From compliance to transformation: notes on the MSU strategic plan to address RVSM

Campbell et al’s discussion of MSU’s strategic plan presents a thoughtful institutional response to a succession of sexual violence and sexual misconduct crises, striking for its tone of accountability and self-critique. In a context in which there are strong institutional incentives to deny having fallen short – indeed, where the institutional reputational stakes feel so high that many institutions refuse to even share data about rates of relationship violence and sexual misconduct (Tashkandi et al. 2022) – the MSU authors are transparent about the urgency of needing to do better. They acknowledge the specifics of MSU’s history, but crucially avoid a sort of ‘institutional exceptionalism’ by situating their own institutional challenges in a broader context in which all IHE’s have failed, over decades, to make meaningful inroads to reduce overall rates of campus sexual violence. Because our expertise lies primarily in the social roots of sexual violence among undergraduates, our response concentrates on those aspects of the MSU plan.

Their plan is typical of even the most robust institutional responses, which frequently do not do enough to address the social roots of sexual assault. Our response makes three claims. First, drawing on the insights from Sexual Citizens (Hirsch and Khan 2020), we argue that pouring more resources and energy into prevention approaches at the individual level will be insufficient and unlikely to make sustained change. Despite longstanding calls for sexual violence prevention that encompasses all levels of the ecological model (Banyard 2013; DeGue et al. 2014; HEISE 1998), most prevention among undergraduates focuses predominantly on shaping individual-level attitudes, rather than addressing modifiable dimensions of the institutional environment or using institution of higher education’s considerable social power to address critical pre-college factors associated with later RVSM. Second, we suggest integrating attention to intersectionality and recognition diverse identities in all facets of response. Finally, we continue to encourage a primary focus on prevention. In the commentary that follows, we organize our thoughts to mirror MSU’s useful “Know more, Do More, Support More” framework.

KNOW MORE

The public commitment to grounding MSU’s institutional response in an honest and meticulous accounting of the scope of experienced harms is laudable. An evidence-based approach, however, will still fall short if the evidence collected does not capture the problem’s full scope. While it is possible that the ongoing data collection extends beyond what was described in their article, we see two ways in which IHEs might lean harder into what exactly they should ‘know more’ about: carrying through more fully on their commitment to an intersectional perspective and capturing data that would shed light on the full ecology of factors that produce relationship violence and sexual misconduct. What might this amendment mean and how would that different knowledge lead to transformational prevention? Sexual violence is related to gender and power. But it’s not just about gender, and when we think about gender we have to do so intersectionally (Armstrong, Gleckman-Krut, and Johnson 2018; K. Crenshaw 1989; K. W. Crenshaw 1991). Knowing more means knowing not just about gender power; it means taking seriously the intersecting forms of power and their consequent inequalities which produce a range of harms, one of which is sexual violence.

Bringing together DEI and prevention of RVSM

Institutional efforts grounded in a commitment to ‘know more’ must document the harms caused by multiple forms of power-based inequalities, rather than starting from a position of ‘gender-based violence.’ Although we are hardly the first to make this argument, two data points from the research we did with undergraduates at Columbia and Barnard highlight the need for this bolder intersectional take on the harm that students experience from their peers. In the interviews that we did with undergraduates at Columbia and Barnard, every single Black woman we spoke with recounted experiencing unwanted sexual touching. Every single one. Crucially, in those interviews, these assaults were rarely described by students as assaults – mentioned not in response to a question about sexual assault, but in response to questions about what it was like to go about living their daily lives on a campus that – like the rest of the country – was suffused with anti-Black racism. Such experiences might be counted in surveys that use behaviorally-specific measures to elicit every single experience of sexual violence that someone has had, but in the example with which we are most familiar, they were not; the Columbia Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation survey, which used the behaviorally-specific measures of sexual violence (considered to be research best practices) did not show equivalently high rates of unwanted touching among Black women (Mellins et al. 2017). This suggests that focusing on sexual violence alone may miss the all too frequent non-sexual experiences of anti-Black racism that occur on every campus (Baker and Britton 2021; Casellas Connors and McCoy 2022). And even if such instances of anti-Black racism that manifested as unwanted touching were measured, they would be categorized as sexual misconduct, rather than in the way that women students subjectively experienced them, which was as a more general manifestation of anti-Black racism. Respecting such subjective experience reflects respect for survivors’ experiences, but also (as we discuss below) has implications for prevention.

