Since the 1970s, teen driver fatality rates in the United States have been reduced by 75% (Anon 2021). Since the 1990s, rates of violent crime have dropped by more than half. Yet over those same decades, there has been no evidence of a similar decline in rates of campus sexual assault: Going back to the 1980s, multiple studies across a diverse set of campuses have found that somewhere between one in three and one in four college women experience an assault (Fedina et al. 2018; Fisher et al. 2000; Koss 1988; Krebs et al. 2007). Although earlier research typically focused only on women, more recent research shows that substantial numbers of men also experience sexual assault in college, and that gender nonbinary students are at extremely high risk (Association of American Universities 2015).
So why the success in reducing rates of violent crime and teen car crashes, but the failure when it comes to sexual assault? In this chapter we lay out what it means to think about campus sexual assault as a public health problem. This includes providing some background on what it means to think about anything as a public health problem. We then describe how we apply those ideas to understanding campus sexual assault, including how we address the challenge of delineating what specifically to focus on in our examination of the social context of sexual assault.
But first, let us look a little closer at what produced that massive decline in teen driving fatalities. There was no magic single solution. Instead, the government, corporations, communities, non-profit organizations, families, and individuals took a wide range of actions. The US government introduced graduated licensing laws and increased the drinking age (Cheng et al. 2012; DeJong and Blanchette 2014). Community groups worked to de-normalize the idea of drunk driving and to promote the concept of the designated driver – a powerful prosocial role that young people are encouraged to adopt – so that young people themselves began to intervene when they saw that their peers were not safe to drive (Gusfield 1994; Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health 2017). Car manufacturers introduced safety features such as seat belts, air bags, and crumple zones, and the government mandated their use or application. Local communities identified dangerous roads and improved signage, corrected blind intersections, and stepped up the enforcement of rules. Construction crews put down rumble strips to wake up sleepy drivers who might be veering off course.
Did those changes include telling young people to drive more safely? Yes, they did – we both remember those scary films from high school drivers’ ed. But that was one element. There is no evidence that the decline in deaths was solely the result of telling small groups of young people that hitting another car or a pedestrian is bad, that driving is very dangerous, or that maybe they should not drive at all until they are older. Nor was the sole response to lock up people who harmed others while driving and think that would solve the problem. Rather, the layering together of policy change, collective action, cultural transformation, and changes in the built environment in combination successfully reduced teen driving fatalities. This approach is sometimes referred to as an ecological understanding: examining how an individual behavior that we hope to change is shaped by interpersonal factors, social institutions, shared cultural norms, and other features of the surrounding environment. Despite a strong expert consensus that this is what is needed to reduce sexual violence (DeGue et al. 2014), this public health approach has yet to be fully applied to the problem of campus sexual assault. That is part of the reason why the level of risk faced by today’s college students is pretty much the same as it was 40 years ago.
So, what would it look like to change the environment (in this case, both the policy environment and the built environment) to make it harder for people to act in ways that cause sexual harm to themselves or others? In this chapter, we apply that public health approach, drawing on ideas from Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power and Assault on Campus (Hirsch and Khan 2020). The basic premise is that individual behavior cannot be understood solely as a product of what individuals want or believe; certainly, individual behavior reflects what people want and believe, but it is also deeply influenced by interpersonal (family, friends, social networks), organizational or institutional, community, and policy factors (Bronfenbrenner 1992).
Most of the public conversation about campus sexual assault still focuses on individuals, asking “What did individuals do and how should we hold them accountable?” This focus on adjudication is combined with a characterization of campuses as “hunting grounds,” portraying those who assault as “predators” who lie in wait and intentionally harm others. Predation is part of the problem, but any behavior that is as common as sexual assault must be understood not only as a problem of “broken people,” but as the product of the social contexts that form those people. But gesturing toward the importance of social context is not enough, because it is a term that can refer to pretty much any and every element of the environment. So, in the remainder of this chapter, we use three concepts – sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies – to outline the pathways through which elements of the environment make sexual assaults likely to happen.
