Abstract
LGBTQ+ (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, queer) people are often left out of campus sexual and relationship violence (SRV) prevention efforts despite experiencing higher rates of SRV. To inform LGBTQ+-affirming prevention efforts, we use a practice-to-research approach to aggregate wisdom from 32 LGBTQ+ professionals working to address campus SRV among LGBTQ+ college students garnered through semi-structured interviews. Participants shared four approaches to including or excluding LGBTQ+ students in campus SRV prevention programs as well as recommendations to cultivate more LGBTQ+-affirming campus SRV prevention efforts. We summarize recommendations for possible action steps at individual, relationship, community, and policy levels of the social ecological model for LGBTQ+-affirming campus SRV prevention.
Campus sexual and relationship violence (SRV) are pervasive social and public health problems. Sexual violence (SV) is sexual contact for which consent is not obtained or freely given (Basile et al., 2016) and relationship violence (RV) is physical, sexual, or psychological violence perpetrated by a current or former intimate partner (Niolon et al., 2017). Over the past 10 years, there has been increased federal and media attention to campus SRV due to advocacy and activism from survivors (Krause et al., 2017). Markedly, one in four cisgender 1 heterosexual women will be sexually assaulted in college (Fedina et al., 2018). Also alarming, LGBTQ+ 2 people are at an even greater risk of victimization: approximately two in five cisgender bisexual women report experiencing SV, and about half of transgender and nonbinary people report experiencing SV (Cantor et al., 2020; Griner et al., 2017; Klein et al., 2022; Rothman et al., 2011; Walters et al., 2013). Studies have also shown that RV victimization rates are likely similar to or higher for LGBTQ+ students compared to cisgender heterosexual students (Cantor et al., 2020; DeKeseredy et al., 2019; Graham et al., 2019; Klein et al., 2022). LGBTQ+ student survivors may suffer profoundly negative behavioral, emotional, academic, economic, and health outcomes that are exacerbated due to minority stress (Edwards & Sylaska, 2013; Klein et al., 2022; Mennicke et al., 2020; Meyer, 2003).
Cisheteronormativity, the Social Ecological Model, and Minority Stress
The minority stress model posits that minoritized groups experience unique chronic stressors due to discriminatory systems and institutions (Brooks, 1981; Meyer, 2003; Tan et al., 2020; Testa et al., 2015). Minoritization is a process of societal exclusion driven by specific systems and contexts (Benitez, 2010). Minority stress for LGBTQ+ college students stems from cisgender heterosexual normativity (i.e., cisheteronormativity), which is the systematic privileging of people by the degree to which they align with White cisgender heterosexual expectancies (Johnson, 2013; LeMaster & Johnson, 2019). Because of these expectancies, LGBTQ+ Black and indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) are especially vulnerable to minority stress. However, as Riggs and Treharne (2017) propose, LGBTQ+ people’s lived experiences are directly informed by institutions, ideologies, and social norms. Therefore, the heightened stress and SRV victimization that LGBTQ+ people experience are enabled by current malleable societal conditions (e.g., racism, cisgenderism) and are not the inevitable results of being LGBTQ+.
A social ecological model requires that SRV prevention efforts consider not only the individuals at risk but also the systems of which they are a part. Prevention efforts with LGBTQ+ people are not sufficient because cisheteronormativity is reinforced by these systems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have cultivated a social ecological model for interpersonal violence prevention that is frequently used by campus SRV prevention educators (Dahlberg & Krug, 2002). This social ecological model depicts the importance of simultaneous, comprehensive efforts at four levels: individual (e.g., efforts to change knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors), relationship (e.g., mentoring), community (e.g., identity-affirming spaces), and societal (e.g., structural and federal policy changes).
Cisheteronormativity and Campus SRV Prevention
SRV prevention and sexuality education efforts are often cisheteronormative and, therefore, lack representation of LGBTQ+ students, especially gender diverse students (i.e., transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer students) and LGBTQ+ BIPOC (Harris et al., 2019; Hobaica & Kwon, 2017; Hubach et al., 2019; Klein et al., 2021; Potter et al., 2012). This cisheteronormative programing often erases and invalidates the experiences of students despite their high risk of victimization (Brubaker et al., 2017; Coulter et al., 2017). As Campbell et al. (2001) have explored, survivors experience exacerbated trauma and secondary victimization after SRV if they do not receive needed services and support. Therefore, cisheteronormative prevention efforts can both keep LGBTQ+ students from receiving needed preventative information and can retraumatize students who have already been harmed. For example, a bisexual woman may not reach out for support from a survivor advocate because prevention and awareness programing does not debunk the myth that bisexual women are “promiscuous” (Seabrook et al., 2018). Coping both with the aftermath of the SRV itself and stigma and self-blame can exacerbate negative outcomes of SRV.
