Racialized Barriers to Reporting Sexual Assault Among Black Women

• In Event: Division J Vice Presidential Session: Dismantling Injustice in Campus Policing and Reimagining Safety

Abstract

This paper focuses on the narratives of Black women and nonbinary survivors to understand how they evaluated postsecondary institutional reporting options through the lens of race and gender. Sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and harassment remain pervasive problems on college campuses. Research suggests Black women in higher education experience all forms of sexual misconduct at greater rates than their white counterparts. Black women, as multiply marginalized by gender and race, consistently describe sexual harm that includes racist behavior from perpetrators. The study was framed through a lens of Black feminist thought and legal cynicism. Black feminism aims to recover Black women’s experiences by combatting gendered racism and exposing the intersectional failures of legal structures, political movements, and institutional policies and practice. Legal cynicism has been used to understand why people from marginalized groups rarely call or cooperate with police. This framework guided the analysis of interviews with 46 Black women and nonbinary students who experienced sexual assault during college or graduate school and how they evaluated reporting options through an intersectional lens, attending to how racism and sexism, referred to here as gendered racism, influenced their decision-making. The analysis reveals how Black women students’ legal estrangement from reporting their victimization arises from growing up in underprotected and overpoliced neighborhoods. Additionally, the findings demonstrate how the everyday actions of campus police confirmed Black women’s legal estrangement while on campus.

Author

• Kamaria B. Porter, Northwestern University