Introduction Excerpt for Hear Our Stories

Introduction

Many of the battles that we’re fighting today are problems that grow out of intersectional failures from yesterday. . . . [Intersectionality] can help us provide a prism to find some of those failures, to repair those failures, and to create a basis for a far broader, deeper, more robust coalition towards the kind of world that we want to build.

—Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw¹

We have long battled against the pervasiveness of campus sexual violence.² But in 2011, this battled erupted. Through the Obama Administration’s April 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights addressed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which states that sex discrimination is prohibited by educational institutions and programs that receive federal funding.³ Through the Letter, the Obama administration aimed to enforce the understanding that sexual violence is a form of sex discrimination and, therefore, prohibited by Title IX.⁴

With the release of the Dear Colleague Letter, the issue of campus sexual violence gained more attention from the U.S. government. In March 2013, President Obama signed into law the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, or the Campus SaVE Act, which required institutions to institute sexual violence prevention programming for all enrolled students and provide protections for survivors.⁵ Nearly one year later, in April 2014, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault released its first report.⁶ In the report, the U. S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights revealed a plan for releasing future documents that would guide best practices and compliance for campus sexual violence prevention and response.

Institutional leaders often attempted to comply with these new federal guidelines. Some institutions created or shifted the role of their Title IX Coordinator to align with the federal guideline that stated each institution must have a designated, trained, and neutral staff member available for victims.⁷ Institutions also attempted to improve advocacy services for survivors.⁸ Between 2002 and 2015, several colleges and universities increased their availability of on-campus counseling options and enhanced their messaging for off-campus sexual violence resources.⁹

Scholars were also compelled “to add their own research brains and resources toward finding solutions.”¹⁰ Research on campus sexual violence has increased over time and continues to focus on specific aspects of sexual violence, including victim and perpetrator risk factors, the role of alcohol and drugs in sexual violence, and campus prevention programming.¹¹

And we can’t gloss over the fervor of student activism. In April 2013, Dartmouth students marched through and disrupted a large prospective student event in protest of the college’s inability to address both sexual violence and racism on campus.¹² Three months later, student activists from various college campuses converged at the U.S. Education Department in Washington, DC to deliver a petition urging the federal government to better enforce policies meant to keep students safe from campus violence.¹³ Students from Swarthmore, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Occidental College, and more, spoke out about the federal complaints they filed against their institutions for mishandling their allegations of sexual violence.¹⁴

Through it all—the increased governmental guidance, institutional efforts, scholarly focus, and the fervor of student activism—sexual violence remains a pervasive issue on campus.¹⁵ “The conversation has grown fiercer, but not necessarily more productive,” Sara Lipka, Assistant Managing Editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote about the heightened narrative concerning campus sexual violence.¹⁶

Sexual violence prevention efforts continue to fall short. Approximately one in four women students will experience nonconsensual sexual contact while in college; this number can be higher or lower depending on institutional environment and students’ identities.¹⁷ For instance, I recently worked with a private university in the southern U.S. to explore different, more effective approaches to preventing sexual violence on campus. Leaders at the university had recently received the results of their sexual misconduct climate survey. They were concerned. Over 40% of undergraduate women experienced sexual violence while attending the university. That number increased to over 50% for undergraduate women students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or queer. And the percentage shifted once again when accounting for student survivors’ race, gender, and sexuality.

Improving institutional response to sexual violence has also proven unsuccessful. The Obama Administration’s May 2014 list of 55 higher education institutions under investigation for Title IX violations has, as of 2023, grown to approximately 155 institutions currently under investigation.¹⁸ This does not include the hundreds of other cases at institutions that have been opened and closed between 2014 and today.¹⁹

We continue to fight today’s battle against campus sexual violence because of the intersectional failures of yesterday.²⁰ Intersectional failure occurs when intersectionality is absent, denied, forgotten, or intentionally distorted within spaces and places where the effects of multiple systems of oppression are present.²¹ The stories in this book expose many of these intersectional failings and demonstrates why we continue to fall short in preventing and responding to campus sexual violence. But the stories in this book also contain implications for addressing these failures that move us closer to more effective campus sexual violence prevention and response.