Recent research has also found that many SRV prevention educators focus on SRV perpetrated by cisgender heterosexual men against cisgender heterosexual women. This conceptualization of gender “meant [transgender and nonbinary] people were overlooked at best, and dismissed at worst” (Marine & Nicolazzo, 2020, p. 5020). Despite calls for more LGBTQ+-affirming and -specific programing (Eisenberg et al., 2021; Klein et al., 2022; Marine & Nicolazzo, 2020; Potter et al., 2012), evaluations of such programs do not currently appear in the literature (Klein et al., 2022). In addition, both published research and key guidance documents for SRV prevention educators and administrators advocate for tailoring prevention efforts to meet the needs of minoritized communities including LGBTQ+ students but there is limited guidance on how to do so (American College Health Association, 2020; Campus Technical Assistance and Resource Project, 2016; DeGue et al., 2014; Dills et al., 2016).
Current Study
To cultivate more such guidance, we sought practitioner wisdom to explore strategies to affirm LGBTQ+ students in campus SRV prevention efforts. The study design was guided by feminist standpoint theory which stipulates that those who are directly affected by systems of oppression have the most perspective on those systems and the best understanding of the implications of minority stress (Harding, 2004; Rolin, 2009). Therefore, we interviewed practitioners working on LGBTQ+ issues and campus SRV who also identified as LGBTQ+. Through interviews with practitioners with professional and lived expertise, we sought answers to the questions: (1) What are current ways that campus SRV efforts include and exclude LGBTQ+ students? (2) What strategies can better affirm LGBTQ+ students in campus SRV prevention across the social ecology?
Method
Study Design
Using a qualitative content analysis approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with professionals with substantive knowledge and lived experience as LGBTQ+ people. These professionals were engaged in both campus SRV prevention and work within LGBTQ+ communities and thus were well versed in the organizational and policy complexities that inform campus SRV prevention work. We provided opportunities for participants to share programmatic as well as policy and structural strategies. The study was exempted from further review by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s institutional review board, as we were asking participants questions about their professional opinions.
Recruitment and Sampling
We developed an initial sampling frame by reviewing recent schedules of LGBTQ+-focused campus SRV sessions at higher education, LGBTQ+, and SRV conferences. We then contacted presenters via email with our recruitment letter. The first author also queried the email list for Campus Advocacy and Prevention Professionals Association, 3 a volunteer-run and no-cost 950-member organization of campus-based and -serving SRV prevention/advocacy staff, for participant nominations. Email and listserv recruitment specified that we were especially seeking participants who are BIPOC, given the disproportionate violence faced by LGBTQ+ BIPOC and that LGBTQ+ BIPOC are often excluded from sharing their perspectives as experts on LGBTQ+ issues (Balsam et al., 2011; Ward, 2008). This strategy was also used because of the authors’ experiences from previous studies that general recruitment in professional campus prevention and advocacy spaces leads to samples that are predominantly White.
Participants were included if they (1) had at least one conference presentation on LGBTQ+ issues and campus SRV against students or were recognized by a colleague as having meaningful expertise at the intersection of those areas, (2) identified as LGBTQ+, and (3) resided in the United States due to the country’s unique policy context (Klein et al., 2018). At the end of each interview, participants were invited to nominate others who met the inclusion criteria for the study. We continued to recruit participants using snowball sampling as we analyzed the data. We stopped interviews when we reached “meaning saturation,” when we had not only heard a range of themes but also had enough rich description to present a nuanced understanding of those themes (Hennink et al., 2017).
Data Collection Procedures
The first author screened each participant and, if they met the inclusion criteria, scheduled them for a 1-hour interview. The first author also prompted participants to fill out a brief demographic Qualtrics survey with open responses (i.e., participants could type words of their choice) for their (1) relevant current or most recent professional and/or volunteer roles, (2) gender, (3) sexual orientation, and (4) race/ethnicity. The first author informed participants that their responses would be used to describe the sample and would not be linked to their individual responses. We did not connect this demographic information to individual participants because the field is small and the risk of deductive disclosure, especially for BIPOC and gender diverse participants, was high. The first and second authors interviewed participants in June and July 2020 using the audio-only feature in Zoom. We let participants know about the purpose of the study and asked for consent to participate in the study and for recording. We let participants know that consent during the interview was ongoing and they could ask to skip questions or stop at any time.
We used a semi-structured interview guide that was piloted and then updated after the first five interviews (Galleta, 2013). Prompts included in the guide were related to campus SRV and LGBTQ+ students, including (1) how current efforts include or exclude these students, (2) challenges prevention educators face to affirming them, and (3) strategies to prevent campus SRV against LGBTQ+ students across the social ecology. We conducted 32 interviews that each lasted between 41 and 73 minutes (M = 53). Each participant received $25 immediately following the interview time slot to thank them for their participation. They were informed during the consent process that they would receive compensation regardless of how much of the interview they completed. The first and second authors then transcribed the interview audio-recordings verbatim with the assistance of the Otter.ai transcription software. When a recording was unclear, we checked the transcript or followed up with the participant for clarification.
