CALCASA posted a great PreventConnect podcast interview a few weeks back with Terri Phoenix, the Director of the LGBTQ Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Terri spoke about preventing sexual violence in LGBTQ communities at the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s iLead Conference in May. In this interview, Terri talks briefly about utilizing the principles of universal design to ensure inclusivity and curricula that she’s worked to develop in the past five years focusing on healthy relationships in the LGB community. Definitely worth checking out!

Hi, I’m Terri Phoenix and I’m the Director of the LGBTQ Center at UNC – Chapel Hill and in today’s session with Krista Park Barry from the Orange County Rape Crisis Center, we talked a lot about how organizations can utilize the principles of universal design and community assessment and agency assessment to really examine the extent to which their welcoming and inclusive of people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. And so we talked about things about having a representative, inclusive, diverse board of directors, staff, volunteers; how you recruit those people, how you train those people; is this inclusive? We talked about the forms and the policies, we talked about the environment, the organization where you provide your services; simple things such as a gender non-specific bathroom, which really speak to inclusion and accessibility for all people. And again, the principles of universal design are really how you design something from the get-go that provides opportunity for service to maximum number of people without having to request accommodations or make specific adaptions. And so that’s the kind of thing that we talked about today and rather than sort of planning and developing services and materials from a perspective of heteronormativity, which is assuming heterosexuality, how can you really start to bring that into question and be intentional about providing all kinds of services that are inclusive of people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.

One of the biggest things is I’ve been working with people in the community who do this as their primary work, so Orange County Rape Crisis Center providing cultural competency trainings, helping to provide some technical assistance and recommendations on some of their materials, doing the same thing for Family Violence Prevention Center  there in Orange County. Also, working with people like Orange Person County Mental Health, and also at the center, provide a number of different programs and resources in the center to try to raise awareness and make visible that sexual assault does happen, recognize that it happens, and that it’s okay to come forward and try to get assistance if it does happen.

The biggest thing that I’m really excited about is our primary prevention, which is we did a curriculum that’s been five years in development and it continues to be revamped and updated as we see necessary. But it’s really looking at how do you have a healthy relationship. A lot of times people that are LGB don’t have healthy models for relationships. I mean, heterosexuals don’t have really a lot of healthy models for relationships. Given that there aren’t a lot of visible images for same-sex relationships or relationships that involve trans people in the media or in other public areas, how do you find that out? And so one of the things that we’ve done is develop a two-hour program that really talks about how do you know what you want in a partner? How do you identify those things? Where do you go to meet people? How do you do that safely? How do you talk about what you want in a relationship? How do you navigate relationship agreements? How do you handle conflict when it arises? And how do you know when conflict is more than just conflict and starts to lead into that unhealthy relationship? And if that happens, where do you go to get support and assistance?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sexual assault statistics, and so has Sandy Hingston—she recently wrote an article in Philadelphia Magazine that is a lengthy attack on Title IX protection for campus assault survivors, explored through the lens of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM). I’d have to write a novella if I wanted to respond to all of it, so for the moment let’s focus on Hingston’s discussion of stats:

What’s interesting about the 2007 Justice Department report is that its researchers didn’t ask the 5,446 female students who took their online survey if they’d been sexually assaulted. They decided for the young women, who despite their on-campus training and support were deemed too ignorant to know.

Specifically, the survey asked whether students had experienced unwanted sexual contact, defined as forced kissing, grabbing, fondling, touching of private parts, and/or oral, anal or vaginal penetration via finger, mouth, tongue, penis or object. If students checked YES, as 1,073—one in five—did, that was deemed a sexual assault. Of those students, 682 were classified as having undergone attempted sexual assault, and another 782 completed sexual assault, with 651 of the latter saying they were passed out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated or asleep at the time.

I’m baffled by Hingston’s outrage at the idea that when a student says they have been forcefully kissed, grabbed, fondled, touched, or penetrated against their will (as “unwanted” behavior indicates) a researcher would label the incident as a sexual assault. Is that NOT the definition of a sexual assault? Hingston frames this as paternalistic and seems to think it robs the participants of agency by not letting them identify their own experiences. While I am a firm believer in letting someone label their own experiences for crafting their own narratives and dealing with experiences, that wasn’t the point of this research. The question isn’t “how many young women say they have been sexually assaulted?” The question is “how many young women have experienced sexual assault, broadly defined?”

