Changing Campus Culture to Prevent Sexual Assault

As educational institutions continue to face increased scrutiny of their sexual assault prevention and response efforts, many are moving beyond fine-tuning their compliance procedures and focusing on a broader effort to change campus culture. Universities on the forefront of this effort include Yale, Colgate, and Rutgers.

“We have our eyes tightly fixed on what is the best possible community we can create at Yale, instead of just thinking we want these bad things to stop,” said Melanie Boyd, an assistant dean of student affairs at Yale College, the four-year undergraduate school at Yale University. “Yes, we want a campus without sexual violence. But we also want a campus that is suffused with sexual respect, support, and a general sense of safety, a sense of mutuality. You need things that you are moving toward, not just things that you are moving away from.”

Culture change involves looking at the bigger picture—beyond an individual incident report or claim. Boyd finds that she is able to focus on that broad perspective because others on campus—such as Title IX coordinators, investigators, and crisis counselors—are handling specific issues as they arise.

At Colgate University, students get a lot of information about policies and procedures from various outlets, but culture change involves working closely with students to identify the changes they want to see, which are usually in line with what administrators want, said Scott Brown, associate vice president and dean of students.

Rutgers, like many institutions, has been working to prevent sexual assault for decades and was recently selected by The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault to pilot a campus climate survey on student experiences, attitudes, and awareness of issues related to sexual assault, said Ruth Anne Koenick, director of the Office for Violence Prevention and Victim Assistance. Through its Center on Violence Against Women and Children at the School of Social Work, the university modified a survey instrument recommended by the task force to align with the Rutgers environment and administered the survey online late last year. The researchers will provide feedback on the tool to the White House and the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women. Questions focused on students’:

Personal experiences with sexual assault

• Sense of community on campus
• Exposure to educational information about sexual assault
• Opinions of the institution’s response to sexual violence

The survey had a 28 percent response rate—a total of 11,735 students. Rutgers—and institutions that adapt the survey to their campuses—can use results to estimate the frequency of campus sexual assault, better understand circumstances under which it occurs, develop an action plan, and address student needs.

Although all these administrators acknowledge the complexity of implementing culture change on campus, they understand that transformation can start with a conversation, and they’ve found creative ways to generate discussions about sensitive issues.

Yale: Empowering Students to Promote Respect

Yale is working to help students move beyond prohibitions and into exploring options and creating healthy patterns. To do so, the university uses freshman orientation to set expectations well beyond consent. Consent is a low bar, Yale’s peer educators say. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, for a positive sexual encounter.

“We want [students] to be thinking about sexual ethics, their ideals, how they want to interact with each other, what they think social and romantic life should look like more broadly, knowing that there are going to be different answers for different people,” Boyd said. Institutions need to determine how to create conditions for respectful mutual relationships, to push back against cultural norms where certain levels of disrespect can be taken for granted, she said.

Yale is attempting to promote this positive culture change through peer education. Boyd works with a group of diverse undergraduates, called Communication and Consent Educators (CCEs), who are trained in complex problem solving and cultural interventions. They take note of behaviors on campus that trouble them and discuss how to improve those situations.

For example, a group of students was working within a community in which new students often thought that fitting in would require them to be quite sexually active. Traditionally, this group welcomed new students with a late-night dance in a dark, sexualized, drunken environment. Identifying this pressure point, CCEs within that community raised concerns. The community now welcomes new students with a picnic—an event that can encompass flirtation, but is also conducive to friendship and conversation.

“Students often have to make sexual decisions in pressured situations. We are working to normalize low pressure zones, spaces where it’s easier to communicate with potential partners, check in with friends, and take action, if necessary, as an intervening bystander.” Boyd said. “We could encourage students to go to a coffee or pizza shop and look at a person in the bright light before deciding to go home with him or her, but we know that’s hard advice to follow. Instead, we bring those brighter, quieter spaces to them—in ‘cool-down’ rooms beside the dance, or after parties in the entryways to the dorms."

Boyd works with 48 CCEs—four per each of 12 residential colleges—who receive 45 hours of training at the beginning of the year to prepare them to lead student workshops. “They are my change agents on the ground. They identify the issues that we should work on, and then I help them figure out what we are going to do about it,” she said.

Boyd’s group conducts hundreds of intense small-group workshops, which are mandatory for first-year students and sophomores. CCEs also work informally within their own Greek organizations, athletic teams, and social groups to raise consciousness, build skills, and change disempowering rituals.

