letter to present and demanded a new program and the hiring of a new director. We got steamrolled. We were told that there was a program in place, that we just didn’t know what was going on. They inferred that what we wanted was a luxury, that the school was running on a Hyundai budget and what we wanted was a Cadillac budget. At the end of the meeting, we assured them that the conversation was not over, and in turn, they promised to continue working with us, insisting that it was their job.

We took a little time off from the campaign—we were organizing a gender symposium on campus. One of the deans had written a summary of our meeting that really sugar-coated everything, so we were upset. We found out that the Office of Student Affairs was hiring new staff, so we wanted to add sexual assault liaison responsibilities, RA training, and demanded that what the handbook said we had would be fulfilled.

In a meeting with the Dean of Students, we negotiated that the liaison responsibilities would be moved to an administrator in the Health Services department. It actually turned out to be one of our larger successes, although not exactly what we were looking for. At least students now have a point person to turn to who is not a mandatory reporter who can assist students with their immediate and long term needs.

In the meantime the president called for a taskforce to rewrite the policy. Eight people, including two students, met every week during the spring semester. We went through comparable schools pulling out best practices to use for our policy. It should be finished this fall and passed this spring. I served as one of the student representatives, along with another member of Flux. The task force is now continuing through the fall, hopefully bringing the new policy to a committee by late November. It’s been a long process, but ultimately a success in institutionalizing progressive change.

While we did not win our demands to put in place a new sexual assault program, we have had some victories. Sarah Lawrence is in a bad budget situation, so putting in a new position would be a big strain. There’s no endowment like a lot of schools have because it started as a rich finishing school, and now most tuition money goes directly into paying faculty and staff.

I graduated with BA, and am continuing with an MA, and there are a lot of undergrads still there to hopefully keep the fire going.

How did you get other students involved?

One of my biggest regrets about how the campaign functioned is that it was really an inner circle kind of job. We did a really awful job of investing other students on the campus in the issue, and didn’t do a good enough job of reaching out.

We received the SAFER manual at some point, I think when we were starting to rewrite the policy, SAFER is so good about pushing outreach.

What were the biggest concerns about your school and sexual assault among students on your campus?

Shutting down the previous program.

No communication about who was a mandatory reporter and who wasn’t. At some point the RAs weren’t and then they were and underclass students weren’t told.

People had no idea if there was an emergency where to go.

How and when were trainings taking place—especially for public safety officers? We just found out they are doing a training this fall for staff.

More counseling services on campus for survivors. There was a limited number of sessions they were allowed and that was really unfair for people who needed them and couldn’t access transportation to get to a private therapist in town.

We were trying to make sure that we were also being really conscious of racial tensions on campus. In our ultimate description what was asked for was a queer person of color who was trained in sexual assault or at least someone who was adamantly anti-racist and was interested in working with those kinds of issues at Sarah Lawrence.

Continue Reading »

Share on Facebook

This is a very exciting time of year for SAFER, because this is the time of year when students across the country sign up for V-Day and start organizing productions of The Vagina Monologues, screenings of Until the Violence Stops, and other V-Day events (there are five to choose from this year!). Why is this exciting for SAFER? Because without V-Day organizers, or Vagina Warriors as they’re called, lots of what SAFER does would not be possible. At all.

About 44% of our funding last year came from the proceeds of V-Day events on campuses. Students at schools like Bentley College, Roosevelt University, Manhattanville College, Babson College, Depaul University, Arcadia University, Valparaiso University, and others organized V-Day events, and donated some of the proceeds to us as an organization working to end violence against women and girls (the V-Day mission).

This funding is crucial for us, especially this year. Our new Campus Activist Mentoring Program is one of the most exciting things we’ve ever offered, and we want to sustain it throughout this year and the years to come. Our new College Sexual Assault Policies Database needs funding too.

If you’re looking for a way to make a real impact in your community, being a V-Day organizer is a fantastic way to support organizations working to end violence, and to raise awareness in those around you of the global problem of violence against women and girls. Here’s where to sign up for the V-Day College Campaign.

Share on Facebook

The Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) has a new initiative that sounds pretty cool. According to their release:

kNOw More initiative examines the reproductive health consequences of sexual coercion and violence, which include unintended pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, miscarriage, infertility, coerced abortion, and a range of other serious health issues. kNOw More is designed to start a dialogue about the birth control sabotage and reproductive coercion that many teens and young women face, and help draw the link to the reproductive health problems it causes. Please visit the initiative’s Web site, which also includes a blog and a forum for women to share their stories, at http://www.knowmoresaymore.org.

And save the date! kNOw more is coming to Howard University on November 10th.