Why is the distinction important? Let’s say there’s a guy and a girl at a party dancing. Suddenly he pushes her against the wall and despite her obvious discomfort and protest, kisses her, gropes at her breasts and rubs his hand between her legs over her clothes. Eventually she pushes him off of her and walks out of the party. If you asked this girl a couple months later, “have you ever been sexually assaulted?” will she say yes? Maybe, but maybe not. Did she experience behavior that we define as sexual assault? Absolutely. For the purposes of trying to measure the frequency of sexual assault on campus, the latter is what’s relevant. This isn’t a question of how individuals define violence—we culturally and legally define violent and criminal behavior. We want to know how often it happens, which means knowing how often the behavior actually occurs not how often people say it occurs. Ask 20 college students if they have ever engaged in “criminal behavior.” Ask the same 20 college students if they have ever smoked weed or consumed alcohol before age 21. Don’t you anticipate more students answering “yes” to the second question even though technically you’re asking the same thing? This isn’t news. It’s not as though researchers who work on sexual violence are the only ones to ever ask inclusive, specific questions that don’t rely on self-identified behavior to uncover realistic rates. In fact, this is how you are trained to do effective research.

Furthermore, just because this student doesn’t feel as though she’s been sexually assaulted, there is still a guy walking around campus who thinks that it’s perfectly OK to shove girls against the wall and grope them. The whole point of providing definitions of acceptable conduct is to set guidelines for what is and isn’t acceptable at an institutional level and hold everyone accountable to the same standards. I may not think handing in a copy of someone else’s paper is a big deal because after all, I was really sick that week and I did all of my other work myself! But the school still calls that plagiarism.

But let’s turn away from research procedure and conduct codes for a second and think about the larger issue: the fact is that many students who have experienced forced, unwanted touching of a sexual nature don’t call it sexual assault. Here’s Hingston’s take.

Still, when researchers asked the young women themselves if they considered what happened to them “rape,” three-quarters of the “incapacitated” victims didn’t. Only three percent said they’d experienced physical or psychological harm. Only two percent reported what happened to campus security or police. Asked why they hadn’t, the women said they didn’t consider the incident serious enough (66 percent) and/or that it wasn’t clear a crime or harm was intended (36 percent). Half said they themselves were partially or fully responsible for what had happened. The gray looked pretty gray to them.

Because Hingston doesn’t specify which DOJ statistics she is referring to, I can’t address specific numbers. However, a couple of her stats match up closely with what was found in the Sexual Victimization of College Women report. Yes, a lot of young women say that they didn’t report incidents that could be defined as rape because they didn’t think it was serious enough or they didn’t think harm was intended. That is true. (Other reasons for not reporting include not wanting parents to know, thinking police will not take them seriously, and being afraid of reprisal from the assailant and the assailant’s friends). Hingston’s conclusion is: “See, it’s not a big deal! All these girls got drunk, experienced ‘unwanted completed penetration by force of threat of force’ but they don’t think it was all that serious. They don’t think the guy meant to hurt them. No harm no foul!” I, however, am left wondering: these women identified what happened to them as “unwanted,” yet they don’t identify it as rape or assault, nor would they call it serious or associate it with harm. What’s going on here?

The authours of the SVCW report address this briefly:

Women may not define a victimization as a rape for many reasons
(such as embarrassment, not clearly understanding the legal definition of the term, or not wanting to define someone they know who victimized them as a rapist) or because others blame them for their sexual assault. Which of these reasons is more or less correct cannot be definitively substantiated here because little systematic research has examined why women do or do not define as a rape an incident that has met the researcher’s criteria for a rape.