Second, the Columbia SHIFT survey, like many other surveys (Cantor et al. 2015), found that LGBTQ+ undergraduates experienced far higher rates of sexual violence than any other group. Those instances of violence, however, happen in a context which lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, non-binary students experienced forms of administrative violence that marked their social exclusion. Despite its historic commitment to queer inclusion, including being the first campus in the United States to have a registered gay student organization (the Columbia Homophile League) (NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project 2017), social exclusion was built into the campus context in various ways, from a data system that had to be overhauled so that students could indicate their pronouns or avoid being misnamed, to a bathroom system that reproduced the gender binary, to a queer student meeting space that was until 2017 literally in a closet in a basement (Maroulis and Deguerrera 2017)– hidden, and not disability accessible. Similar to the example of Black women’s experiences, an accounting of the high rates of RVSM experienced by LGBTQIA+ individuals on campus is incomplete without mapping the full ecology of social exclusion and erasure (S. Khan et al. 2022).

The “Know More” framework, therefore, is exactly where campuses should start, but it needs expanding. In order to know what they need to know to address campus sexual violence, campuses should bring together institutional initiatives that address sexual and gender-based misconduct with those focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Knowing more requires recognizing that sexual violence response and DEI initiatives are both fundamentally part of the same project: addressing intersecting power inequalities and the subsequent harms, in order to build institutions in which all people can learn, work, and thrive.

Looking at the ecology of RVSM

The institutional commitment is carried through concretely through data collection strategies ] that would render visible the full ecology of relationship violence and sexual misconduct. Campbell et al. address ‘culture and climate’, but a focus on culture is insufficient as a formulation to understand the social roots of sexual violence. It may seem like a distinction that only two social scientists would insist on, but culture – people’s shared beliefs about what is good and bad, the norms to which they aspire – is different from structure, and institutions typically have much more control over and potential impact upon structural dimensions of communal life (policies, resource allocation, the physical environment) than they do over culture. A full social diagnosis would include looking at modifiable dimensions of the institutional environment, which may include lab architecture, the allocation of social space, or policies about housing, but potentially many other institutional characteristics. The strength of a public health approach lies in building an environmental context in which individual behavior is less likely to harm others. Addressing cholera didn’t mean teaching people about the dynamics of infectious diseases and hoping they would act with that knowledge in mind. Instead, John Snow, one of the founders of epidemiology, removed pump handles to cholera-laden water, rendering his neighbors unable to pump it out and access it, regardless of their knowledge of or beliefs about infectious diseases.

We stop short of recommending that every institution of higher education replicate the ethnographic research we conducted as part of Columbia’s Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (although much, certainly, could be learned through multi-campus comparative ethnographic research). We do, however, have four actionable recommendations.

First, as the authors themselves have argued elsewhere, campus climate surveys’ focus on measuring individual-level experience leads to a failure to produce information on many modifiable dimensions of the institutional climate (Moylan et al. 2021). It is entirely within the capacity of individual institutions to add questions about institutional context to existing survey instruments. This would enable analyses that render visible the characteristics of work environments, or registered student organizations, or living environments, in which RVSM is more or less likely to occur.