On November 10, the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity will join the kNOw More initiative by bringing together more than 500 students, faculty and Omega members on the Howard University campus in Washington, D.C. to take a pledge against violence. The fraternity will host a panel discussion on the links between violence against women and negative reproductive health outcomes. With more than 700 chapters worldwide, Omega is one of the oldest and most prestigious African-American fraternities in the United States.

I’m pretty convinced that the future of progressive organizing is in beginning to make the links between problems that have been artificially separated through single identity politics. I’m not in absolute disagreement with the idea of liberation movements based on one oppressed identity—in fact, I think that organizing strategy is probably necessary at the very beginning of a social movement for people who are oppressed on the basis of an identity, and who haven’t yet named that identity-based oppression (e.g. It’s hard to fight transphobia if most people in the culture don’t know the name for it). And to some extent, it’s a strategy that will exist as long as the dominant culture labels us according to oppressive artificial categories. As bell hooks has pointed out, those responding to oppressive categories are not the ones who created them!

That said, I also think the strategy of addressing oppression through identity politics is extremely limited and must be temporary. In the end, it fragments progressive movements and leaves those with multiple oppressed identities out in the cold. That’s why I think projects like kNOw More, which make connections between “different” issues: in this case sexual violence, partner violence, birth control/abortion access, and unwanted pregnancies/STIs, are really important stuff.

Share on Facebook

I’ve barely posted at all for a couple of weeks now, for several different reasons, including teaching two classes, dissertation deadlines, and the election (I LOVE campaigning!). But there have also been two SAFER projects that have kept me occupied. One you’ve probably noticed - the student success story interviews. Those are for an article on student anti-sexual violence activists, and I’ll post the link to the article as soon as it is published.

The other big project is an outreach campaign for our new sexual assault policies database. We need to get the word out, so if you’re a college student, a recent alum, or know any college students or recent alums, go take a look, leave a comment about your school’s policy or a question in the forum, and then tell everyone you know.

Why a database, you might ask? It sounds a little dry, a little academic, not quite sexy enough for our operation, right? We developed it, though, because it is what student activists kept telling us they needed. If you’ve read any of the success story interviews, you might have noticed that everybody fixed their own policy with reference to other policies that they thought were better. We know, from talking to students and from putting together the database, that finding other schools’ sexual assault policies can be a real pain in the neck. Doing all that research was slowing activists down and causing them to waste time duplicating work that had already been done by other activists. Our database speeds up the research process and lets students look at a wider range of policies when trying to find solutions that will work on their campus. That means more effective proposals and faster organizing.

The second use of the database comes from the way it lets students compare their school’s policy to the policies of similar schools. You can quickly find “competitors” that are offering better services and policies then your school, and then use that information as added pressure on your administration to meet your demands. We’ve already heard from some people who’ve used the database that way, and, although it’s too early to add them to our success stories list, we know it bolstered their case.

So go check it out, comment on your school or fill add the form to help us add your school. Raise questions in the forum, provide answers to any already there. Tell anyone else you think might be interested. Ask your school news paper to write about the database- they’ll be getting a press release about it on Monday.

And then, make use of it over the next year. Write a paper for a class analyzing different policies. Start a poster campaign around campus about what your policy doesn’t do as well as other schools (a little football rivalry here?). Get together with some friends and start looking for parts of policies that you do like. Write an article for the school paper about your policy’s strengths and weaknesses. Join a group and start working on a policy change. After you’ve done your research, ask for a meeting with your administration and present your evidence.

We’d love to hear about how you use the database, and we’re always available to answer questions or set you up with an organizing mentor to help you through the process.

Share on Facebook

Hat tip to Morgan at Speaking Out for alerting me to this great interview with Ruth Ann Koenick, who founded one of the first rape crisis centers in the country while a student at the University of Maryland.

I was an undergraduate working for residence life, on the cusp of trying to decide what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was living on campus when a student on my floor was abducted and raped. I went to meet her at the police station and then to the hospital, and I felt totally inept, but I knew enough to know that she wasn’t getting what she needed. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her, and we were kept in separate rooms. She was all alone and no matter what I did, I couldn’t talk to her. I realized the system wasn’t working for victims.

Sometime later, there was a series of abductions and rapes that overwhelmed the university, not because people didn’t want to help but because we didn’t know how. It hit the front pages of the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post, and it became an even bigger issue. I teamed up with two friends who also worked for residence life and were in grad school, Chris Courtois and Debby Watts, and worked with folks in student affairs to open a campus rape crisis center. It operated on the beg-borrow-and-steal budget, but we got support from Dan Bratton, the Vice President for Student Affairs, and others in leadership positions, partially because he made them do this and partially because some of them knew it was the right thing to do.

