On a warm September day in 1984, my parents dropped me off for my freshman year of college. I had just turned 18. I was eager to make new friends, take challenging classes and embrace all that college had to offer.
I wasn’t thinking about the statistic that one in four women would be sexually assaulted during those four years on campus. Little did I know, I would become one of them.
That experience reshaped my life, driving me to research and teach on gender-based violence. Today, my co-authored textbook, The Social Dynamics of Family Violence, is read by thousands of college students each year, including my own.
In 2009 and 2011, I dropped my own children off at college. I knew the statistics; I had written about them. Yet little could have prepared me for the sickening realization that my daughter and my son’s friends faced the exact same risk of sexual assault that I had decades earlier.
That is because the one-in-four-women statistic hasn’t budged in more than 40 years.
Sexual assault happens on college campuses because men are raised to believe they are entitled to women’s bodies. Period.
I’m glad the Cornell case has pressured administrators to take real steps to mitigate risk and handle reports properly. But given how little has changed in four decades, standard policy updates are not enough. We must fundamentally rethink how we prevent sexual assault in the first place.
What does work, as trauma psychologist Dr. Jennifer Freyd has long argued, is “sustained education.” Sexual assault prevention specialist Jackson Katz, in his documentary The Bystander Moment: Transforming Rape Culture at its Roots, demonstrates that men need dedicated time and space to unpack and deconstruct rape culture, not only with experts, but with their peers. Where better than in college classrooms?
College presidents can, and must, do better by educating themselves and investing in evidence-based prevention strategies. We expect nothing less, and the students on their campuses deserve so much more.