Teaching “Love and War”

Colleges and universities in the United States have been challenged to implement sometimes vague and constantly evolving federal laws and departmental guidance regarding how to respond to and prevent gender-based violence (GBV). State legislatures are also creating laws that may not be consistent with federal law and guidance. This chapter challenges the current model for addressing GBV by suggesting that, to be truly transformational, universities must give pedagogical time and space to the root causes and cultural underpinnings of GBV. The chapter describes a year-long interdisciplinary course offered to freshmen, co-taught by a philosophy professor and the Title IX coordinator, which, to transform students’ understanding, uses philosophers such as Plato to examine sexual violence and how it is structured in Western culture. The authors advocate for universities to incorporate classroom and organizational responses and collaborations to mitigate a culture of violence to eradicate GBV from higher education.

Transforming Campus Rape Culture

This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence. While rape culture is not simple, institutional responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause–effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

Introduction

This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence and how people’s understanding of rape culture has limited their ability to change it. Although rape culture is not simple, individuals’ responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause-effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and share how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally, it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

Feminist Activism Among Academic Staff in the Movement to Address Gender-Based Violence on Campus

Three ingredients underpin feminist campaigns against violence against women in universities: research, public activism, and political lobbying. Often discussed as if they are separate activities, this chapter demonstrates that conducting research constitutes activism resulting in and/or requiring lobbying and other activist activities. The chapter analyzes qualitative data collected in a UK national multimethod study exploring barriers and facilitators to implementing the recommendations of the 2016 Universities UK report on violence against women. Interviews with academics reveal how, in becoming cognizant of the power structures within their universities, participants identified how power operated to stall or block the gender-based violence agenda and pointed to transformative measures to circumvent barriers. These measures involve the three ingredients listed here. Collective action is apparent throughout their accounts with alliances being developed with students, external partners, and key individuals, as well as committees and services within their institutions. Cumulatively, the activism of these participants can be seen as transformative.

Building Authentic Partnerships for Responding to Gender-Based Violence in Universities

This chapter critically discusses the importance of coalition-building in challenging gender-based violence (GBV) in universities and for laying the groundwork to facilitate and support cultural transformation in the complex and risk-averse environment of higher education. Drawing on the example of a cross-institutional, multipartner coalition initiated by student organizations in collaboration with security, service, and academic staff in two Scottish universities, local service providers, and police, this chapter critically discusses the tensions encountered and challenges posed in creating a “whole-university” approach to preventing and responding to GBV. In so doing, it highlights the centrality of student leadership for developing an informed response and driving forward meaningful change and the importance of internal/external partnerships for prevention work, root and branch reform of university policies and practices, the provision of training and awareness-raising, and the delivery of a thorough institutionalized response to tackling GBV.

Challenging University “Lad Culture”

The National Union of Students report Hidden Marks, which found that one in seven female students experience a serious physical or sexual assault during their time at college, impelled a call to arms from many feminist academics that sexual violence at universities must be investigated and challenged. The report from the Universities UK taskforce prompted university campaigns, demanding transformative changes to university culture requiring collaboration from activists, students, and university staff. This chapter draws on semistructured interviews with 10 activists at a collegiate university in England, describing their involvement with anti-lad culture campaigns. Thematic analysis draws out the strengths of, and difficulties in, university activism seeking to challenge cultures of sexual violence. In particular, this chapter discusses students’ strategies for transformation and their reflections on the successes of campaigns that oppose lad culture.

From #MeToo to #HimToo in Academia

The #MeToo movement has been celebrated for centering the voice of survivors of sexual violence, and the new visibility that it has brought to issues that have long been of marginal interest to mainstream media and public discourse. In the context of the limits of the #MeToo movement, this chapter draws attention to a different kind of feminist Internet activism—the #HimToo movement in India—which entailed the compilation and circulation of a list of predatory men in academia. Apart from the predictable backlash from anti-feminists that this list attracted, it was also denounced by self-proclaimed feminists for its abandonment of due process for institutional remedies in favor of what was deemed “vigilante” action. In light of these debates, this chapter examines the limits and potential of emerging forms of collaborative feminist activism that seeks to transform violence-tolerant cultures and practices within educational institutions.

Leveraging Partnerships Between Faculty and Staff to Transform Rape Culture on Campus

Ending gender-based violence (GBV) on campus requires sustained efforts to transform the rape culture that is embedded in college and university systems. While partnership with student activists is crucial, structural change necessitates partnerships among college and university employees, particularly between staff who direct campus survivor advocacy and GBV prevention programs and their faculty allies. This chapter draws on accounts of members of the Campus Advocacy and Prevention Professionals Association across the United States and Canada about their partnerships with faculty. Key themes emerged: navigating bureaucracy, negotiating roles and responsibilities, destabilizing power and privilege dynamics, confronting institutionalized oppressions, and going beyond programming to catalyze systems change through meaningful (and often uncomfortable) partnership and dialogue. Recommendations to transform rape culture through new and existing partnerships on program evaluation, curriculum infusion, survivor support, and campus-wide task forces are discussed.

Conclusion

In this chapter the editors pull together key themes emerging from the previous chapters and consider how this volume may help direct future work on transforming higher education in order to eradicate gender-based violence (GBV). They reflect on the importance of theorizing about GBV in the higher education context. Paying attention to the language and concepts used, ensuring perpetrators are in the picture rather than obscured, and adopting an intersectional approach are all important aspects of scholarship and practice. The chapter examines the central role of students as both objects and subjects of transformation; their work as activists is essential to transforming student norms and practices. It also reflects on the importance of collaborations between various actors (students, staff, faculty, management, and community organizations). To be effective in transforming the power that enables GBV to persist, these collaborations, and scholarship, must be explicitly power-conscious.

Challenging Institutional Resistance

Numerous cases of sexual harassment in French higher education institutions led to the creation in 2002 of a student association dedicated to anti-sexist action against sexual harassment in higher education (Collectif de Lutte Anti-Sexiste Contre le Harcèlement Sexuel dans l’Enseignement Supérieur, also known as CLASCHES). More recently, the French minister for higher education introduced a policy requiring universities to take steps to eradicate sexual harassment and commissioned a survey of violence and gender relations in universities. Focusing on one of the universities where the survey was conducted, this chapter presents key findings from the survey and discusses the university’s responses. Although the university governing body set up a Victim Support Unit and organized activities annually to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, it has not used the survey to develop a specific policy but has, in fact, tried to obscure the results. Students criticize the university’s governing body’s discourses for blaming victims and making perpetrators invisible.