We really didn’t know much but quickly discovered that we knew more than others, and when we started to talk about this publicly, women came out from the woodwork to tell us what had happened to them. Eventually we got space in the health center, developed training, took overnight shifts, and responded to crisis calls. We developed a really good relationship with the university police and, in retrospect, worked as a team. This was 1973-74, just before the first Burgess and Holmstrom book (Rape: Victims of Crisis) came out in 1975 and people began to use the term rape-trauma syndrome.

Her on the ground model of learning from the people she is helping continues to drive her work today and has shaped the work of anti-violence activists for the last 30 years. I hope you have a chance to check out the rest of the article - she’s a great example of what a determined student can achieve!

(And PS, University of Maryland, I hope you’re keeping her legacy alive - don’t cut back your sexual assault services.)

Share on Facebook

Thanks a million to all the folks that have gotten us so close to reaching our goal of raising $5,000! We are less than $600 dollars away from our goal. Just to give you a sense of what $5,000 means to SAFER:

That’s about 333 hours of mentoring support for student activists OR

Over a year of rent, telephone, and utilities OR

8 internship stipends OR

20 Weekend Organizing Training workshops.

Donating is super easy! Please take a minute to send some of your hard-earned money to SAFER—we’ll make it hard-working money in the fight for better sexual assault policies. Thanks!

Share on Facebook

Jamie Zottola went to SUNY New Paltz for undergrad and grad school. She graduated with her Masters in Humanistic Multicultural Education concentrating in Women’s Studies and Services in August 2008. She is currently looking for employment in the higher education field or with organizations that deal with violence.

How did you get involved in challenging how your school handles sexual assault?

For all of college I was involved in sexual assault hotline, which I coordinated for 2 years, and people came to me all the time asking about resources. Another woman, Jill Greenberg, took a Women’s Studies class, Women’s Images and Realities, for which she had to do a “take action” project. So her project was to get students and administrators together in April 2007 to talk about [SUNY] New Paltz’s sexual assault policy. I met her through this process, and we got the VP of Student Affairs, Ray Schwartz, and the professor for the course, Amy Kessfelmean, to sit down with several students.

How did you get other students involved?

Facebook is a magical tool for college students. Jill started a Facebook event and invited everyone we thought would be interested. We had 40 or 45 students at first meeting, and Facebook and word of mouth were our two tools.

What were the biggest concerns about your school and sexual assault among students on your campus?

For the meeting we talked about how the policy was very heteronormative, and didn’t talk about same-sex sexual assault. We wanted to make it inclusive of all students, and we wanted to make it more accessible. It was called the sexual misconduct policy, and had three levels of “misconduct.” We felt that it minimized the student’s experiences.

At the first meeting we just went over the policy. Ray is really great, really supportive of students, really great about being concerned about sexual assault.

We focused on just these two items—and they could do more—but it was a good place to start for the first redo in several years.

What did you demand of your administration?

I don’t think we demanded, we just voiced our concerns. We wanted to work as a collaborative. We said that we wanted to make the policy more inclusive of GLBT students, and for them to be more concerned about what the policy was called. Students didn’t know what [sexual misconduct] meant; we wanted to change it to rape. We wanted to show how serious it is.

Now the policy has rape and two kinds of sexual assault.

How did they respond?

I think they were overall receptive. It took around a year for the new policy to get in place. Ray was very receptive; he was involved with the prior changes so he was very familiar with the policy. This winter we had to present to the Board of Trustees, although only one person showed up. I don’t know what the president, or other members of the administration thought, but we were really proud of the change we made and Ray was too.

Describe your successes.

Policy Regarding Rape and Sexual Assault (Go to page 61)

What resources (on- and off-campus) were most useful to you in your campaign?

Having the old policy was very helpful, so we could see the gaps. Having Ray’s support was good because he was involved in the prior changes; he knew what he was doing. Amy and Ray had worked with other schools, and that helped. We also used each other as a resource to bounce things off—this is too complicated, etc.

What advice would you give to other students who want to change their campuses?

It’s really important to not go into a meeting on the defensive. If you have your guard up you might be seen as an enemy. This is not something you can do alone, the administration doesn’t care if it’s just one person. It’s very important to have a smorgasbord of people together trying to change a policy.

What, if anything, would you have done differently?

It was a learning experience, the first time changing the policy. I would have tried to get more administrators and more faculty involved, it was mostly students, it so wasn’t necessarily representative of everyone on campus.

Share on Facebook

This is something I think about a lot. It brings up issues of blame, communication styles, raunch culture, and of course, my favorite topic, slutty clothes.

It seems to be a favorite topic of people I meet when I tell them what I do. It goes likes this:
“the clothes girls wear these days….”
“at my school, the girls used to keep score of how drunk they got…”
“seriously, what message do they think they’re giving out when they dress like that?”

My reaction is usually along the lines of the speaker in the “My short skirt” monologue in The Vagina Monologues. As in, their short skirts have nothing to do with the men staring at them. Maybe they just like short skirts. (I do, and I am not lying when I say it’s because they’re easier to walk in and make me look taller.)