Sample
The 32 participants were located across the United States including the Northeast (n = 10), West (n = 8), Southeast (n = 6), Midwest (n = 5), and Southwest (n = 3). Participants currently or recently held paid professional roles working as campus SRV prevention and/or advocacy staff members (n = 21) or LGBTQ+ student-serving staff (n = 11). Participants also indicated additional salient roles as community activists or volunteers (n = 15), consultants (n = 10), undergraduate or graduate students (n = 7), independent researchers (n = 4), LGBTQ+-serving community or coalition staff members (n = 4), SRV community organization staff members (n = 3), adjunct faculty members (n = 2), and performance artists (n = 2). Participants indicated their genders as nonbinary, genderqueer, or gender fluid (n = 12); woman or cisgender woman (n = 10), transmasculine (n = 5), man or cisgender man (n = 3), and questioning (n = 2). Participants identified as queer (n =14), bisexual or bisexual/queer (n = 5), lesbian or lesbian/queer (n = 4), gay (n = 4), and pan/polysexual (n = 4). They indicated they were White (n = 10), Latinx (n = 7), Black (n = 7), bi/multiracial (n = 5), and Asian or Pacific Islander (n = 3).
Data Analysis and Researcher Positionality
We used an iterative directed thematic content analysis approach to code the data (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005; Tracy, 2020). We used this approach because our research questions were organized around two well-known concepts in campus SRV prevention: (1) inclusion and exclusion of specific minoritized groups and (2) the social ecological model. The first author developed an initial codebook based on the first five pilot interviews and met with the second author to further refine themes. The first and second authors met frequently to explore salient themes and discuss repeated subthemes and engage in constant comparison and negative case analysis. This process was aided by ATLAS.ti. Our analytic process was shaped by our own experiences as LGBTQ+ researchers with professional experience in campus SRV prevention and advocacy. Our professional and lived experience not only helped establish trust with the participants but also necessitated our continual attention to reflexivity through member checking, reflective writing and memoing, and convening and engaging with an expert advisory board (Holmes, 2020; Tracy, 2020).
Expert Advisory Board
We convened a seven-person expert advisory board of individuals who met the study’s inclusion criteria. Each participant received $325 for 4 hours of meeting time as consultants who engaged with summaries of the findings, suggested implications, and provided ideas for disseminating findings. We queried the Campus Advocacy and Prevention Professionals Association listserv to specifically recruit an expert advisory board. The board was mostly BIPOC due to the importance of intersections between racism, cissexism, and heterosexism but lack of representation of LGBTQ+ BIPOC among nationally recognized experts. BIPOC perspectives and expertise were especially crucial because the first and second authors’ interpretations are shaped by how we benefit from White supremacy.
Results
Participants’ quotations are identified by a unique code from E1 through E32. In partnership with our expert advisory board, we decided not to link sample demographic characteristics with participant interview transcripts. The rationale for doing so was to ensure participant confidentiality. As the campus SRV prevention field is predominantly white cis gender women, linking demographic characteristics could unfortunately identify a participant. Therefore, we decided in partnership to use the pronouns “they/them/theirs” to refer to all participants. We did this because the singular “they” is typically the pronoun used if the gender of the subject is unknown. We discussed our rationale with all study participants and asked if they would prefer another pronoun, and all agreed the use of they/them/their would enhance their comfort with being quoted in study reporting and make it more likely they would recommend someone else participate. We have also included counts and percentages for our themes both because the expert advisory board felt this information would be of interest and to show patterns in participant responses, not to imply generalizability (Maxwell, 2010). Our findings answered our two research questions with (1) four approaches to LGBTQ+ student inclusion and exclusion in campus SRV prevention efforts and (2) individual- and relationship-level strategies and community- and societal-level changes to better affirm LGBTQ+ students in campus SRV prevention efforts.
LGBTQ+ Student Inclusion and Exclusion in Campus SRV Prevention Efforts
When asked how current campus SRV prevention efforts include LGBTQ+ students, 29 of the 32 participants (91%) said some variation on “they don’t.” As participants discussed their experiences with inclusion and exclusion of LGBTQ+ students, four approaches emerged: (1) the cisheteronormative approach, (2) the disclaimer approach, (3) the gender-neutral approach, and (4) the LGBTQ+-affirming approach.
The Cisheteronormative approach
Twenty-six (81%) of the participants described how much of the campus SRV programing use an approach in which LGBTQ+ students’ experiences are excluded. As one participant said, “It blows my mind that’s still where we are, that the framework is still so binary and gender essentialist and heterosexist” (E5). Twenty participants reflected that there were many campuses still employing this approach.
Fourteen (44%) participants discussed challenges they face in selecting prevention programs because of concerns that many of them use a cisheteronormative approach, especially programs that divided students into “male” and “female” groups. As one participant said, “The research on dividing students into single-sex groups didn’t even really contend with nonbinary people’s existence” (E21). This quotation reflects a concern from 11 (34%) participants that gender-diverse students were not only invisible in prevention programs that use this approach but were further harmed by being asked to choose between male and female groups. Another participant described existing tensions between using evidence-based programs and including LGBTQ+ students: “Our grants want us to use evidence-based curricula, but the curricula that have been studied often come from this ‘men’s violence against women’ place. Then I have the false choice of evidence based or supportive of queer and trans students” (E2). Indeed, 12 (38%) participants explicitly stated that they developed all their own programs because they were concerned about a lack of LGBTQ+ inclusion in curricula that had been found to be effective through research.