Although the authors cite a 1993 study in their list of potential reasons (Pitts and Scwartz, Promoting Self-Blame in Hidden Rape Cases), they are right—we don’t know why this gap in dictionary definition and self-definition occurs. (If someone has more updated research, PLEASE let me know!) But the point that we don’t exactly know is well-taken. It means that any theories about the answer are based on personal biases and personal and professional experience. Whereas Hingston argues that there simply isn’t assault happening, I would argue that this identification gap is a result of a number of different social and personal factors, including all of the ones listed by the report authors, and the widespread belief of a multitude of rape myths that keep people from defining their experience as rape if they are not “the perfect victim.” I would also guess that the popular narrative about women, drinking, and “responsibility,” also has a lot to do with it.

Because what it comes down to is, of course, “responsibility.” Hingston refers to a stat (that I can’t find) that about half of the incapacitated students who have experienced a “by-definition” rape feel responsible for what happened. She also says:

I have a college-age daughter. I tell Sokolow [the NCHERM lawyer in the story] that if she got drunk and had sex with someone, I’d jolly well expect her to take responsibility. He isn’t buying it: “She should have the right to strip naked and run through the streets and be unmolested. She didn’t make that happen; the molester did.”

Again, Hingston takes an “admission” of responsibility as an erasure of the incident. By her logic, a student who gets drunk and passes out, is raped, and then feels responsible for what has happened to her actually hasn’t been raped at all. By feeling guilt, the student is absolving the perpetrator. But whether or not the student calls it rape, feels responsible or doesn’t, reports the incident or doesn’t, the fact of the matter is someone had sex with her while she was unconscious. We call that rape. And we don’t want to see it happen to anyone, no matter what their perception of it is. I’ll say it again, we don’t create standards of conduct based on individual perceptions of personal harm, we do it based on collective ethics and standards.

Finally, I have no idea what Hingston means when says she would expect her daughter to “take responsibility” if she got drunk and had sex with someone. I feel really gross using someone’s daughter as a hypothetical though, so let’s just phrase this as though we were talking about any student. What does “taking responsibility” look like? Does she mean that once a student gets drunk that student is no longer “allowed” to say they have been raped or assaulted? Is being drunk a free pass for the other person to do whatever they want?

I’m going to assume that’s not the case (because it’s just too upsetting to believe). I’m going to assume instead that Hingston believes that there is a distinction between “rape” and “unwanted sex.” The former (sometimes called rape-rape) is associated with girls who don’t drink and aren’t promiscuous and scream for help as they are forcefully held down and raped. The latter is this nebulous thing that happens when a girl gets drunk, gets herself into a situation that she wasn’t ready for, and then feels bad about it afterward. Hingston implies that that second girl needs to suck it up and deal with her bad decision-making. She doesn’t get the “privilege” of being a rape victim because she did something stupid to put herself in that position.

But here’s one reality of “that girl.” That girl is out drinking at a party. She invites a guy back to her room to make out, and who knows where it will go…she figures she see how it feels.  They start kissing, and she starts to feel dizzy; she drank too much. As things go on, she’s mumbling incoherently. At some point she has stopped really moving much, the guy is just continuing to hook up with her. She blacks out, and she wakes up to find a used condom next to her bed. She feels awful and violated. But she doesn’t call it rape—she doesn’t know quite what to think, but a voice in her head tells her some version of what Hingston does: that she put herself in that position, she is “responsible.”

Meanwhile, this guy had sex with a girl who was visibly, according to most campus policies and many state laws, too drunk to consent. But we don’t hold him responsible. We don’t expect that at some point he would have tried to figure out if the girl was even aware of what was going on. He wasn’t blacking out, but we don’t expect that he would find it odd that his sexual partner wasn’t really actively participating in what was going on, just lying there and letting him “do his thing.” In fact, our only expectation of him is that he not use some kind of excessive force or threat to have sex with a woman who is shouting “no.”

I’m sorry, I’m repeating myself. I’ve told some version of this story over and over again. But I can’t say it enough—we spend so much time talking about who is liable and what can be proven in a court or at a disciplinary panel, when we SHOULD be talking about why that situation should not be happening. And it shouldn’t be happening no matter what you call it—even if you leave it at “unwanted sex,” WHY ARE PEOPLE HAVING SO MUCH UNWANTED SEX? But  maybe, just maybe, if we made it clear to students that what happened in the above situation isn’t what fun, healthy, consensual sex would be like (drunk OR sober), we could have a more balanced conversation about how to be responsible for ourselves and for each other.

