Inside Higher Ed has an article on a new report on sexual assault at the University of New Hampshire, which has been tracking all varieties of “unwanted sexual contact” among their students for 20 years. (via Feminist Law Profs) A lot of what it reports is not news, but I found this fascinating:

Overall, UNH has found that the number of unwanted sexual experiences on campus declined significantly from 1988 to 2000, during which time the university established a crisis center and put a number of prevention programs in place. However, there has been little change since 2000 — prompting a need for more creative, broad-based responses, said Victoria Banyard, an associate professor of psychology and a co-author.

A second report is actually from last year, but was linked to by this article and I hadn’t read it, so I figured it’s worth reposting for others who missed it. The Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky did a survey to find out how unsafe women at UK felt, why and where they felt unsafe, why they did not report sexual assaults, and what could be done to fix these problems. The key idea here is to have research that feeds directly into attacking the problem:

“The best way to approach this as a research institution was not to go to President [Lee T.] Todd and say, ‘I know you have a wife and daughter … and this is a national problem; I have a couple anecdotes,’” says Carol Jordan. As director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Research on Violence Against Women, she spearheaded the campus-specific “Women’s Safety Study: 2004-2007.” The university is using the results from the empirical research project to inform changes in its campus policies and safety programs. And those changes in turn appear to have women on campus feeling safer — and more likely to report violence when it does occur.

“We determined from the outset we were going to undertake this as a translational research project,” says Jordan. “Research, policy and practice are almost one word here.”

This is a good example of we always tell student activists – do your research before you talk to your administration. Find out what your school needs and what other schools are doing. Know your relevant statistics, legal rights, and the details of the policy as it currently stands. Can’t find enough good information about how much sexual assault there really is at your school or whether what the administration is currently doing is effective? Make one of your demands a study like this one at Kentucky. And kudos to UK for doing and following through on this study. I’ll be interested to hear if a new survey in two more years sees even stronger results.

Then, I started searching the Inside Higher Ed site to see if I had missed anything else of importance, and found a fascinating article about a panel at this year’s American Educational Research Association conference. The panel was called Rethinking Violence Prevention: What We Think We Know Can Hurt Us (and Our Students), and the abstracts can all be found here.

Among other things, these studies found:

* Those who counsel victims of sexual assaults on campus (and many of the victims themselves) feel disconnected from the campus judicial systems designed to adjudicate these cases on many campuses, in part because of a tendency of those offices to view the process as “educational,” not judicial.
* Student affairs officials have a less than complete understanding of the Clery Act, the primary law governing reporting of campus crime.
* A small subset of male students pose the most significant threat to women on their campuses, and these men are not necessarily those who have been the focus of many colleges’ educational programs designed to prevent assaults and rapes.

While 1 and 2 are pretty much “no, duhs” for everyone in the sexual assault community, it is always good to have hard data on those facts. 3 is really interesting – it suggests that athletes and fraternity members, who tend to be the targets of many rape prevention programs, may not be more likely to commit sexual assault. The point seems to be that certainly personality traits are the real risk factors (although, of course, I instantly wondered if certain environments tend to encourage such traits). This claim contradicts some other studies, and more research clearly needs to be done. Still, the author’s suggestion that more emphasis should be placed on bystander training is one I wholeheartedly endorse, as it can benefit everyone.

And seriously, even though the results on administrators are unsurprising, they are really sad. If a law can’t make them sit up and pay attention to sexual assault on campus, what can? The only real answers are students and parents – demand that your school work hard to keep you (or your child) safe or nothing will change at most schools.