Jennifer S. Hirsch - Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

A LANDMARK STUDY OF SEX,
POWER, AND ASSAULT ON CAMPUS

JENNIFER S. HIRSCH
&
SHAMUS KHAN

Copyright 2020 by Hirsch and Khan, LLC

All rights reserved

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FOR THE STUDENTS WHO SHARED THEIR STORIES AND THEIR LIVES WITH US

W hy do campus sexual assaults happen? And what should be done to prevent them? Sexual Citizens offers parents, students, school administrators, policy makers, and the public a new way to understand sexual assault and an approach to prevention that extends far beyond the campus gates. Our perspective is based upon a landmark research project: the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, or SHIFT. Along with nearly thirty other researchers, weve spent the last five years undertaking one of the most comprehensive studies of campus sex and sexual assault. Sexual Citizens draws upon that research, providing detailed portraits of a wide range of undergraduates sexual experiencesfrom consensual sex to sexual assaultat Columbia University. Well hear about men like Austin, whose attentiveness to his girlfriends pleasure contrasts starkly with the night he assaulted a woman he barely knew, when both were drunk in her room. Well discuss why Adam never talked to his boyfriend about how pushy and forceful he was about sex, even after his boyfriend came home one evening after a long night of drinking and basically raped him. Well write about Michaela, a queer Black woman, who refused to accept as normal being touched, brushed up against, and grabbed on a dance floorexperiences that heterosexual women (and some heterosexual men) see as an inevitable part of being in those spaces. And well meet women like Luci, who was raped by Scott, a senior, when she was a freshman, and a virgin. As Scott took off Lucis pants, she exclaimed, No! Dont! His response was, Its okay.

We spoke with many students whose pre-college sex education consisted primarily of instruction about the perils of sex. Once on campus, they had all learned about affirmative consent; they dutifully told us that in order for sex to be consensual, both parties have to say yes, and be sober enough to know what theyre saying yes to. But over the course of our research we found that the moment of consent frequently looks more like this, often drunken, text exchange:

We have to do better. Sexual Citizens shows how.

Since the fall of 2014, we have been part of SHIFTs research on campus sexual assault. Jennifer codirected SHIFT with her friend and colleague clinical psychologist Claude Ann Mellins, an expert in adolescent and young adult development, mental health, substance use, and trauma. But the designdeep ethnographic engagement, nested within the work of a large research teamhas allowed us to contextualize and enrich our findings, yielding fresh insights.

It isnt just the amount or type of data that makes us different. Its how we think about the problem. Our focus is on the social roots of sexual assault. This is a starkly different starting point than the two major themes of public discussion. The first directs attention to predators, or toxic masculinity, as the problem. The second is the focus on what to do after assaults occurhow to adjudicate those he said/she said moments. Instead of thinking in terms of predators or post-assault procedures, SHIFT examined the social drivers of assault, in order to develop new approaches to making assault a less common feature of college life. We deployed what public health scholars call an ecological model. This approach situates individuals, along with their problem behaviors, in the broader context of their relationships, their pre-college histories, the organizations they are a part of, and the cultures that influence them.

Thinking about sexual assault as a public health problem expands the focus from individuals and how they interact, to systems. If we know that people are drinking water that is polluted, one solution is to try and educate every person about how to use that water in safe ways. Another is to go upstream and remove the toxins from the water, reducing the need to change individual behavior one person at a time. Effectively, this book asks, What would the clean water approach to sexual assault look like? The creation of a context that nudges people toward making decisions that are good for themselves and others, or choice architecture, a theory for which Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics, calls attention to how much impact can come from working at the system and community level. In the case of sexual assault, in addition to instructing students, Dont rape anyone; dont get raped; dont let your friends get raped, what if prevention work did more to address the social context that makes rape and other forms of sexual assault such a predictable element of campus life?

This perspective yields a new language for sexual assault, based on analyzing the ecosystems in which it occurs: the forces that influence young adults sexual lives; the relationships people share; the power dynamics between them; how sex fits into students lives, and how physical spaces, alcohol, and peers produce opportunities for sex and influence the ways in which sex is subsequently interpreted and defined by those having it. Our approach mines everything from sexual literacy (or more precisely, illiteracy), to underage drinking, social cliques, stress, shame, and the spaces where they sleep. It incorporates earlier feminist writing on sexual assault, emphasizing gender inequality, sexuality, and power. But it expands upon that approach by exploring how race, socioeconomic status, and age, to name just a few intersecting forms of social inequality, are also essential to understanding assault. These factors deeply affect peoples sexual lives. This points to another way in which our approach is unique. While many insist that rape and sex are fundamentally different things, we maintain that understanding what young people are trying to accomplish with sex, why, and the contexts within which sex happens are all essential for a comprehensive analysis of sexual assault.

Better prevention is urgently needed. An analysis of SHIFT survey data led by Claude Mellins found that over one in four women, one in eight men, and more than one out of three gender-nonconforming students said that theyd been assaulted.

The stories that studentsand not just womenshared with us made clear the harms of sexual assault, and how parts of that suffering ripple through the whole campus community. If preventing sexual assaults emotional and social harms is insufficient to justify more attention to prevention, we can also point to sexual assaults vast economic impact. In 2017 researchers from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that across the population of the United States, the economic cost of rape was over $3 trillion.