It may seem scary to hear that “sexual assault is built into the campus environment.” But we actually mean this in a more hopeful way. Understanding how sexual assault is built into the environment is the first step toward redesigning that environment so that it is less likely that students would act in ways that hurt other people. One of public health’s greatest triumphs, achieved for many in the United States and other wealthy countries in the twentieth century, was ensuring access to clean water and sanitation. Clean water and sanitation do not require people to believe anything, to take any actions, or to care about and be committed to water quality. People can just turn on the tap and drink water that will not give them diarrhea. This has saved millions of lives. This example points to a clear path between a massive environmental intervention and a specific outcome. However, enduring inequalities in access to water and sanitation also remind us that understanding the causes of a problem is no guarantee that those solutions will be implemented equitably. Native American households in the United States are 19 times as likely as white households to lack access to water and sanitation (Stead Sellers 2019). So, in the case of water and sanitation, there is a good understanding of how the environment affects health outcomes, but insufficient political will to create a safer environment for all. In contrast, for sexual assault, despite enormous public attention and professed concern from many elected officials, there is not a shared understanding of how modifiable elements of the environment produce contexts in which assaults are likely to happen.
What would a “clean water” approach to sexual assault prevention look like? Right now, there is no massive environmental intervention, no system of aqueducts and underground piping, that produces consensual sexual interactions. But we want to outline how you might think through this. This chapter is a call for communities to collectively think about what “the environment” actually is, and how it might be transformed. To help with that, we draw upon three concepts we developed in our book, Sexual Citizens. The concepts sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies highlight modifiable aspects of the environment that produce vulnerability to campus sexual assault.
Sexual projects examines the question of what sex is for, and builds on earlier work (Hirsch 2003, 2015; Hirsch et al. 2010). At first that might sound like a question that only two university professors would think to ask (isn’t it obvious what sex is for?). Except it is not at all obvious – very few college students today are having sex in order to have children, and as other research has also found, a lot of the sex that they are having is not particularly pleasurable (Ford and England 2014). Students’ sexual projects included pleasure, but also accruing experience, articulating their identity, jockeying for social status, and expressing care for a partner. Students do not have just one sexual project, and their projects could change over time.
Understanding students’ sexual projects – their sexual goals, or how they are trying to use sex to achieve other goals – helps us see why they seek out the kinds of sexual interactions they do. That is important because a lot of assaults happen in situations that begin as consensual sexual interactions. In our research we did not find that there is one “safe” sexual project, but rather that different sexual projects carry with them different kinds of risks for assaulting people, or for being assaulted. People in committed relationships experienced intimate partner violence. People looking to hook up to increase their number of partners – and thereby improve what they perceive to be their status within their community – face different risks of assault. In contrast to clean water, which comes out of tap if well-maintained systems are in place regardless of people’s level of concern about water and sanitation, public health challenges that have a behavioral dimension – whether it is getting people to stop smoking or getting them to wear condoms or motorcycle helmets – requires understanding what behaviors mean to people, and what they are trying to achieve through those things.
Sexual citizenship points to the right to sexual self-determination – one’s own right, but also others’ equivalent rights. Our interest in the idea of sexual citizenship, and in the socially patterned way in which some students seemed attentive to their own right to have the kinds of sexual experiences they wanted and others, did not came from hearing stories like Gwen’s. Gwen was a willowy blonde, excited to experience the New York City club scene. In her interview, she described fall semester freshman year, going out and meeting B-list actors and not very famous athletes. The evenings would typically end back in their hotel rooms. She was clear she did not want to have sex with them, and so, as she recounted to us, she had to “give them a blow job to get out of there.” That “blow job to get out of there” was something that we heard about from many young women. We were struck both by the way it reflected their acceptance of men’s sexual satisfaction as important, and by the men’s apparent lack of interest in checking about whether those women actually wanted to give them a blow job. This reflected a broader pattern where more advantaged students, be those advantages from gender, race, or class, were attentive to their own wants and desires but relatively inattentive to the equivalence of their partners.
Sexual geographies highlights how the choices that people can make are deeply influenced by the physical space. For example, if you walk into someone’s dorm room and they only have four pieces of furniture – a desk, a bureau, a chair, and a bed – where will you sit if you want to sit together? On the bed. But beds have a social meaning because they are also a place that people have sex. This is just one example of how space can influence people’s actions. The concept calls attention to space both as a producer of vulnerability to assault and as a key modifiable dimension for prevention.