Second, the full power of these questions about modifiable institutional characteristics can only be fully realized with more of the kind of cross-campus research for which one of the authors of the MSU piece has herself advocated (Moylan et al. 2019; Moylan and Javorka 2020). When data do exist that could be used to identify institutional characteristics associated with safer or more dangerous environments, they are typically only available to researchers with the institutional identifiers stripped out, limiting analysis to individual-level characteristics (the AAU 2015 campus climate survey, for example, is only available to researchers with the student data pooled across campuses) (Association of American Universities 2015). IHEs should do much more to facilitate cross-campus research to identify campus characteristics associated with both with various forms of victimization and with thriving, both for overall student populations and for subpopulations. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to associations between Greek Life and organized athletics and sexual violence, a recent systematic review found a much broader set of factors (institution demographics, institution type, institution climate, institution financial characteristics, and educational characteristics being related to various forms of victimization) (Tashkandi et al. 2022). That same review, however, also pointed to the many limitations of current research, largely related to access to comparable data on victimization across multiple IHEs.

Third, campuses are not islands, separated from the social context, nor are they magical places that can undo the profound social inequalities that characterize American life, nor are the new students who enter classrooms every September blank slates. An ecological perspective includes attention to life course factors; given that almost four out of five students (Woodruff 2021) at MSU are from Michigan, knowing about sources of vulnerability to sexual violence means thinking about the educational systems that most of these students have passed through on their way to higher education. Our prior research shows the powerful protective effect that comprehensive sex education may have against experiencing sexual assault. A further element of ‘knowing more’ means attending to the ways in which students who arrive on campus may be underprepared for the challenges of adult life, which typically includes becoming sexually active (Santelli et al. 2018).

Finally, there is the domain of organizational psychology. If every institutional crisis related to sexual violence led to change, then the problem would have been solved long ago. This points to another question about which it is crucial to know more – one that might seem very distal to the experience-near suffering of so many survivors, and yet one that is crucial to answer in order to ensure that the moments when their suffering bursts onto the public consciousness translate into work that actually makes that suffering less likely to happen in the future. In an institutional response that brought together expertise from across the campus, it seems like a missed opportunity not to have engaged someone with expertise in organizational psychology, particularly given that MSU has one of the nation’s top-ranked programs. A great deal is already known about crises and institutional change (Cortell and Peterson 1999), and in designing a strategy for institutional transformation this expertise seems as relevant to include as topical expertise in sexual violence. Moreover, studying the process as it unfolds could lead to understanding aspects of campus organizational structure that enable or block change.

DO MORE

The authors write “Despite having strong survivor service programs, MSU has struggled to meaningfully address RRVSM on our campus”. The “despite” reveals the widely-shared notion that supporting survivors necessarily translates into the prevention of future harm. Unquestionably, supporting survivors is important, and supporting them should begin by seeking their input about what is needed, but support for survivors should not be confused with a comprehensive approach to prevention. Prevention may well require an entirely different approach than care for those who have experienced harm.

Sexual violence is not just one problem, it’s many

Sexual and gender-based misconduct collapses together many outcomes and experiences which differ in consequential ways: sexual harassment by the principal investigator of a lab with millions of dollars in funding from NIH reflects a fundamentally different set of modifiable institutional factors than verbal coercion for intercourse between two students in an ongoing relationship. So no matter how much more campuses do, part of that ‘do more’ needs to be marshalling a diversified, evidence-based strategy to address the full range of forms of RVSM.

The MSU piece provides an intersectional take on RVSM, with the authors rightfully attending to the diversity of sexual assault experiences of people with multiply minoritized identities. That is important, given that rates ranged from 9.3% to 65.5% across different gender and affiliation groups. We would highlight that these different rates also likely encompass different kinds of RVSM outcomes, each of which might require a different strategy to address. For example, nationally, white people drink more than Black and Asian Americans, and in our own research we found, unsurprisingly, that white students were more likely to report an alcohol-associated sexual assault as the most significant ones they experienced (Walsh et al. 2021). Accordingly, a prevention strategy that focuses on alcohol as a risk factor for committing assault, while crucial, risks centering the harms that white students experience over those that other students are more likely to experience (Black students, for example, are more likely to experience relationship violence in contexts where neither person has been drinking).