Boyd meets with the CCEs every week to focus on a particular issue and handle logistics and reports. Institutions with fewer resources could likely develop a similar program with volunteers, she said, since students take the job so seriously. Her group’s mandate is to foster a more positive sexual culture on campus. They feel empowered and that attitude spreads to the students they work with.

The CCEs focus on prevention, but also help with response. “They offer a lower, more approachable entry point sometimes than coming to a dean, faculty member, or someone in a higher position of authority. And my students often then vouch for the official resources and get the person to the professional who can help them,” Boyd said.

For more information on Yale’s full set of resources, visit smr.yale.edu/.

Colgate: Yes Means Yes

One of Brown’s goals is to help Colgate students feel empowered to make sexual decisions that make sense for them—regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, or background. “I think students really want to talk about this and are not really quite sure how to do it,” he said.

“A lot of it goes back to the basic issue of clear, voluntary consent. In navigating relationships, how do you communicate what you really want even as you are figuring it out? Communicating that is a difficult part of human interaction,” Brown said. He wants to help students understand the difference between seduction, coercion, and consent by giving them structure, language, permission, and practice to have these conversations even as they’re figuring out want they want from relationships.

Colgate is facilitating such conversations through its collaborative “Yes Means Yes” (YMY) seminars. YMY is an interdisciplinary five-week positive sexuality course that focuses on helping students decide what kind of relationships they want, instead of concentrating only on what they should avoid. The program’s goal is to help students learn to enjoy safe, consensual, sexual activity.

YMY includes dinner and facilitated discussions about healthy communication, positive sexuality, sexual attitudes, and decision-making skills. Students also learn how to find resources on campus. Brown expects students who complete the course to work with other groups to help improve the campus climate.

YMY began as an exercise in a 2009 graduate’s thesis. The course has become so popular that the YMY team increased its frequency. The student-run sessions include faculty and staff as guest facilitators, including representatives from the dean’s office, counseling services, and LGBTQ programs. Faculty members participate from sociology/anthropology, education studies, and women’s studies departments. Students discuss essays in Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. Topics include gender norms and rape culture, sexual pleasure, date rape, consent, and entitlement.

“There is now a ‘Yes Means Yes 2.0’ that was developed by another student, and that really gets into a critical look at sex and sexuality and how it intersects with race, gender, and ability,” Brown said. “The hope is that all of these students, wherever they go socially, bring it to their real lives, not leave it in the classroom.”

For more information, visit www.colgate.edu/about/campus-services-and-resources/prevention-and-education.

Rutgers: Staging Bystander Interventions

Rutgers has worked to prevent sexual violence on campus for nearly 25 years through its peer education and theater groups, SCREAM (Students Challenging Realities and Educating Against Myths) Theater™ and SCREAM Athletes™. SCREAM performances, which are developed and performed by students, provide information about sexual assault, dating violence, same-sex violence, stalking, bullying, and peer harassment. SCREAM Athletes performs specifically for members of the athletic community.

One focus of interactive SCREAM is bystander intervention, using skits and discussions to help students understand the role a bystander can play. Actors stop each scene at a certain point and let the audience vote on which intervention works and how to strengthen interventions. Then actors play out what the audience suggested to change the outcome.

“One of the beauties of bystander intervention is that we can start where people are—find out what their skills are and what they are capable of doing. Then we help them learn new skills they can use to be actively engaged positive bystanders,” Koenick said.

Another approach the theater group uses is to present a variety of low- and high-risk scenarios to see whether the audience would intervene, and why. After a discussion, the group asks audience members to return to their communities and create a poster or social media campaign to share what they learned and get other students involved in sexual assault prevention efforts.

SCREAM performs about 80 times a year at Rutgers as well as at high schools, middle schools, and other higher education institutions. SCREAM Athletes similarly works with athletic programs at other institutions.

Koenick also promotes effective bystander intervention through a class, “Bystander Intervention in Higher Education,” in the College Student Affairs master’s program. These students learn to teach bystander intervention to the students they’ll work with in their professional lives.

The course examines the role of bystander intervention in education and how it can be applied in college, high school, and middle school. It examines why people do and do not intervene in certain situations and how professionals can encourage students to respond.

For more information, visit vpva.rutgers.edu/.

By Julie Britt, communications associate