After years at an elite but very sheltered boarding school abroad, Luci was eager to leave behind her nerdy high school self – to lose her virginity, party, and be popular. That first Saturday after classes began, she went out with Nancy, another first-year student. The two young white women met two seniors, also both white, at one of the bars near campus. Nancy danced with one. The other, Steve, bought Luci a drink. They flirted for a while and then he asked Luci if she wanted to go back to the frat house with him. She said yes. They stumbled up Amsterdam Avenue toward fraternity row in the warm summer night. Steve had forgotten his keys, so they made out on the stoop, waiting for someone to buzz them in.
Luci’s phone rang and rang. When she finally answered, it was Nancy, headed back toward campus to catch up with her. Steve reluctantly agreed to wait, and the three eventually climbed the steps and passed through the carved entryway. Steve offered them drinks. The fraternity, like others at Columbia, was not allowed to serve hard liquor, but that just meant that they kept it upstairs, on the second floor. Steve steered Luci upstairs. Nancy followed. Not too long after sitting down in that second floor living room, Nancy passed out on a tattered couch. Steve invited Luci to see his room, and they went up to the third floor. Once in his room, they started making out again. That was all fine. But then he started taking off her pants. She said “No, don’t,” to which he responded “it’s okay.” But it was not ok. He raped her. Luci recounted saying “no” again. Then she gave up and waited for him to finish.
Sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies each provide insight into different elements of this context. We only spoke with Luci, not Steve, and so we cannot know what his sexual project was – but if it had been having sex to express care, or to pleasure his partner, he might not have proceeded when Luci so clearly said no. Sexual projects that are only about oneself – having pleasure, accruing experience – or that are about people other than the person you are having sex with (jockeying for social status) and positioning the other person as an object, put people (especially socially powerful students) at risk of assaulting others.
But Steve’s presumably self-oriented sexual project would not have mattered if he had respected Luci’s right to sexual self-determination. In fact, the story hinges on the moment in which Steve ignores Luci’s sexual citizenship. In saying “it’s ok,” when Luci said “no,” he conveyed that her desires did not matter, that his goal of having sex outweighed her clearly expressed desire not to. We saw this over and over again in our research with undergraduates: men reach adulthood having received a great deal of affirmation about their right to realize their sexual desires, and women reach adulthood having gotten a lot of messages about men’s right to sexual pleasure, but very little about their own right to sexual self-determination or sexual pleasure. Unquestionably, one take on the story of Steve and Luci is that he is a bad person. Certainly, he did a bad thing, and our goal is not to let people who harm others off the hook. Rather, it is to advance the conversation about how that assault could have been prevented.
Analyzing the sexual geography calls attention to where they were: on the third floor of a building where Steve lives, surrounded by his friends, on a campus where he has already spent three years, accruing substantial experience with sex and drinking, and where Luci was a newcomer, inexperienced, and with few friends. But this configuration of space is not inevitable: in many residential higher education contexts, it is taken for granted that first-year students should have worse housing, with less access to private space for sex and shared spaces to host parties, with the better housing reserved for students in their third and fourth years. First-year students may also, as at Columbia and Barnard, live in dorms where most of the students are under the legal drinking age, increasing the institutional pressure to discourage underage drinking. Many students (especially wealthy white ones) arrive at college with a powerful sense that “college fun” includes binge drinking, and so those who cannot drink legally navigate their early months on campus as a sort of alcohol-oriented scavenger hunt. Moreover, it is considered normal for younger women to socialize with older men, but not the reverse. This combination of cultural ideals and institutional structures funnels inexperienced women students, new on campus, into spaces controlled by older men, sheds light on what sexual assault researchers call “the red zone,” those first months of campus when women students are particularly likely to be assaulted (Cranney 2015).
Critical analysis of that sexual geography also helps us understand Steve’s social power. Gender inequality – socially organized unequal relations between women and men – was unquestionably part of this story; here we can see that inequality in how Steve ignored Luci’s clearly stated desire for him to stop. Gender certainly plays a role, with men socialized to be attentive to their own sexual desires, and less attentive to women’s. But those third-floor rooms in fraternities are occupied by people with many sources of social power. It is not just that they are men; they are also typically white, wealthy, third- and fourth-year cisgender heterosexual men. There were many factors that led to Luci walking up those stairs, some more easily modifiable than others, but one feature of the sexual geography that schools might consider changing is to provide appealing and lightly monitored spaces that would facilitate first-year students socializing with other first-year students.