For more on Hingston’s article, see Jezebel.

(As an aside, this post was written with a female victim/male perpetrator paradigm because that’s how the article it was responding to was written.)

Are you interested in becoming a SAFER trainer-mentor? Our training and mentoring program empowers students with the information and guidance they need to get their sexual assault policy reform campaigns off the ground. I’m including the details of the job description and application instructions below, but you can also find this listing on Idealist.org.

Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER) is seeking candidates to serve as trainer-mentors in our national on-campus movement support programs. SAFER offers in-person trainings and follow-up mentoring in the Activist Mentoring Program, AMP! We are currently looking to hire two Trainer-Mentors at this time.

Trainer-Mentors are paid on a per-diem basis for trainings and an hourly wage for preparation, travel, mentoring responsibilities and supervision. Trainer-Mentors can expect to facilitate at least one training per month and deliver a maximum of 8 hours of follow-up mentoring per month. Trainer-Mentors must be able to make a minimum of a year-long commitment. You can learn more about Trainings and the Activist Mentoring Program here: https://safercampus.org/resources

The Trainer-Mentor Will:

—Work with the SAFER Trainings Coordinator and the SAFER Mentoring Coordinator to prepare for, debrief on, and provide on-going support to student activists in our programs.

— Be or become familiar with the dynamics of sexual violence on college campuses in the United States.

— Be or become familiar with laws and best practices related to college sexual assault policies.

— Be or become familiar with best practices for student-led movements on college campuses.

— Learn the training curriculum (a four-hour workshop) and prepare to deliver it to diverse student groups nation-wide.

— Prepare for, travel to and execute dynamic and in-depth trainings to student activists, staff, faculty and administration on their campuses.

— Orient student activists to the Activist Mentoring Program (AMP!) during trainings.

— Conduct thorough follow-up documentation for the Board of Directors of SAFER

— Stay in contact with student leaders and provide on-going mentorship for their movements. Trainer-Mentor will coordinate and conduct bi-weekly check-ins with active groups for up to two hours of direct mentoring per month per school.

— Provide tailored advice, support and resources for active student movements working to reform the sexual assault policy at their school.

— Provide clear, consistent communication to the Trainings and Mentoring Coordinators on the status of these student-led movements.

Strong Trainer-Mentor Candidates will have:

— Successfully carried out social justice organizing campaigns on a college campus.

—Demonstrated experience with trainings, community education or workshop facilitation.

—Comfort working with diverse groups of students, staff, faculty and administration.

— Familiarity with (or dedication to learn about) the importance of prevention-based policy reform in the national movement against sexual violence on college campuses.

— Ability to facilitate difficult dialogues across differences and experience levels. Comfort with discussing and training students on the importance of intersectionality as it relates to their policies and their movements. (i.e. the impact of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, homo- and trans-phobia in the anti-violence movement)

— Ability to create and maintain a safe(r) space during trainings.

— Ability to identify needs of participants and tailoring programming to meet these needs

—Creative and innovate ideas for engaging student activists both during in-person trainings and supporting their movements in the Activist Mentoring Program (AMP!)

— Commitment to detailed and through follow-up and communication to Coordinators and Board of Directors.

— Strong oral and written communication skills.

—The ability to work independently with limited supervision while remaining organized, energized and detail-orientated.

— Passion for justice, social change and working with a small volunteer-run national collective.

— Availability to work during evenings and weekends to accommodate to student schedules.

— Ability to travel, problem-solve on the road, be flexible and have a good time!

Interested candidates should send a cover letter and resume to . We hope to fill this position by mid-September and applications will be reviewed as they are received. All Trainer-Mentors must be able to meet with SAFER staff in our office in New York City. SAFER is committed to maintaining a diverse organization and we will actively recruit people of color, people with disabilities, and people with diverse gender and sexual identities.

I don’t really have a lot to say about the decision today to drop charges against Dominique Strauss-Khan, but I feel that the spectacle of a woman of color being told yet again that she is just not a reliable enough witness to her own experience deserves clear acknowledgement. It is hard to believe that her race, gender, and class played no part in the decision not to prosecute.