Nine participants discussed challenges in government and funder narratives about campus SRV using a cisheteronormative approach. As one participant shared: “There’s so much centering of men’s violence against women that folks are starting to push back. We need to move from a scarcity mindset to an abundance one that is more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people” (E30). Six (19%) of these participants referenced increased LGBTQ+ inclusion in more recent iterations of the Violence Against Women Act but that the overwhelming focus remained cisheteronormative.
Seven (22%) of the participants described roots of the cisheteronormative approach as dating back to slavery and White supremacy. As one participant shared, “We are still reifying dynamics from slavery about the White cis girl who is like a fawn with a broken leg who needs to be saved” (E8). Another participant echoed this, saying “the concern is about White women, especially White women in sororities, who are considered vulnerable and deserve protection. This narrative doesn’t really mean ‘women.’ It doesn’t include Black or brown women, trans women, queer women, women with disabilities, undocumented women” (E9).
The disclaimer approach
Eighteen (56%) of the participants described a transitional point in campus SRV programing in which educators began to include a disclaimer to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion. As one participant described it, “I hear prevention educators provide that disclaimer that anyone can be assaulted but, for my own ease, I’m going to say ‘he’ for perpetrators and ‘she’ for victims” (E19). One participant described the introduction of this disclaimer on their campus soon after they began partnering with campus SRV prevention efforts: People around here couldn’t even comfortably say the acronym. They’ll be like ‘B. . ..G. . ..L. . ..T. . ..E?’ But some of these administrators they have an important role in preventing sexual assault on campus so I can’t just kick them out of the room. I have to do 101 a lot so it’s hard to get to 201 to talk about actual LGBTQ+ people and sexual assault”. (E21)
Nine (28%) participants shared that inclusion of the disclaimer indicated progress from a lack of recognition of LGBTQ+ people but that LGBTQ+ people were still seen as an add-on.
The gender-neutral approach
Twenty-nine (91%) participants mentioned that many prevention educators seek to include LGBTQ+ students through a gender-neutral approach. Four (13%) participants described how they use a gender-neutral approach: We have scenarios at the end of our programs so the students can practice skills and we will always make them gender-neutral with names like Alex and Pat. If students make assumptions about their genders, we’ll call them out on it. We use gender-neutral language throughout our workshops because sexual assault can happen to anyone and be perpetrated by anyone. (E10)
These participants removed pronouns and gendered names to move away from a cisheternomative approach and to challenge student participants to do the same.
However, 25 (78%) of the participants who discussed a gender-neutral approach described it as exclusionary to LGBTQ+ students. As one participant said, “We can’t ungender everyone and assume that’s what it’s like for LGBTQ+ students. Gender-neutral is not the same as queer” (E11). Sixteen (50%) participants specifically described how gender-neutral approaches impact prevention educators’ ability to talk about power. As one participant said, “Making [programming] gender-neutral obscures our ability to talk about how gender and sexuality are a central part of our experiences of the world, of power and violence” (E7). One participant provided an example: We used to use this [bystander intervention program] but we don’t anymore. The focus was a lot on calling the police without taking into consideration if the person was queer or trans or Black and there was no way for them to intervene safely by calling the police. (E13)
Twelve (38%) participants highlighted that gender neutrality did not include discussion of how the helpfulness of systems (e.g., law enforcement) may be perceived differently by LGBTQ+ and specifically LGBTQ+ BIPOC than White cisgender heterosexual students.
Nine (28%) participants also described how others using the gender-neutral approach on their campus harmed them as LGBTQ+-identified staff, such as, I used to work on a campus and was frequently accused of putting my queer agenda ahead of our work to prevent violence as though they were different things. There was an idea that our programming should be for everyone and, therefore, should be neutral. (E12)
These staff were asked to extend use of a gender-neutral approach beyond their educational program and to their broader interactions with colleagues and students. As one participant elaborated, “[my colleagues] feel like they can hang up a gender-neutral restroom sign and they’re all set” (E30).
The LGBTQ+-affirming approach
Twenty (63%) of the participants described how their or their colleagues’ prevention efforts were LGBTQ+ affirming, characterized by, as one participant elucidated, including “unique factors that contribute to violence within the LGBTQ community and the ways cisheteronormativity is used to abuse, such as threatening to out someone” (E22). Instead of neutralizing gender and sexuality, an LGBTQ+-affirming approach specifically includes how gender and sexuality impact students’ experiences of SRV.
