Title IX, Mandated Reporting, and the Silencing Effect: Responding to Narratives of Sexualized Violence

• In Event: 44.019 - College Communities in the New Era of Title IX: Confronting Sexualized Violence

Abstract

Objectives
Sexualized violence has long been a pervasive problem on college campuses, and recently garnered more attention in national and academic conversations. With the re-interpretation of Title IX at the federal level, new policies have been enacted at campuses across the country.
While at the administrative level sexualized violence is understood as a problem that institutions must protect themselves from in terms of liability, this violence manifests itself in different ways in other campus spaces. In the writing classroom, instructors are frequently positioned as primary responders to student survivors. This project describes the particular challenges instructors face in providing an adequate academic and compassionate response to both these students and their writing. Institutional policies along with individual interviews of university composition instructors are analyzed in an effort to address the following questions: What is at stake when narratives of sexualized violence enter the classroom? How can writing instructors bridge the necessity of developing academic voice with the social justice need of honoring survivors’ experiences?
Context
The ways in which we talk about rape and other forms of sexualized violence often misrecognize both the conditions that enable this violence as well as the current needs of survivors. Within the larger context of academic institutions that often fail to meet the needs of survivors of rape, the college composition classroom is understood as a necessary place to consider the structures of power inherent within language, as well as a place for students to reclaim narratives that have yielded power over their experiences. Narratives of survival can be potentially transformative to both their experiences of violence as well as identities of survivors (Hesford). While it has long been considered unethical to require students to write about experiences of trauma, this project suggests that it is perhaps equally unethical to prevent students from critically engaging with the experiences that have shaped their subjectivity.
Data Sources
In addition to national, state and local statistics regarding reports of sexual assault and rape on college campuses, this narrative case study draws on nine interviews of first-year composition (FYC) instructors from a small, rural state university located in Northern California. The data from these interviews is examined alongside institutional policy documents on mandated reporting and sexualized violence.
Approaches & Methods
Written and oral interviews were conducted: the choice between an in-person oral interview and a written interview was presented to the informants. The interviewer, a composition instructor in the same program as the respondents, was known professionally and, for some, personally, to the respondents.
Significance
While this project does not seek to provide concrete answers for the challenges inherent in responding to these texts, its extended meditation points to the importance of continuing to think through the problems and possibilities of responding to both students and the texts they produce and, especially in the context of restrictive institutional policies that are not survivor centered in nature or impact. The findings of this study call into question recent institutional policies concerning reinterpretations of Title IX and mandated reporting designations.

Author

• Tessa Pitre, Humboldt State University