Over the span of several years, I spent time with 34 Women of Color survivors of campus sexual violence.²² Because Women of Color experience multiple and compounding forms of oppression they often develop an “epistemic advantage” that provides them with critical insights into the practices of their oppressors, as well as knowledge of their own oppression.²³ Jennifer Nash, a scholar of Black feminism, explained, “Marginalized subjects have an epistemic advantage, a particular perspective that scholars should consider, if not adopt, when crafting a normative vision of a just society.”²⁴ Women of Color are uniquely positioned to speak deeply and directly to intersectional failure because these women are often the most impacted by and conscious of these failures.

Through our conversations, the 34 survivors demonstrated how sexual health education, institutional reporting policies, prevention programs, resources for healing, and more, were riddled with intersectional failures. These policies, programs, and procedures that were meant to prevent and respond to sexual violence often failed to account for how intersecting systems of domination, specifically racism and sexism, influence Women of Color survivors’ experiences with and needs for addressing campus sexual violence.

The ultimate intersectional failure, however, is that we rarely listen to the stories of Women of Color. Their “epistemic advantage” has been ignored throughout the battle against campus sexual violence. Instead, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners often take a race-evasive approach to violence, which denies the significance of race in sexual violence and focuses on the significance of gender.²⁵ This race-evasive lens has helped to create a uniform, one-size-fits-all approach to prevention and response that perpetuates “a paradigm that implicitly highlights the white female experience . . . and ignores other racial ethnic groups.”²⁶ Because the stories of Women of Color have been ignored (the ultimate intersectional failure), many other intersectional failings remain unnoticed. Evading intersectionality in our work on campus sexual violence results in intersectional failure; this is why we’re still here, fighting this battle.

Yes. This book is about intersectional failure. But it is also about intersectional repair. While intersectionality is helpful in exploring what may be wrong with the current approaches to addressing campus sexual violence, it also pushes us toward what is right, or what is intersectional, inclusive, and more effective.²⁷ At the 2020 MAKERS Conference, Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw explored how intersectional failure is the reason “why we are not done.”²⁸ Crenshaw continued:

Intersectionality is a prism. It’s a framework. It’s a template for seeing and telling different kinds of stories about what happens in our workplaces, what happens in society, and to whom it happens. Now, some part of why we’re not done is predicated on what we haven’t been able to see, what’s not remembered, the stories that are not told. So, intersectionality is like training wheels to get us to where we need to go. It’s glasses, high index glasses, to help us see the things we need to see.²⁹

Crenshaw ended her MAKERS Conference Keynote by stating that intersectionality “can inspire us to get shit done.”³⁰

When we pay attention to the stories that have been erased by intersectional failure, we begin to repair some of the damage done by this failure. Women of Color’s stories provide tangible information and implications for how we can repair intersectional failures through sexual violence prevention and response efforts that attend to intersectionality, which attends to the needs and experiences of all students.

Notes

1. Women of the World Festival 2016. “Kimberlé Crenshaw—On Intersectionality—Keynote—WOW 2016,” YouTube Video, 1:19, March 14, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DW4HLgYPlA&t=245s.

2. “Sexual violence” is a non-legal term often used by individuals and U.S. organizations to reference violence on a global scale and includes sexual assault, rape, incest, intimate partner sexual violence, and stalking (see RAINN.org [Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network] for more information). In 1957, Kilpatrick and Kanin published one of the first studies that focused on campus sexual violence, finding that over 50% of the women students surveyed had experienced “erotic aggressiveness” while in college; Clifford Kilpatrick and Eugene Kanin, “Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus,” American Sociological Review 22, no. 1 (1957): 53. In the 1970s, the height of the feminist anti-rape movement helped to establish several community rape crisis centers that partnered with nearby colleges and universities to serve student survivors of violence; Jody Jessup-Anger et al., “History of Sexual Violence in Higher Education,” New Directions for Student Services vol. 2018, no. 161 (2018): 9–19. In 1990, what is now known as the Clery Act was signed into law. Clery required campuses to record and disclose all campus crime that happens on or near campus; The Clery Center “The Jeanne Cleary Act: Summary, Reporting Requirements, and Clery Center Resources,” 2022, https://clerycenter.org/policy/the-clery-act.

3. Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. 1681–1688; “Dear Colleague Letter: Office of the Assistant Secretary,” 2011, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201104.html.

4. U.S. Department of Education, “Dear Colleague Letter: Office of the Assistant Secretary,” para. 1. In 2020, U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and the Department of Education released regulations that rolled back Obama era guidelines on Title IX. The new regulations institute a narrower view of sexual harassment, hold schools less accountable for responding to sexual violence, particularly those occurring off campus, narrow reporting requirements, and shift the evidentiary standard; U.S. Department of Education, “Summary of Major Provisions of the Department of Education’s Title IX Final Rule,” 2020, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/titleix-summary.pdf. As I write this introduction, we await the Biden Administration’s “dramatic overhaul” to Title IX; Collin Binkley, “Biden Administration Proposed New Title IX Protections for Campus Sexual Assault,” PBS News Hour, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-administration-proposed-new…. My interviews with survivors, however, were completed prior to fall 2020. Therefore, participants’ understandings of Title IX and other federal and institutional policies often related to the Obama era guidelines.

5. RAINN. “Campus SaVE Act,” 2023, https://www.rainn.org/articles/campus-save-act.

6. Sexual assault refers to any unwanted sexual contact. Sexual violence is a more encompassing term that refers to sexual assault, stalking, and intimate partner violence. Through this book, I focus on sexual violence, but I use specific, narrower terms of violence, for example, sexual assault, when referring to documents that use these terms and/or when study participants reference these specific forms of violence; White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, “Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault,” April 2014, https://www.justice.gov/ovw/page/file/905942/dl.

7. U.S. Department of Education, “Dear Colleague Letter”; Jacquelyn D. Wiersma-Mosley and James DiLoreto, “The Role of the Title IX Coordinators on College and University Campuses,” Behavioral Sciences 8, no. 38 (2018): 1–14.

8. Tara N. Richards, “An Updated Review of Institutions of Higher Education’s Responses to Sexual Assault: Results from a Nationally Representative Sample,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 34, no. 10 (2019): 1983–2012.

9. Richards, “An Updated Review of Institutions of Higher Education’s Responses to Sexual Assault.”

10. White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, “Not Alone,” 16.

11. Jessica C. Harris et al., “Reimagining the Study of Campus Sexual Assault,” Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research 35 (2020): 1–47; Jessica C. Harris and Chris Linder, “Introduction,” in Sexual Violence and its Intersections on Campus: Centering Minoritized Students’ Voices, ed. Jessica C. Harris and Chris Linder (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2017), 1–22; Chris Linder et al., “What Do We Know about Campus Sexual Violence? A Content Analysis of 10 Years of Research,” Review of Higher Education 43, no. 4 (2020): 1017–1040; Sarah McMahon et al., “Campus Sexual Assault: Future Directions for Research,” Sex Abuse 31, no. 3 (2019): 270–295.

12. Laura Ly, “Dartmouth Cancels Classes After Student Protest, Online Threats,” CNN, April 25, 2013, https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/24/us/dartmouth-cancels-classes-protest/ind…; Ishani Premaratne, “Sexual Assault Protest Cancels Dartmouth Classes,” USA TODAY, April 27, 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/27/dartmouth-sexual-….

13. Allie Grasgreen, “Enforcement for the Enforcers,” Inside Higher Ed, July 15, 2013, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/16/sexual-assault-activists….

14. Sara Lipka, “An Arc of Outrage,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 13, 2015, https://www.chronicle.com/article/an-arc-of-outrage/; Libby Sander, “4 More Colleges are Targets of Students’ Complaints Over Sexual Assault,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2013, https://www.chronicle.com/article/4-more-colleges-are-targets-of-studen….

