Sexual Coercion and Assault Goes to College Too: Disarticulating Culture, Language, Heritage, and the Cheating of Justice

• In Event: 70.038 - Issues of Gender and Higher Education

Abstract

Years of rigorous research, prevention programs deployment, and legislative reforms have failed to overcome 60 years of statistical stagnation regarding postsecondary sexual assault. Prevention approaches rely on problematic, reductionist and incorrect assumptions about students’ lived experiences of intimacy and sex. This is particularly true of consent, presumed to be something that can be legislated, taught, required, negotiated, communicated (and adjudicated). Moreover, early learning about sexuality in school is impersonal and technical, and the silences and awkward responses of adults generate a hidden curriculum of shame, stigma and abdication of agency. The collegiate environment exacerbates this through charged environments, dysfunctional belief systems and social norms, intoxication, and societal characterization of the “real world” (versus this fantasy). We aim to change this.

Authors

• Jason Laker, San José State University

• Erica Misako Boas, University of California - Berkeley