The assault that Lupe experienced reflects another way in which campus sexual geographies produce vulnerability. A genderqueer first-generation college student, they did not feel at all comfortable in the neighborhood bar where Steve and Luci met, and even less so in the fraternities on 114th street. Toward the end of their first year on campus, they were desperate to escape “the drama of the campus’s relatively small queer community and the predictable ‘shitty white music’ at student events.” All they were looking for was a place to listen to some bachata. When a man offered to buy Lupe a drink, they were surprised – they did not have sex with cisgender men, and described themselves as not conventionally attractive. But the drink was free, and Lupe had very little spending money. The stranger must have slipped something in their drink because they were soon very sleepy and dizzy. The stranger offered to call them a cab, and then the rest of the evening was a nightmarish blur. Looking back, Lupe felt lucky to have escaped alive. Of course, they should have been safe sitting in that bar – but they would not have been in that bar if there were more social spaces on campus and in the immediate neighborhood where a queer, Latinx first-generation student felt at home. In that situation of predation by a stranger, Lupe’s sexual projects were immaterial because the person who harmed Lupe had no respect for their sexual citizenship. Further, campus sexual geographies pushed Lupe into a context of vulnerability: alone and in a bar.
Austin’s story provides a third example of how sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies provide new ways to think about why assaults happen, and how they can be prevented. Austin was an engaging interviewee; the only really spicy sex scene in Sexual Citizens features Austin doing his part to narrow the campus orgasm gap. And yet Austin told a story about assaulting a young woman, early in his first year on campus. What he initially described in the interview as a “weird experience” began like this: his roommate, who was hooking up with a girl, wanted to be alone with her and so Austin was – as students sometimes call it, “sexiled” – sent to go sleep in that girl’s double room, where her roommate was already in bed. Austin agreed. As Austin recalled:
So they made me sleep in her roommate’s place. The first night, she was really drunk, and they were just like, “Oh go over there.” And I didn’t know what to do so I just lay down next to her and she was like “Oh I just threw up, like, I don’t want to do anything,” but I kind of just laid next to her for a bit and kind of rubbed her body for a bit. I definitely grabbed her boob, but then I felt weird about it, because I was also drunk, and then I slept in the other bed… . I shouldn’t have done that. But I was definitely happy that I had slept in the other bed. Glad I did that. I stopped and was like “Uh, this isn’t it.” She didn’t seem like she was hating it, but she didn’t seem like she was loving it. Okay, she probably didn’t give affirmative or negative consent. This is a gray area. And I was just like “Okay, this is weird, this is a bad idea.” I don’t know, it wasn’t one of my best moments.
Later in the interview, we asked him how he would categorize what he did that night. His first take was “just kind of shitty.” But as the conversation continued, he labeled what he had done:
I know the definition of sexual assault, like any kind of nonconsensual sexual action, so yes … that would probably be considered sexual assault… . Which is I guess what I did. But umm. But also, like. Yeah damn. Well, fuck me, right? Yeah.
Austin’s sexual project early in college sheds some light on his motivation that night: he hated that he was a virgin and was desperate to accrue sexual experience. Both his “grabbing her boob” and his feeling weird about it can be analyzed through the idea of sexual citizenship: he was clear about realizing his own sexual self-determination, but disregarded hers, at least initially. And then, as he admits to himself “this isn’t it,” we can see him acknowledging that she too had the same right, and that he was violating it.
Most of the conversation about campus sexual assault has focused on what happens after a report is made – with questions of due process, evidence, and punishment. Had this incident been reported [which, like the vast majority of campus assaults (Khan et al. 2018), it was not], this might have been considered a classic he said/she said situation. However, because our focus is on what could have been done to prevent this from happening, rather than what should happen after the fact, perhaps the most salient set of insights comes from thinking about how campus sexual geographies were part of what set this assault in motion. Very few first-year students on the campus have single rooms, and so sex between two first years almost inevitably involves a third person – someone’s roommate – who is sent to sleep, or at least chill, elsewhere. As we write in Sexual Citizens, “an opportunity presented itself, set in motion by the community norm that part of being a good friend is going along with being shuffled into a virtual stranger’s bedroom, or having a virtual stranger shuffled into yours.”