15. David Cantor et al., “Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct”; Jessup-Anger et al., “History of Sexual Violence in Higher Education”; Lipka, “An Arc of Outrage.”

16. Lipka, “An Arc of Outrage,” para 7.

17. Cantor et al., “Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct”; Kolby Cameron and Jason Wollschleger, “Examining the Institutional Features Influencing Sexual Assault at Small Colleges and Universities,” Sociological Inquiry 91, no. 1 (2021): 162–180; Carrie A. Moylan and McKenzie Javorka, “Widening the Lens: An Ecological Review of Campus Sexual Assault,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 21, no. 1 (2020): 179–192.

18. Scott Neuman, “55 Colleges, Universities Under Investigation for Abuse Claims,” NPR, May 1, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/05/01/308702112/55-college…; Jennifer Steinhauer and David S. Joachim, “55 Colleges Named in Federal Inquiry into Handling of Sexual Assault Cases,” The New York Times, May 1, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/us/politics/us-lists-colleges-under-…; Office of Civil Rights, “Pending Cases Currently Under Investigation at Elementary-Secondary and Post-Secondary Schools as of May 8, 2023 7:30am Search,” U.S. Department of Education, May 8, 2023, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/investigations/open-inv….

19. The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Title IX: Tracking Sexual Assault Allegations,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2023, http://projects.chronicle.com/titleix/#overview.

20. Women of the World Festival 2016. “Kimberlé Crenshaw—On Intersectionality—Keynote—WOW 2016.”

21. Women of the World Festival 2016. “Kimberlé Crenshaw—On Intersectionality—Keynote—WOW 2016.”

22. In the 1970s, the term Woman of Color grew out of a movement of resistance and a need for solidarity among a group of racially minoritized women who shared a similar position in a U.S. hierarchy of oppression. Women of Color is a “solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed Women of Color who have been ‘minoritized.’” Western States Center. “The Origin of the Phrase ‘Women of Color,’” YouTube Video, 1:30, February 15, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vl34mi4Iw. At times, the term is used as a biological reference rather than a solely political one, which risks placing Women of Color into a monolithic group of people who share the exact same experiences; Western States Center, “The Origin of the Phrase ‘Women of Color.’” Throughout this book, I foreground how “the existence of the group as the unit of analysis neither means that all individuals within the group have the same experiences nor that they interpret them in the same way”; Patricia Hill Collins, “Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Where’s the Power?,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22, no. 2 (1997): 377. I note how the 34 Women of Color survivors have similar group experiences, but I also draw out dissimilarities within group experiences. I use the term “Women of Color” to center the experiences of these women as a political, not biological, group that often shares a history of power and oppression. Centering Women of Color as a political group acknowledges the “social, cultural, and historical specificity of one’s location and embodied knowledge as crucial in developing and mobilizing effective strategies to end violence against women and their communities”; Shireen M. Roshanravan, “Passing-as-if: Model-Minority Subjectivity and Women of Color Identification,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10, no. 1 (2010): 6.

23. Uma Narayan, “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern feminist,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 213–224; Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review, no. 89 (2008): 1–15.

24. Nash, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” 3.

25. Subini Ancy Annamma et al., “Conceptualizing Color-Evasiveness: Using Dis/Ability Critical Race Theory to Expand a Color-Blind Racial Ideology in Education and Society,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 20, no. 2 (2017): 147–162.

26. Valerie Lundy-Wagner and Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, “A Harassing Climate? Sexual Harassment and Campus Racial Climate Research,” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 6, no. 1 (2013): 59.

27. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., “What Does Intersectionality Mean?” March 29, 2021, in 1A, produced by NPR, podcast 43:15, https://www.npr.org/2021/03/29/982357959/what-does-intersectionality-me….

28. MAKERS. “Kimberlé Crenshaw. The 2020 MAKERS Conference,” YouTube Video, 13:45, February 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSTf89pLcl0<.

29. MAKERS. “Kimberlé Crenshaw. The 2020 MAKERS Conference,” 1:48.

30. MAKERS. “Kimberlé Crenshaw. The 2020 MAKERS Conference,” 11:10.