From Compliance to Transformation: Notes on the MSU Strategic Plan to Address RVSM

Bringing Together Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and RVSM Prevention

An evidence-based approach, while laudable, may fall short if the evidence misses the problem's full scope. Sexual violence is related to gender and power. But as the authors note, knowing more requires taking seriously how intersecting forms of power and their consequent inequalities produce a range of harms, including sexual violence (Armstrong et al., 2018; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Two data points from our research with undergraduates at Columbia and Barnard illustrate the urgency of a bolder intersectional approach. Every single Black woman we spoke with in the ethnographic interviews recounted experiencing unwanted sexual touching. Every single one. They mentioned these experiences not as assaults but in response to questions about daily life on a campus—like the rest of the country—suffused with anti-Black racism. Such experiences might be counted in surveys, but in the example with which we are most familiar, they were not; the Columbia Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation survey used behaviorally-specific measures of sexual violence but did not show higher rates of unwanted touching among Black women (Mellins et al., 2017). Measuring sexual violence may exclude the nonsexual experiences of anti-Black racism that occur on every campus (Baker & Britton, 2021; Casellas Connors & McCoy, 2022). Moreover, categorizing unwanted touching as sexual misconduct rather than also as anti-Black racism ignores survivors’ subjective experiences.

The Columbia SHIFT survey, like many others (e.g., Cantor et al., 2015), found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) undergraduates experienced the highest rates of sexual violence. Despite Columbia's historic commitment to queer inclusion, including being the first institution of higher education (IHE) to have a registered gay student organization (NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 2017), LGBTQ+ students faced a data system that had to be overhauled so that students could indicate their pronouns or avoid being deadnamed, a bathroom system that reproduced the gender binary, and a queer student meeting space that was until 2017 literally in a closet in a basement (Maroulis & Deguerrera, 2017). Focusing only on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual/agender (LGBTQIA+) students’ high rates of RVSM misses other forms of social exclusion (Khan et al., 2022). The “Know More” framework requires recognizing that sexual violence response and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are 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.

The Ecology of RVSM

Campbell et al.'s discussion of “culture and climate” misses some of the social roots of sexual violence. It may seem like a distinction on which only two social scientists would insist, but culture—people's shared beliefs about what is good and bad—differs from structure, and institutions typically have more control over structural dimensions of communal life (policies, resource allocation, and the physical environment) than cultural ones. The ecology of RVSM entails studying the institutional environment's modifiable dimensions, such as lab architecture, the allocation of social space, and housing policies.

We have four actionable recommendations. First, as the authors have argued (Moylan et al., 2021), climate surveys’ individual-level focus may not capture information on modifiable institutional factors. Adding questions about institutional context to existing surveys could render visible risks associated with specific work environments, student organizations, or living environments. Second, IHEs must facilitate cross-campus research to identify campus characteristics associated with victimization and with thriving, both for overall student populations and for subpopulations (Tashkandi et al., 2022). As one of the authors has herself argued (Moylan & Javorka, 2020; Moylan et al., 2019), the full power of studying modifiable institutional characteristics requires cross-campus research.

Third, an ecological perspective includes life course factors; the new students who enter classrooms every September are not blank slates, nor are campuses islands separated from the social context. As we discuss below, sources of vulnerability to sexual violence include K-12 educational systems. Finally, if every institutional crisis related to sexual violence led to change, the problem would have been solved long ago. To ensure that the moments when survivors’ suffering bursts onto the public consciousness translate into changes that actually make that suffering less likely to happen, mobilizing what is already known about crises and institutional change (Cortell & Peterson, 1999) would have been useful, particularly given that MSU has one of the nation's top-ranked programs in organizational psychology.

Sexual Violence Is Not Just One Problem, It's Many

RVSM 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 National Institute of Health funding reflects a different set of modifiable institutional factors than verbal coercion for intercourse between two undergraduates in an ongoing relationship. No matter how much more campuses do, part of that “do more” needs to be a sufficiently diversified strategy to address the full range of RVSM.