This builds upon our earlier arguments for “knowing more.” Sexual violence is a diverse set of experiences, that diverse student bodies are likely to experience differently in patterend ways. The first step is to “know more” about this diversity. The second is to mobilize this knowledge to “do more” in light of this knowledge. In our own survey research “incapacitation” was identified by victims as one of the primary form of perpetration in over half of the reported “most significant” assaults. So addressing alcohol on campus is absolutely essential. But it is also insufficient. It must be complemented by prevention work designed to respond to the types of sexual violence more likely to be experienced by BIPOC and Queer students (education about relationship violence, for example), as well as those with disabilities, etc.

Not just a campus problem

At least for the violence that occurs among undergraduates, our work suggests that a fundamental dimension of sexual violence is that young people in America are not learning to have sex without hurting other people. Campus sexual violence is not just a ‘campus problem’, it is an everyone problem, and thus unlikely to be solved in any meaningful way by interventions that begin when students arrive on campus.

A more ambitious vision of prevention recognizes that pre-college risk and protective factors, including comprehensive sexuality education, prior experiences of sexual violence, and adverse childhood events, are significantly associated with vulnerability to sexual violence on campus, and may even be connected to the likelihood of committing sexual violence. We particularly call attention to comprehensive sexuality ed as a modifiable pre-college protective factor. Our research with Columbia and Barnard undergraduates found that women students who had had comprehensive sexuality education before college were half as likely to be raped in college (Santelli et al. 2018), and other work that suggests that age appropriate CSE might be effective as primary prevention (Schneider and Hirsch 2018). Meanwhile, current K-12 students in Michigan face a school system that does not require sex ed. If sex ed is provided, teachers are required to stress abstinence and the importance of only having sex within marriage, and they are not required to provide instruction that is age appropriate, medically accurate, or culturally unbiased. There are other ways that institutions of higher education can address the environment outside of campus; there is substantial evidence, for example, that state policies affect college binge drinking (Kuo et al. 2003; Nelson et al. 2005).

Recognizing our earlier point about intersectionality, the trend in the state seems to be towards an educational environment that is even more silent regarding critical thinking about power and inequality, with the Michigan legislature banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory, ‘anti-American’ ideas about race, or material from the 1619 project, and imposing funding penalties on schools that flout this ban (Baucher and Altavena 2021; Michigan Senate Republicans 2021). With almost 80% of MSU students being from Michigan, the broader point here is that publicly funded universities need to think about the extent to which they can leverage their power to make sure that the students who arrive on campus are prepared to interact with each other in an inclusive manner. Some higher education settings are electing to offer sex education at the higher education level (Manning-Ouellette and Shikongo-Asino 2022), but as we are fond of saying, just like it is better to teach people to drive before they grab the keys, given that the median age of first sex is 17, it would be better to provide comprehensive sex ed before young people start college. Doing more requires looking beyond the campus gates. Great public universities like MSU are uniquely positioned to lead these (admittedly challenging) efforts.

What it means to take an intersectional approach to RVSM in higher education

We also encourage MSU – but not just MSU – to think in a bolder way about what it means to take an intersectional approach to power-based harm. Without diluting the specificity of experiencing RVSM, there are many other forms of harm that students do to other students, both in person and online, including racist, ableist, and anti-queer interactions, all of which are, unfortunately, mirrored by similar harms among university employees. Centering the question of what is required to build an institution in which everyone can learn and work to their full potential means acknowledging and addressing all of these harms, rather than ‘only’ the ones governed by title IX. The MSU write up notes “limited prevention programming”, but as we argue above in our discussion about the ecology of RVSM, the very framing of prevention as ‘programming’ is limited, implying mandated small group interventions rather than environmental change. Certainly a series of interactive educational interventions that build on each other, rather than one-off mandated slide sets to click through, more closely approximates known characteristics of effective prevention work (DeGue et al. 2014). However, trying to shape the hearts and minds of those who pass through the institution – in a context where the entire undergraduate population will turn over every 4-5 years, falls short of leveraging a key form of institutional power, which is to shape the context itself, rather than only trying to influence the people in that context. Our own modest contribution to this work, building on the idea of sexual geographies in Sexual Citizens, is a toolkit designed to guide campuses through a process addressing structurally-grounded power inequalities among undergraduates by examining and transforming the allocation of social and residential space (Hirsch and Khan n.d.).