I had to take a sexual harassment online training at work this week. In one of the sections, a woman reports a two-year old groping to her boss. There was this “crystal ball” on-screen, and it showed what happened to each of the various people if you did or did not report her allegation to the HR department. Of course, in this scenario, the black woman’s allegations against the white man were taken seriously (despite aspects of her story, like the two year delay, that could effect her “credibility”), he was fired, everyone was safe and happy. And all I could think was, yeah right.

Of course, they got the part where he went on to attack someone else if he wasn’t stopped correct.

When the defense your attorney offers is “You can engage in inappropriate behavior, perhaps. But that is much different than a crime,” I have trouble believing that the people involved have any idea where that line actually is. If I ran a hotel, I would probably follow the lead of Air France going forward.

Governor Chris Christie has finally signed a bill that would ensure that rape survivors are not billed for the rape kits used to collect evidence that will hopefully help to prosecute their attackers. New Jersey-ites were unhappy that the Governor seemed to have been dragging his feet on the bill, and mounted an effective campaign to move the process along (including a woman inspired by a news article on the delay to start a petition that gathered a thousand signatures in three days!).

The bill is a nice example of bi-partisanship, and of women legislators working together to make sure that issues that effect women (and the many boys and men who will also undergo a sexual assault forensic exam this year) are addressed by their government.

Wonderfully, although it has not been picked up in the press accounts, the bill establishes a very broad definition of what is covered by a sexual assault forensic exam, ensuring that survivors “are not charged any fee for services that are directly associated with forensic sexual assault examinations, including routine medical screening, medications for prophylaxis of sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy tests, emergency contraception, supplies, equipment and use of space.” No one should have to weigh the risk of getting an HIV infection from a rape with the cost of the prophylactic drugs.

I applaud New Jersey, and especially Senator Diane Allen and Assemblymember Annette Quijano, the bill’s sponsors, for taking a clear stand on behalf of survivors.

Readers! Today is the day that I get to let you in on some very big news. SAFER is excited to announce that we will be featured in a new campaign spearheaded by Cosmopolitan Magazine to confront rape on college campuses. We’re thrilled that Cosmo has selected the SAFER/V-Day Campus Accountability Project as a key action item to engage students in anti-violence work at their colleges. With Cosmo’s help, we’re hoping to reach more students than ever before.

Earlier this week, Cosmo’s inaugural campaign column hit the stands in their September issue (on page 210, to be exact), and yesterday marked the official launch of the “Cosmopolitan Fights Campus Rape” website, which encourages readers to submit their schools’ policies to CAP in order to fight campus sexual assault.

As a part of the new campaign, Cosmo has also set up a community forum where students can share their experiences changing their colleges’ sexual assault policies. Check out the forum and tell other students how you are holding your college accountable for campus sexual assault.

Illinois has a new law, similar to one passed in New York last year, that lets survivors of human trafficking wipe their criminal records clean of all the charges related to their time as a trafficked individual.

Kennette Thomas was 15 when she married a man she thought was a gentleman. Instead, he spent the next 30 years as her pimp.

In 2009, she finally broke away. Still, she said, the prostitution and the drugs she had used landed her in jail dozens of times, so many that her rap sheet ran 32 pages. “Prostitution, drugs. That’s my whole life history,” Ms. Thomas, 49, said. “That’s the only life I knew.”

Thanks in part to the lobbying of Ms. Thomas and others, Gov. Pat Quinn earlier this month signed the Illinois Justice for Victims of Sex Trafficking Crimes Act. The law enables victims of sex trafficking — people recruited or coerced into sexual exploitation — to clear their records of prostitution convictions.

Under the law, the person must petition for a hearing in the court where the prostitution convictions were handed down, produce evidence that she or he was a victim of sex trafficking and ask the judge to vacate the convictions.

The law, the third in the nation to address the problem, is part of a larger statewide campaign by law enforcement and local advocacy groups to hold pimps, customers and traffickers accountable for the sex trade, while supporting its survivors.

The rest of the article gets into attempts to start making use of another Illinois law that allows civil suits against traffickers. Illinois really seems to be at the forefront of attempts to shift attention and prosecution toward those who profit from coercing people into prostitution, an idea that I hope keeps spreading.