The MSU authors are attentive to the diversity of sexual assault experiences among people with multiple minoritized identities—vital, given that rates ranged from 9.3% to 65.5% across different gender and affiliation groups. But these different rates also likely encompass different kinds of RVSM, each of which might require a different prevention strategy. For example, nationally, White people drink more than Black and Asian Americans; we found, unsurprisingly, that White students were more likely to report an alcohol-associated sexual assault as the most significant one they experienced (Walsh et al., 2021). Accordingly, alcohol-oriented prevention, while crucial, risks centering the harms that White students experience over those that other students are more likely to experience. After “knowing more” about sexual violence as a diverse set of experiences that diverse student bodies experience in differently patterned ways, the “do more” should reflect this knowledge, with prevention designed to respond to the types of sexual violence more likely to be experienced by Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), queer students, and other minoritized groups, as well as prevention of nonsexual forms of power-based harms.

Not Just a Campus Problem

A more ambitious prevention vision would address precollege risk and protective factors. Our research with Columbia and Barnard undergraduates found that women students who had had comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) before college were half as likely to be raped in college (Santelli et al., 2018), and other work suggests that age-appropriate CSE might be effective as primary prevention (Schneider & 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, but are not required to provide instruction that is age-appropriate, medically accurate, or culturally unbiased. Some higher education settings offer sex education (Manning-Ouellette & Shikongo-Asino, 2022), but the median age of the first sex is 17, so freshman year is late for comprehensive sex ed. IHEs can also address the environment outside of campus by advocating for state policies that reduce college binge drinking (Kuo et al., 2003; Nelson et al., 2005).

Addressing the intersectional nature of power-based harm also requires responding to a K-12 educational environment that silences critical thinking about power and inequality. In 2022, the Michigan legislature banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory, “anti-American” ideas about race, or material from the 1619 project, and imposed funding penalties on schools that flout this ban (Baucher & Altavena, 2021; Michigan Senate Republicans, 2021). With almost 80% of MSU students being from Michigan, the broader point here is that publicly funded universities should leverage their power to make sure that the students who arrive on campus are able to interact with each other in an inclusive manner. This requires looking beyond the campus gates, with flagship public universities such as MSU uniquely positioned to lead these (admittedly challenging) efforts.

An Intersectional Approach to RVSM in Higher Education

We also encourage bolder thinking about an intersectional approach to power-based harm. Without diluting the specificity of RVSM, students do many other forms of harm to each other, including racist, ableist, and anti-queer interactions both in person and online. Building an institution in which everyone can learn and work to their full potential means addressing all of these harms, rather than “only” the ones governed by Title IX. The MSU write-up notes “limited prevention programming,” but the very framing of prevention as “programming” implies mandated small group interventions, not environmental change. Certainly, rather than one-off mandated slide sets to click through, a series of integrated interactive educational interventions more closely approximates known characteristics of effective prevention work (DeGue et al., 2014). However, in a context where the entire undergraduate population will turn over every 4–5 years, trying to shape those hearts and minds is distinct from shaping the context itself. Our own modest contribution, building on the idea of sexual geographies in Sexual Citizens, is a toolkit designed to guide campuses through a process of examining and transforming the allocation of social and residential space as a way to address structurally grounded power inequalities among undergraduates by (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 it is insufficient to provide healing to those who experience exclusionary interactions without also identifying and teaching those who are harming them to do better. Intersectional support for survivors is distinct from building an inclusive environment, which is unlikely to happen simply by telling people not to discriminate (Chang et al., 2019). 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,” but the ensuing commitment must be to address the social oppression itself, not just the resulting disparities.

Universities are intentionally and intensely stratified institutions—the academic robes that mark educational achievement (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, students’ reliance on personal, confidential letters of recommendation for 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. “Knowing more” must render visible how power-based inequalities built into daily life through institutional policies put people at risk for doing harm; “doing more” uses that knowledge to create structures in which that harm is less likely.

Feedback Loops to Identify Problematic Behavior

For campuses with the political will to pivot from institutional compliance to transformation, our first recommendation is about innovating in restorative justice, noted as a goal in the MSU strategy. Certainly, many survivors would prefer a formal alternative to adjudication after they have reported experiencing sexual harm. But formal restorative justice processes may not serve the many 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; Khan et al., 2018). 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. Building on that, we see an urgent need for 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. What many who have experienced harm—including, crucially, those who would not label themselves survivors or call what happened assault—want is an acknowledgment of the harm done and for those who have hurt them to learn to do better.