Sixteen (50%) participants underscored the importance of LGBTQ+-affirming programing for all students such as “It’s very easy to fall into the trap of, oh, we will offer programming to our [LGBTQ+ student organization] instead of widening the narratives in all programming or including more narratives in programming for everyone” (E6). Nine (28%) participants discussed how many campuses use influential students to spread prevention messaging and that on their campuses those students tended to be White cisgender heterosexual students in leadership roles, especially in fraternities and sororities. These participants described how they would “infiltrate” (E32) spaces that were not built for LGBTQ+ people. One participant provided an example of this infiltration by sharing how they worked to make prevention efforts more affirming for LGBTQ+ and BIPOC students by joining the facilitation team: [The bystander intervention program our campus uses] is all about social networking, finding the influencers, making it cool. It was pretty clear that people of color and queer folks weren’t cool. So I became a facilitator. That’s often my strategy, to infiltrate and by my presence in the space make way for better work. (E31)
Participants also expressed the importance of LGBTQ+-affirming programing being realistic to the campus environment. Eight (25%) participants described how prevention messaging should not tokenize individual LGBTQ+ students but share realistic scenarios where students are a part of a peer group. One participant reflected on how they had reviewed online modules featuring an LGBTQ+ student but not students in community with each other leading them to ask, “Why not include Black queer people making decisions together about bystander intervention instead of a making one Black gay man a token. Show students as a part of the groups they hang out with” (E24). Participants shared that to realistically portray LGBTQ+ students, and particularly LGBTQ+ BIPOC, they needed to be shown in settings with other LGBTQ+ and/or BIPOC students, not just added to a scene focused on White and/or cisgender heterosexual students.
LGBTQ+-Affirming Campus SRV Prevention Across the Social Ecology
We also asked participants to share strategies across the social ecology that would enable them to better their work. We used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s adaptation of the social ecological model to elicit (1) individual, (2) relationship, (3) community, and (4) societal-level strategies (Dahlberg & Krug, 2002) for taking an LGBTQ+-affirming approach to campus SRV prevention. A list of recommendations by level of the social ecology is included in Table 1.
Strategies for LGBTQ+-Affirming Campus Sexual and Relationship Violence (SRV) Prevention Efforts across the Social Ecology.
Individual-Level Strategies
Twenty-six (81%) participants mentioned strategies at the individual level that sought to change knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Participants frequently referenced that their institutions had safe zone or safe space programs (see Woodford et al., 2014) that are popular for training faculty and staff members on how to support LGBTQ+ students but that they wish these programs included campus SRV prevention information and statistics about violence against LGBTQ+ students and that their colleagues would engage in ongoing professional development. As one participant crystallized it: “I talk to deans and directors all the time and they say, ‘oh no, we are good here, our staff went through Safe Zone 6 years ago and we have a rainbow flag on our door’” (E13).
Participants also discussed the value of including information about and examples with LGBTQ+ people in healthy relationships and consent programing. They also mentioned the importance of including scenarios in bystander intervention programing that highlight the role that cisheteronormativity could play in the abuse or violence and how other students can change cisheteronormative culture. One participant emphasized the importance of sharing not only the harm LGBTQ+ face but their resilience as well: “We should look at how people are already surviving. Imagine if we don’t just talk about trans folks experiencing more violence but about how they live and transcend all the violence put on them” (E9).
All 26 (81%) participants who shared individual-level strategies discussed the importance of campus SRV prevention programing developed by and for LGBTQ+ people. As one participant described it: A lot of my work with students is trying to act as a liaison to their vision. . .and how they are architects of how we are going to move forward in the anti-violence movement. I use my voice to subversively bring in those agenda and to take some of the calculated risks to get the voices of LGBTQ+ people and especially LGBTQ+ BIPOC to the table (E28).
Participants specified that it was valuable to go beyond sharing statistics and research about LGBTQ+ students in their programing by involving LGBTQ+ students on their own campus in shaping the content and format of their prevention programs.
Relationship-Level Strategies
At relationship level, participants frequently mentioned the value of peers and mentors. Twenty-seven (84%) participants asserted the importance of LGBTQ+ leadership in campus SRV efforts. One participant succinctly expressed a common sentiment among participants who serve as consultants: “People want me to be a trans courier who will bring a program in a box” (E19). Participants stressed the importance of leveraging external consultants to build capacity, not to outsource prevention programing and community building.
Nineteen (59%) participants spoke on cultivating peer educators who are highly trained in cisheteronormativity, and 17 expressed that institutions of higher education need to hire LGBTQ+ people for both SRV-related roles and senior leadership positions. One participant said, “My work is subversive. I build up small groups of leaders who go into their spaces and make change. It can’t be about huge numbers when trust-building is so important.” Another stated, “We need to focus on creating environments where people can do this work, especially BIPOC LGBTQ+ folks. They need to be able to speak truth to power, have leadership listen, and have them do differently” (E11). Highlighting the importance of rewarding students for their expertise and contributions another participant said, How we train our peer advocates and educators is an important part of our prevention work. These peers are the ones embedded in community. We teach from an anti-oppression lens and all of these high-intensity positions are paid assistantships with our office. The investment in these students as paramount, and we do intentional recruitment to ensure that we are not just reflecting diversity of our campus but ensuring that the students facing many intersecting forms of oppression are on the forefront at all times in our work (E14).