The piece notes ‘relationships’ between the RVSM strategic plan and DEI initiatives to identify common goals and to ‘heal the negative impacts of oppression’, but providing healing to those who experience exclusionary interactions without also identifying and teaching those who are harming them to do better is insufficient. Intersectional support for survivors is important but distinct from building an inclusive environment, and campuses are unlikely to reach this goal simply by telling people not to discriminate (Chang et al. 2019). While the principle of intersectional action “recognizes social oppressions create climates that allow violence to occur and that violence increases disparities in the health and well-being of survivors”, the ensuing commitment must be to address the social oppression itself, not just the resulting disparities.

If campuses have, for decades, failed to prevent RVSM, it may seem counterintuitive to encourage an even more ambitious approach to power-based violence. But universities are institutions that, like other types of institutions, are deeply and intentionally stratified –academic robes show how “educated” you are (with some schools having their own “special” robes to demarcate further status differences), the assumption that seniors should have better housing than first year students, the way that student rely on personal, confidential letters of recommendation on the academic job market, how faculty can have permanent positions but staff, even if unionized, experience far more perilous employment circumstances, or how assistant professors’ tenure fates are determined by their more senior peers. Our institutions have built power and inequality into their daily life. “Knowing more” must render visible how these power-based inequalities built into daily life through institutional policies which puts people at a range of risks, including sexual violence; “doing more” can help them use that knowledge to build them out.

Create feedback loops to identify problematic behavior

Not every campus has the political will to pivot from an institutional strategy centered on compliance to one that strives for transformation, but for those that do, we have some specific recommendations. First, the MSU strategy notes an intention to innovate in restorative justice. It is certainly the case that many survivors would prefer a formal alternative to adjudication after they have reported someone for causing sexual harm. But formal restorative justice processes may fail to serve the many people who have had experiences that felt harmful but that they would not label sexual assault (and in our research with undergraduates, we spoke with many who had good reasons for eschewing that label) (S. R. Khan et al. 2018). In parallel with how racial justice advocates have modeled ‘calling people in’, rather than calling them out, when they act in ways that are harmful in social movement spaces, we encourage campuses to consider ways of creating feedback loops, so that people who are having what they and their peers might still label ‘sex’, but in ways that feel harmful, scary, or humiliating, might receive that information and learn to do better. Reporting feels like a stark binary, setting in motion institutional processes of punishment, or nothing – whereas what many have experienced harm – including, crucially, those who would not label themselves survivors or call what happened assault – is both acknowledgement of the harm done and for those who have hurt them to learn to do better.

Use a broader set of metrics to evaluate progress towards inclusive communities

Admirably, the MSU piece commits to rigorous evaluation of prevention programming. As we note above, it is our position that a focus on ‘prevention programming’ underleverages institution’s central power, which is to shape the context. We are not arguing, however, that they should abandon entirely small group programming. Rather, reimagining it so that it is attentive to more forms of power-based violence opens up a much broader set of changes to assess. First, analyzing rates of RVSM by gender identity, affiliation group, and other axes of difference will show if the work that they are doing is reducing sexual violence, but it will not assess other forms of power-based harm, nor will it help identify administrative units, student groups, or physical spaces that are resistant to change. In other words, a focus on individual identity groups leaves out a layer of social reality, and so assessment should examine institutional location, to identify both leaders and laggards in safer environments.

Second, bringing together prevention of RVSM and DEI work opens the door to a much broader set of metrics to assess variation in institutional thriving. For students, this might include outcomes ranging from sleep disparities to drop out rates, all of which can create a comprehensive picture of which groups are least well-served by the institution. For faculty and staff, retention rates and professional flourishing are much broader indicators of an inclusive environment. Our point is not to ignore RVSM as an outcome to assess, but rather to situate it in relation to outcomes that are conceivably affected by the extent to which students, faculty, and staff across multiple forms of social difference feel seen, supported, and included as citizens in the community.