A Broader Set of Metrics to Evaluate Progress Toward Inclusiveness

Admirably, the MSU piece commits to rigorously evaluating prevention programming. Analyzing rates of RVSM by gender identity, affiliation group, and other axes of difference will show if their efforts are 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. The singular focus on individual identity groups leaves out a layer of social reality; assessment should examine the institutional location, to identify both leaders and laggards in safer environments.

Second, integrating prevention of RVSM with DEI work opens the door to a much broader set of metrics to assess variation in institutional thriving. Outcomes for students might range from sleep disparities to dropout rates, to create a comprehensive picture of which groups are least well-served by the institution. For faculty and staff, retention rates and professional flourishing are some 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 assessing the extent to which students, faculty, and staff across multiple forms of social difference feel seen, supported, and included as citizens in the community.

Who Is Not Seeking Help, and Why?

In our research (Khan et al., 2018), those who did not talk to anyone about their experiences had diverse reasons for their decisions (in our research, people could provide multiple reasons). In total, 84% reported that they did not think what happened to them was serious enough; 26% feared others’ reactions, 29% were too embarrassed, 38% did not want people to worry about them, and 34% just wanted to forget about what happened. Those who did tell someone tended to do it quickly, with two-thirds doing so within 24 h and 80% doing it within a week. Whether or not they told anyone, those who experienced assault reported effects on their academic lives (16%), mental health (38%), extracurricular activities (11%), and social lives (36%).

Fearing the reaction of others, feelings of embarrassment and not wanting to worry others are deeply social reasons for not seeking help. We saw students balancing competing priorities: they wanted to secure the support they needed to get back to their “normal” life, while minimizing the affective, identity, social, and collateral damage and protecting their time. Being “survivor centered” requires thinking about how survivors are embedded in communities and institutions. Survivor-centered approaches should attend not only to individual needs, but also to how those needs are relationally and institutionally embedded. For example, supporting more also requires addressing the community-level mental health burden of the peers who provide the lion’s share of support to survivors. If by graduation over 30% of women experience sexual violence, if 80% of those women tell someone, and if the person they tell is most likely to be a peer, then it is those untrained in support who are most likely to be providing it. Those students do not need training in care; they need support for triage. Student organizations and friend groups racked by instances of sexual assault also need help processing.

Who Is Left Out of This Framing of “Survivors”?

Those who identify as survivors are likely to be the most vocal and thereby the most responded to, yet their needs may differ from those of others who experience harm. 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 did not want to get him into trouble. The Black women did not see themselves as having “survived” sexual violence; they lived in a society and an institution that they experienced as racist. Most of the people who experience assault do not identify as “survivors” and what they have survived may not be, in their assessment, gender-based violence. An intersectional approach to support means recognizing the multiple forms of power-based harm that students experience.

In our research, we actively engaged survivors from multiple communities to understand their needs and experiences. Some did not want to identify as a survivor because they saw being a “survivor” as an identity that they viewed as abject, politicized, and necessarily deeply traumatized. Considerable other research finds that many who have experiences that meet the definition of sexual assault do not label it as such (Harned, 2005; LeMaire et al., 2016; Orchowski et al., 2013). Those who claimed the identity of a survivor did so as a way to claim power over their own negative experiences, but many who did not claim the identity of a survivor did so for exactly the same reason: as we argue elsewhere (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.” Many are assaulted by people they know, and so calling an experience an “assault” frequently had implications for the dynamics of peer groups and student organizations. Publicly labeling oneself a survivor was seen as bringing inevitable rupture to a valuable social group, while describing one's experience in ambiguous ways allowed for the continuation of one's existing and highly valued social life.

Finally, we are skeptical that doing better for survivors, by itself, will lead to lasting change. The implication is not that their needs should be ignored or seen 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, a different framing of the question looks beyond the question of “survivors” to ask “what do people need to thrive, to feel included, to feel a sense of citizenship and community?”