Twelve (38%) participants highlighted that campus SRV prevention work is helped or hindered by LGBTQ+ personnel job security, as one participant stated, “On my campus, because of my supervisor and our campus being a historically very gay place, I can be vocal and create spaces. That likely wouldn’t be the case somewhere else” (E18).
Participants often pointed to the value of collaborations between LGBTQ+-affirming personnel and campus SRV professional and peer survivor advocates and prevention educators. As one participant said, “A lot of outreach is setting up a table. That’s not enough. Anti-violence professionals need to show up, volunteer, and give money. Ask, ‘how can I show up for your group?’” (E3). One participant spelled out what “showing up” can look like: We align our work with LGBTQ+-focused professionals and students on campus. Our messaging is co-created to make sure we can leverage everyone’s participation, especially the lived experiences of students. That involves creating intentional space where they know we are listening and will take what they tell us and make our programming better and that we are there for them if they need help (E14).
These participants stressed the importance of engaging LGBTQ+ people from the beginning of the process of creating new programing or organizing events.
Nine (28%) participants mentioned the importance of housing security and support from roommates for LGBTQ+ students. Two (6%) participants highlighted the value of LGBTQ+-affirming roommate match programs to prevent LGBTQ+ students from facing discrimination or violence where they live and helping to strengthen their support systems when arriving on campus.
Community-Level Changes
All the participants pointed to at least one community-level strategy to prevent campus SRV against LGBTQ+ students. One participant stressed that these community-level strategies are key because “We aren’t going to program ourselves into LGBTQ+ students feeling safe, let alone to actually be safe” (E10). Community-level strategies emphasized the importance of cultivating environments that protect students from SRV, including reducing cisheteronormativity, cisgenderism, and heterosexism.
Twenty-three (72%) participants spoke to how often LGBTQ+-related statistics were often not shared at all in campus SRV prevention programing and if they were, they were aggregated. Participants advocated for collecting a large enough sample of LGBTQ+ to people to disaggregate LGBTQ+ identities when sharing campus climate survey or national data. Sharing the disproportionate risk of violence victimization faced by bisexual women, gender diverse people, and LGBTQ+ BIPOC was seen as particularly crucial. Participants also frequently highlighted how campus communities should highlight how intersectionality enhances risk of violence, including the high rates of murder of Black trans women by their intimate partners. “Let’s stop the switch up at the end where we call out students’ assumptions. That set-up compounds how heterosexist and cisgender-focused our campuses already are. How about we just talk about what it’s like for LGBTQ+ people? How about we start by sharing how Black trans women are often murdered just for existing?” (E6). A different participant provided another suggestion: I think we need to talk about biphobia in programming. Bisexual women in particular are at greater risk, but I find our programming is often about queer people as a monolith or doesn’t talk about us at all. Biphobia, that you’re just bi to get attention, should be something we are talking about, those biphobic myths (E18).
Twenty-one (66%) participants also shared that social marketing images and social media campaigns should highlight LGBTQ+-specific scenarios and contexts. One participant shared how they did this in their own social marketing campaign: “We worked to ensure that our campaign featured BIPOC and trans people and all sexual orientations. To do that, we needed to actively involve those communities in building the campaigns” (E16). Participants highlighted the importance of not only visibility but visibility that is informed by feedback from LGBTQ+, and especially LGBTQ+ BIPOC.
Eighteen (56%) participants spoke to the importance of community building and LGBTQ+ celebrations as a prevention strategy, especially if that work is recognized and celebrated by higher education leadership.
We have to look differently at what doing anti-violence work is. So often our intervention is a program, a workshop, a class session and that can be part of it but not all of it. Community-building is key and that involves creating safety, spaces to ask hard questions, spaces to talk about experiences of violence without having to straight or cis or Whitewash it or worry about making administrators uncomfortable with how our communities connect and survive the various dangers we face (E12).
These participants wanted to see attention to LGBTQ+ people as whole human beings and not solely communities at risk, such as creating identity-affirming peer support spaces (e.g., Black queer women).
Nine (28%) participants proposed that institutions of higher education examine their funding priorities as a SRV prevention strategy. These participants proposed reallocating funds and transforming spaces segregated by sex (e.g., fraternity or sorority housing, male and female bathrooms) to gender-inclusive spaces (e.g., gender-inclusive housing and bathrooms).
I think the biggest thing is moving from specialty centers and their plans to plans for the whole school. Like the LGBTQ+ center can have their goals and the sexual violence program their goals but nothing says they have to be aligned or that the university as a whole has any sort of commitments. We need this to be institutional level with planning that is rooted in social justice. We need to do what universities are supposed to do: innovate. Instead of what they do now a lot of the time which is follow (E30).
For these participants, SRV prevention involved revisiting all the institutional structures that could contribute to campus SRV against LGBTQ+ students.