SUPPORT MORE

The vast majority of survivors of sexual violence tell someone about their experience – but it is rarely school officials. So in thinking ambitiously about systems that “support more”, it is vital to remember that there are systematic biases in who chooses to seek supportive services or to reach out to campus officials to make a formal report.

While we recognize that our own work is not representative, we feel our findings are instructive (below results first presented in Khan et al. 2018). The random population survey conducted among Columbia and Barnard undergraduates (N=1671; response rate 67%) showed that only 2.2% of students formally reported their experiences; only 13% told a mental health professional, and only 3% spoke with a campus advocate. So while over 80% of those who experienced assault told someone, only about 15% told someone other than a friend for family member.

If we center survivors the question naturally arises, “which survivors?” Those who seek support perhaps are those who experience the greatest harm. So intuitively it makes sense to design our systems of support around them. However, we would note that those who seek institutional support are also those mostly likely to feel like they can trust institutions, or, that the institutions are there to serve their needs. Some of our most disadvantaged students have multiple institutional experiences, before, outside of, and within college, that lead them not to see institutions are places “for them.” In our own research BIPOC and Queer students described Columbia and Barnard as “white” and cishetero institutions. The question arises, “how can we support survivors who don’t see “us” as a source of support, or, whose voices we are unlikely to hear?” We suggest that supporting more requires asking two questions: (1) who is not seeking help, and why? and (2) Who is left out of the framing of ‘survivors’? Both of these questions need to be imbedded within an understanding of intersecting power inequalities.

Who is not seeking help, and why?

Research, both qualitative and quantitative, can learn about who is not seeking help, and why. And so part of supporting more means knowning more about who isn’t seeking help, and why they aren’t. In our own research (Khan et al 2018), those who didn’t talk to anyone about their experiences had diverse reasons for their decisions (in our research, people could provide multiple reasons). 84% reported that they didn’t think what happened to them was serious enough; 26% feared the reaction of others, 29% were too embarrassed, 38% didn’t want people to worry about them; 34% just wanted to forget about what happened. For those who did tell someone, they tended to do it quickly, with two thirds doing so within 24 hours and 80% doing it within a week. And whether or not they told anyone, those who experienced assault reported effects on their academic lives (16%), mental health (38%), extracurricular activites (11%), and social lives (36%).

Fearing the reaction of others, feelings of embarrassment, and not wanting to worry others are are deeply social reasons for not seeking help. In our own work on why people label experiences as assault, tell others, and/or report their experiences, we highlighted the social risks to their identities, relationships, and college and life projects. What we saw were students balancing competing priorities: they wanted to secure what support they needed to get back to their “normal” life, while minimizing the affective, identity, social, collateral damage. They also just wanted to protect their time. Being “survivor centered” requires thinking about how survivors are embedded in communities and institutions. And so part of supporting survivors requires interventions beyond the individual level. This is one of the primary challenges with survivor centered approaches: they often focus on individual needs, without a full attentiveness to how those needs are relationally and institutionally embedded.

Most of the burden of caring for those who experience assault is being carried by those who are not trained or equipped to carry that burden: peers. In our own research we noted considerable community-level mental health burdens of assault. If by the time they graduate over 30% of women are experience assault in college, and if 80% of those women tell someone, and if the person they tell is most likely to be a peer, then students are doing the lion’s share of care for one another. Those untrained in support are those mostly likely to be providing it. The implication is not that we should train these communities in support; instead it’s important to help guide people to the kinds of help they need. But overall, survivor-centered support means supporting not just individuals, but the communities that are doing most of the work to support one another.

Who is left out of this framing of ‘survivors’?