In these brief pages, we have traced out how the three grounding concepts of Sexual Citizens – sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies – highlight specific elements of the social environment that produce situations in which it is more likely that assaults will occur. Did we cover every single element of the context here? Of course not. What we have demonstrated, however, is how theory can highlight specific elements of social context, helping show how those elements shape behavior. This lays the groundwork for community-level sexual assault prevention by moving beyond seeing the environment as a vast blob that somehow leads to bad outcomes, or focusing only on particular elements of the environment, like fraternities, organized athletics, and binge drinking. But perhaps even more importantly, it directs attention to dimensions of the social environment that can be modified – specifically, through transforming sexual geographies, promoting sexual citizenship, and helping people clarify their own sexual projects.
Transforming sexual geographies can happen at the most micro-level: if students on a residential campus have no other late-night options for continuing a conversation with someone they would like to get to know better, then when the parties wind down and the bars close, they will end up in rooms with nowhere to sit but a bed. Modifying the sexual geography could include furnishing dorm lounges with cozy nooks for quiet conversation, or keeping dining and lounge spaces open late Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturday nights. Considering sexual geographies can also open up a conversation about power inequalities on campus, and modifying sexual geographies could include identifying, and working to transform, ways in which the allocation of residential and social space on campus amplifies the power of already powerful groups. It is frequently taken for granted that students on residential campuses who are in their third and fourth years get better housing, with more space to host parties and more single bedrooms. This funnels first-year students into spaces controlled by older students. The fact that fraternities serve alcohol on premises, but sororities do not, means that on campuses with Greek life, men students in their third and fourth year have disproportionate control over social space. If Luci had had a single room, maybe she would have invited Steve back to her room, where it might have been easier to kick him out when he started to unbutton her pants. If Lupe and other minoritized students had more access to spaces on campus where they could host parties and choose the music, maybe they would not have ended up in that bar, just wanting to listen to some bachata. The broader principle is that rather than focus on the decisions that individual people make – which are very hard to modify – prevention can work by changing the range of choices that people have.
Promoting sexual citizenship requires addressing aspects of the pre-college environment. Young people in the United States come of age forced to navigate an obstacle course of messages undermining their right to sexual self-determination. This includes sex ed communicating the implicit message that young people should wait to have sex until they were older, the heteronormativity of most sex ed which tells queer youth that the sex that they want to have will never be legitimate, parents committed to a “not under my roof” policy, and restrictions on access to sexual and reproductive health services, including abortion. But some people’s sexual citizenship is more intensely undermined than others; Steve and even Austin reflect men’s socialization to think first of their own sexual projects, and their right to enact them, and secondarily, if at all, about others’. Promoting sexual citizenship is inextricable from addressing underlying power inequalities. An environment that would have taught Steve to listen when Luci said “no, don’t,” or that would have kept Austin from grabbing that woman’s breast, requires teaching little boys that their desires are not more important than others’ boundaries. This goes far beyond promoting consent, as many campuses already do. Sex involves a complicated set of interpersonal interactions. In the same way that safe driving involves more than knowing to stop at stop signs and red lights, instructing people in consent after a lifetime of silence and shame around sex is insufficient to teach them to have sex without hurting other people.
Finally, there is more that could be done to help young people develop clarity about their sexual projects. Our point is not that there is a right or wrong sexual project. But sexual projects that are focused only on sex for one’s own satisfaction or on sex as achievement, rather than on sex as an experience to share with another person, put people at risk of assaulting others. Not because of those sexual projects alone, but in combination with lack of attention to the other person’s equivalent right to sexual self-determination. Drunk sex with someone you just met is, for some (but not all) students, the epitome of college fun. Rather than preaching at them not to do that, a public health approach would provide opportunities for them to think about how to do what they want without getting hurt or hurting others. Turn signals, rumble strips, and graduated licensing laws do not keep people from using cars to get where they want; rather, they are part of an environment in which people learn to drive without running others off the road.