"An Evil, Evil Person": A Policy Discourse Analysis of Federal and Michigan State University Policies

• In Event: 35.040 - It's On You, MSU: Critically Addressing Sexual Violence at Michigan State University and Beyond

Abstract

The MSU Nassar scandal is embedded in a complex, shifting policy environment. The purpose of this paper is to understand how policies may have contributed to Michigan State University’s failures to address sexual violence. The study is guided by the following question: How do various policy documents represent the problem of campus sexual violence at MSU and beyond?

The main federal laws addressing sexual violence on college campuses are the Clery Act and Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 (McCallion & Feder, 2014). In 2001, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released guidelines that explicitly connected sex discrimination in Title IX to sexual harassment of students (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). In 2011, OCR released a “Dear Colleague” letter reaffirming the responsibilities of higher education institutions to respond to sexual violence under Title IX (Ali, 2011). Additional policies included the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act in 2013 (Office of the Federal Register, 2014) and another guidance in 2015 (Lhamon, 2015). In 2017, Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded previous federal guidelines and introduced interim guidelines that aim to make the process of adjudicating sexual violence cases on college campuses more fair for the accused (Smith, 2017).

I am informed by Linder’s (2018) power-conscious framework, which calls attention to the ways in which power and systems of oppression operate in campus sexual violence. Following the work of Allan (2003) and Iverson (2010; 2016), I use policy discourse analysis as a method. Iverson (2016) describes policy discourse analysis as “ a strategy for examining policy discourses and the way they come together to make particular perspectives more prominent than others” (p. 19).

I use three main sources of policy data: recent national policy documents, including guidance letters from the Obama and Trump administrations; MSU formal policy documents, including the Title IX resolution agreement; and relevant email releases from MSU’s administration.

Preliminary results indicate the following. First, power dynamics are largely absent from formal policy documents. Consistent with Iverson’s (2016) policy discourse analysis of multiple institutional sexual violence policies, perpetrators are often left out of the discourse. Where named, in letters from MSU’s administration (“an evil, evil person”), the system that supported Nassar’s perpetration is not acknowledged. Linder (2018) argues that we must recognize systems of oppression at work in sexual violence to address its root causes. Second, despite knowledge that sexual assault are most often perpetrated by someone known, documents such as the MSU resolution agreement often represent sexual violence as perpetrated by strangers. Third, recent guidance by Secretary DeVos questions truthfulness of survivors by allowing for the accused to appeal and increasing requirements for evidence, reaffirming the problem of disbelieving survivors that allowed Nassar to continue perpetration for years.

Representations of sexual violence in policy documents has contributed to MSU’s failures in addressing sexual violence. Understanding policy discourses is necessary to address sexual violence (Iverson, 2016), and in relation to the MSU case, is essential to address sexual violence at MSU and other institutions and to developing future policy.

Author

• Sapna Naik, Michigan State University