Societal-Level Changes
Nineteen (59%) participants proposed strategies at the societal level to shift social norms, strengthen state or federal policies, or shift conditions that make LGBTQ+ people more vulnerable to SRV. Eighteen (56%) participants mentioned that starting at the college level for healthy sexual communication education was too late and advocated for LGBTQ+-affirming comprehensive sex education in elementary, middle, and high schools. One participant connected this recommendation directly to campus SRV prevention: Cis[gender] het[erosexual] people need queer sex education both for themselves and to know what violence does or doesn’t look like. I’ve seen so many queer and straight students think that sex between two women doesn’t count as sex and then that if what’s happening is nonconsensual it wouldn’t count as violence (E25).
Sixteen (50%) of the participants spoke to the importance of advocacy at the federal level in providing clear models for policies and procedures that support LGBTQ+ students. They also shared that clear federal anti-harassment and nondiscrimination guidance was needed. Three (9%) of the participants specifically discussed the difficulty students face because of a loophole in Title IX that allow schools to have religious exemptions to not support LGBTQ+ students. “The Department of Education doesn’t even recognize trans people as a group that exists let alone should be protected from discrimination” (E7). Others called out draconian and stigmatizing language like how, “the Clery [Act] violence definitions still use ‘sodomy.’ I think that can really have a lot of unintended effects on queer students” (E19).
Ten (31%) participants discussed that the field was behind on the evidence and research on supporting LGBTQ+ students broadly and on SRV against LGBTQ+ students specifically and wanted better pipelines for disseminating this crucial information. Nine (28%) participants discussed restorative and transformative justice approaches, including three participants who mentioned their campuses are exploring or using these approaches.
Seven (22%) participants also mentioned that a major barrier to doing effective work was funding priorities and the difficulty of doing work in silos. One participant shared the importance of coalition building, especially with limited resources: We cannot untangle responses to interpersonal violence from how the federal government is handling access to medical care, how we are treating undocumented folk, and how we are looking at access to education, who gets it, who doesn’t get it at all. And all these struggles are so intertwined, right? Cross-coalition organizing is what comes to my mind (E28).
These participants discussed the value of intersectional approaches that aligned rather than siloed people facing discrimination and violence based on different forms of oppression.
Discussion
LGBTQ+ students, especially bisexual cisgender women, and gender diverse students, are at heightened risk for campus SRV compared to their cisgender heterosexual peers (Klein et al., 2022; Rothman et al., 2011). Although both published literature and practitioner guidance documents emphasize the value of prevention efforts that affirm LGBTQ+ students, there is limited information on specific LGBTQ+-affirming prevention strategies. Due to such limited guidance, we interviewed professionals working to prevent SRV against LGBTQ+ students who also identify as LGBTQ+ to learn more about how current campus SRV prevention includes and excludes LGBTQ+ students and to elucidate strategies that better affirm LGBTQ+ students.
Participants shared four approaches to LGBTQ+ student inclusion and inclusion in campus SRV prevention. To varying degrees, these approaches incorporated the unique experiences, risk/protective factors, and needs of LGBTQ+ students. First, the cisheteronormative approach rendered LGBTQ+ students invisible within a narrative of cisgender heterosexual White women’s experiences of SRV. This approach is also consistent with much of the campus SRV literature’s narrative about campus SRV (see Harris et al., 2019; Klein et al., 2021). Second, participants shared that prevention educators would use a disclaimer approach of including a brief statement at the beginning of the programing about the possibility of SRV against LGBTQ+ people but would not further include LGBTQ+ people. Third, participants discussed the use of a gender-neutral approach. A few participants used this approach themselves and it is indeed recommended by many of the authors of LGBTQ+-focused campus SRV research (Klein et al., 2022). However, most of the participants asserted that removing gender and sexuality from SRV prevention programing ignores the cisheteronormative context in which violence against LGBTQ+ people occurs. Participants delineated a fourth LGBTQ+-affirming approach that recognizes the experiences of LGBTQ+ students, the minority stress they face, and their specific risk and protective factors.
Participants also provided recommendations as to how to cultivate this LGBTQ+-affirming approach across the four levels of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social ecological model for violence prevention (e.g., individual, relationship, community, society). Although participants provided suggestions for LGBTQ+-affirming and -specific prevention programing, including using peer education and bystander intervention approaches at the relationship level, participants were particularly adamant that community and societal changes were necessary to truly change campus culture. As recent research has asserted (Coulter & Rankin, 2020; Edwards et al., 2016), campus climate is crucial to preventing anti-LGBTQ+ campus SRV, and much of that climate is shaped by cisgender heterosexual people and the cisheteronormative systems from which they benefit. Therefore, it is not enough to develop targeted programing for LGBTQ+ students or even specific programing for LGBTQ+ students but to ensure that there is robust resourcing for community- and societal-level strategies.