But then I read something like this. The quote that really got me was this person’s:

“I, perhaps unconsciously, observe women to try and determine how they want to be treated. When I see girls at a party who seemingly have no self-control, I’ll admit that it’s really tough to visualize them as ‘ladies.’ It’s as if they, solely through their own actions, have lowered my expectations, lowered my standards of behavior.”

I have a suggestion. Try using words. Remember Mae West? “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” How about “Is that skirt/tube top/translucent toga for me to remove or are you just feeling warm tonight?”

An ongoing discussion I have with people in the field of violence prevention is a debate over how much of campus sexual assault is due to perpetrators “who really didn’t know what they were doing was wrong, who made a mistake” and the perpetrators in the model of David Lisak’s Undetected Rapist. I’m from the Lisak school of thought on this one. You know why? Because this isn’t semaphore school. We don’t communicate just with flags people. College students may be young, as susceptible to culture as anyone else, as nervous and insecure, but we know they can put a sentence together; they have to for admissions essays. So I don’t think I’m holding anyone to too high a standard when I expect them to talk to each other and understand basic phrases like “I don’t want to.”

There is one caveat to this of course, and some people will object. I am in the above, primarily referring to the instigator of the sexual act in question. This is about power dynamics. If a person feels threatened, afraid, communication can be difficult. If you are bigger, stronger, or in some other way more powerful than your partner, for god’s sake take that into account and remember that there is one flag here that should be recognized. Silence. If you don’t hear a yes, folks, that’s a no.

Share on Facebook

The ACLU Women’s Rights Project has created this fantastic new fact sheet on Title IX and sexual assault. It explains how sexual assault is covered by Title IX, how Title IX has been applied in sexual assault-related court cases and, important for activists out there, how students can use Title IX in the fight to get better sexual assault policies.

We are very grateful to the team at the Women’s Rights Project for putting this together. Please share this resource with your fellow activists. We’ll also keep it up on the website here.

Share on Facebook

This is pretty great news.

The President of U of Iowa has actually apologized for the school’s mishandling of a gang rape case.

Sally Mason, the university’s president, met today with Iowa’s Board of Regents and apologized for the university’s handling of the alleged 2007 assault on a female student by two Iowa football players.

“Failing a student who asks for our help is unacceptable,” Ms. Mason said, according to the Associated Press. “Failing to be transparent and accountable to the Board of Regents and ultimately the people of Iowa is also unacceptable.”

Ms. Mason apologized to the alleged victim and her family for the university’s response. University officials followed established rules, she said, but those policies were flawed. The regents issued a resolution today directing Iowa’s public universities to conduct a comprehensive review of their procedures related to sexual assault.

It’s too bad that it took such a tragedy to get here, but honestly I’ve seen schools respond to equally tragic circumstances with far less sensitivity and openness. The fact that U of Iowa is admitting that it made a big mistake is a good sign. The fact that they’re reviewing their procedures is an even better one.

Share on Facebook

Sexual assault is a pretty natural outgrowth of a culture where women’s bodies are seen as public property, and where some bodies are seen as unimportant.

Here we find yet another reminder of that deep and pervasive cultural value.

State Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, fears Louisiana may be headed toward an economic crisis if the percentage of people dependent on the government is not decreased.

His solution: pay impoverished women $1,000 to have their tubes tied so they will stop having babies they can’t afford.

The idea came to LaBruzzo after hurricanes Katrina and Gustav when the state was forced to evacuate, shelter and care for tens of thousands of people.

“I realized that all these people were in Louisiana’s care and what a massive financial responsibility that is to the state,” LaBruzzo said. “I said, ‘I wonder if it might be a good idea to pay some of these people to get sterilized.’”

This stuff is not, by any means, new. Backers of eugenics tried similar plots, and many poor women have been forcibly sterilized by doctors who felt it was up to them to make that decision. It’s a practice that zealots of various stripes have kept alive in many contexts, from Nazi Germany to New York City.

Hmmm. Acting on a woman’s body without her consent… Sound familiar?

Update: Womanist Musings (which you should be reading if you aren’t already) has a good analysis of this story, with more links.

Share on Facebook

Gender PAC has published the 2008 Gender Equality National Index for Universities and Schools (GENIUS). This report includes the results of the survey they conducted of schools across the country asking about discrimination based on gender or gender expression. There’s a list of schools that explicitly prohibit that kind of discrimination and great information about gender-neutral bathrooms and housing, and the extent of gender-based harassment (and a little opining from yours truly). I really encourage student activists who are working on sexual violence issues to look at the report and consider how bias based on gender and gender expression is also part of the problem. Gender PAC has a great toolkit to help you out.

Share on Facebook