A profound tension for institutions is that those who do identify as survivors are likely to be the most vocal and thereby the most responded to. Yet what they want/request may not be what the majority of those who experience harm need. The Black women who told us about unwanted touching did not identify as “survivors.” Neither did Adam, a gay man who told us about being raped by his boyfriend. Adam also resolutely resisted calling his experience “rape.” He loved his boyfriend too much and didn’t want to get him into trouble. For the Black women, the problem is that they hadn’t “survived” sexual violence; they lived in a society and an institution that they experienced as racist. We need to support survivors and design systems for them. Yet we also need to recognize that most of the people who experience assault don’t identify as “survivors” and that what they have survived may not be, in their assessment, gender-based violence. They, too, need our support. An intersectional approach to support means recognizing the multiple forms of power-based harms that students experience.

In our research we actively engaged survivors from multiple communities to understand their needs and experiences. Their ideas, feedback, and suggestions were not always consistent. We found that some students didn’t want to identify as a survivor because they saw being a “survivor” not as an experience but instead as an identity; they viewed that identity in negative ways: as abject, politicized, and necessarily deeply traumatized. This is consistent with considerable research that finds that many who have experiences that meet the definition of sexual assault do not label it as such (Harned 2005; LeMaire, Oswald, and Russell 2016; Orchowski, Untied, and Gidycz 2013). In our own research those who claimed the identity of survivor did so as a way to claim power over their own negative experiences. But it’s important to recognize that many who did not claim the identity of a survivor did so for exactly the same reason. As we argue in previous work, (Khan et al. 2018), “refusing to define something as an assault, and hence refusing the identity of a sexual-assault survivor, allowed them to hold fast to the identity of someone who was in control of their life, someone who had not been harmed.”

Further, as many are assaulted by people they know, survivors also showed a tendency to describe their experiences in ambiguous ways. Calling an experience an “assault” and identifying as a survivor was not simply about one’s own identity, but also the identity of the person committing the assault (transforming them into a “perpetrator”) and this had implications for the dynamics of the likely overlapping peer group. Being a survivor of an assault was seen as an almost guaranteed way to rupture a valuable social group. But describing and thinking about one’s experience in ambiguous ways allowed for the continuation of one’s existing social life—something many valued.

Finally, without at all wanting to diminish the importance of doing so, we are skeptical that doing better for survivors, by itself, will lead to lasting change. The implication isn’t that we should ignore their needs or see their well-being as antithetical to institutional well-being. But care is not prevention. And preventing assault is the greatest support institutions can give to the community as a whole. When thinking about support, maybe need a different framing of the question, one that looks beyond the question of “survivors.” Support might mean asking, “what do people need to thrive, to feel included, to feel a sense of citizenship and community?”

CONCLUSION

Actually preventing sexual assault (which entails going beyond complying with federal requirements) requires something very few institutions are willing to do: intentional reflection, deliberation, and willingness to learn from critique and criticism and carry that learning into action. What the community at MSU has done, both in the work presented in this piece and in the piece itself, is almost the opposite of what most institutions have done in terms of its openness, ambition, and vulnerability. Presenting their plan for action is transformative and marks them as leaders in this space. The spirit of our commentary is to add to, rather than to critique, their valuable vision.

While some may suggest that the scope of our vision is too broad, and too expensive, effective primary prevention is almost always a bargain. United Educators, a higher education insurance organization, reported more than $36 million settlements in response to the 262 claims of student-perpetrated sexual assault over between 2006 and 2010, and their ‘large loss report’ for 2022 showed multiple six or seven figure settlements related to sexual misconduct; indeed, these settlements are part of what is described as a ‘coverage crisis’ in higher education (Keehan n.d.; Large Loss Report 2022 2022; Dwyer 2022). We invite readers to consider what could be done if the vast sums spent insuring institutions against lawsuits, or paying for questionably-effective prevention, were redirected. For too long institutions of higher education have responded to incidents of sexual violence as a legal, communications, and reputational crisis. We stand with the community at MSU in their efforts to reframe these issues instead as a moral crisis—one that demands a robust, intersectional, multi-level prevention approach.