Limitations
To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that has elicited LGBTQ+ professional perspectives on cultivating LGBTQ+-affirming campus SRV prevention. Our findings should be considered in context. The study is exploratory and provides the beginning of a novel area of inquiry. Due to concerns about participant confidentiality in a field comprised of predominantly White cisgender heterosexual women, we did not share identities (e.g., race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, position) of participants alongside their quotations and referred to all participants using they/them pronouns. Participants were identified through conference presentations and snowball sampling and are not the only experts in this area. Study findings should be considered within their U.S. higher education context and further research is needed globally. We asked participant gender through one open response question, which made it difficult to describe the number of cisgender and transgender participants. In future studies, we would add a second question (i.e., are you transgender?) (Lombardi & Banik, 2016) or a Gender/Sex 3x3 Model (Beischel et al., 2022) to better describe our sample.
Implications
Implications for research
Regardless of study aims, future research about LGBTQ+ people and SRV prevention should actively include LGBTQ+ people at all stages of the research process, especially trans people and LGBTQ+ BIPOC. As Nicolazzo (2021) has advanced, research that seeks to liberate trans people necessitates new epistemological approaches that disrupt the gender binary (i.e., trans* epistemology) and not solely consider trans people as an afterthought. Participants frequently expressed concern that prevention educators, including themselves, had difficulty accessing the most recent research on campus SRV and LGBTQ+ students due to journal paywalls or lack of staff time to review recent research. Participants reflected that the research they had read was often cisheteronormative and lacked information about trans people.
Participants often referenced that prevention programs frequently divide students into male and female groups, when many programs that have been found to be effective through research (e.g., Bringing in the Bystander) now recommend training students in all-gender groups. Much of the research on this topic has been published in the past 5 years (Klein et al., 2022) and greater efforts to translate research in accessible forms for practitioners (e.g., infographics, research briefs, videos; Klein et al., 2021) is needed. Multi-institutional climate surveys that ask affirming gender and sexuality questions are needed (e.g., Cantor et al., 2020) given that data on LGBTQ+ students’ experiences of campus SRV are often not collected robustly (Voth Schrag, 2017). These larger studies can also mitigate the likelihood that multiply minoritized students could be identified. Qualitative studies of LGBTQ+ students’ perspectives on how they want others to intervene on their behalf could also provide rich description for scenario development. Both effective LGBTQ+-specific prevention programs and LGBTQ+-affirming adaptations of existing effective prevention programs are also needed. Changing the attitudes and behaviors of cisgender heterosexual students is crucial to changing the social norms that shape how LGBTQ+ college students experience SRV, whether bystanders intervene, and the help and support they have afterward (Riggs & Treharne, 2017).
Implications for practice
Study findings suggest that even prevention educators who are aware of the harm of a cisheteronormative approach may still be excluding LGBTQ+ students using disclaimer or gender-neutral approaches. It is crucial that efforts to prevent LGBTQ+ campus SRV be informed and led by LGBTQ+ students and personnel and supported and funded by institutional leadership. Focusing exclusively on providing programming for LGBTQ+ students could also miss out on the crucial need to shift social norms that are mostly shaped by cisgender heterosexual students. Prevention educators and university leadership could use the strategies in Table 1 as potential future directions. Organizations that specialize in SRV against LGBTQ+ people at the national (e.g., National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs; FORGE) and local level would be vital partners in implementing these strategies.
Implications for policy
Title IX policies that explicitly include LGBTQ+-specific examples are needed. Students retain policy information best when they have opportunities to process and discuss policies with relevant examples (Potter et al., 2016). Participants reflected that their efforts were constrained by a compliance culture that prizes formal reporting (Moylan, 2017) even though they saw promise in radical and transformative justice models (see Dixon & Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2020; Koss et al., 2014) that widen options for accountability. Federal recommendations for campus policies and procedures could be enhanced through a better understanding of how LGBTQ+ communities, and especially LGBTQ+ BIPOC, often seek healing and accountability outside of criminal legal and Title IX processes (Owen et al., 2018).
Conclusion
The participants that we interviewed for this study shared a range of approaches to including or excluding LGBTQ+ students in campus SRV prevention. Cultivating LGBTQ+-affirming strategies across the social ecology can help campuses shift campus culture to eventually lower the disproportionate prevalence of campus SRV against LGBTQ+ students. Through efforts driven by the leadership and expertise of LGBTQ+ people, we will hopefully see more LGBTQ+-affirming campus SRV prevention efforts that move campuses toward an end to cisheteronormativity and the violence to which it contributes.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the 32 participants and the expert advisory board members M. M. Marcotte, J. P. Higgins, C. Leyva, S. Ezell, C. Avery, E. Duran, and K. Carter. We are grateful to the Campus Advocacy and Prevention Professionals Association, especially Michelle Bangen and Taylan Stulting, for assistance with participant recruitment.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by the National LGBTQ+ Institute on Intimate Partner Violence. Dr. Klein was an Injury and Violence Prevention Fellow supported by the University of North Carolina Injury Prevention Research Center which is partly supported by a grant (R49/CE003092) from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
