“Title IX Doesn't Work for Us”: College Women’s Informal Policing Strategies

• In Event: Authority & Authorities: The Gendered Dimensions of Policy Implementation

Abstract

The wide range of recent revelations associated with the #MeToo Movement indicate that sexual misconduct is pervasive in many settings, and that formal institutional authorities--including law enforcement, human resources departments, college campus Title IX offices, the courts system--often do little to police or punish such behavior. As important scholarship suggests, however, this enforcement vacuum is not the end of the story. Rather, in such contexts, vulnerable populations operating ‘in the shadow of the law’ often self-organize to protect themselves and police their communities (Gambetta 1993, Venkatesh 1997, Menjívar and Bejarano 2004, Singh 2010). We examine one such setting--the university undergraduate community--to examine whether and how members of this group self-organize to reduce exposure to sexual misconduct or other dangers.

Drawing on three waves of in-depth interview data with college-age women in sororities at a university with documented instances of sexual assault among the student population, we explore the informal and typically unseen means by which Title IX policy is actually implemented on college campuses. We find that, operating within sorority institutions, college women coordinate to create and refine informal policing practices to help members address threats of sexual assault and harassment, adopting a ‘legal consciousness’ in the self-conception of their roles in this process. Examining variation in the development of these practices across sororities, we theorize the conditions under which private policing strategies develop and why members of these groups often eschew ostensibly stronger, formal institutional remedies (such as the university Title IX office or the police). Follow-up analyses also provide preliminary evidence on how participation in these informal, self-protection institutions shapes subsequent trust in government institutions more broadly, suggesting that reliance on such private enforcement mechanisms has durable effects akin to those theorized by scholars of policy feedback. In exploring this relationship between informal policing mechanisms and the enforcement capacity of formal institutions, this paper contributes to current knowledge about the long-term political consequences of institutional betrayal and how formative institutional experiences shape women’s attitudes toward the state and the implementation of civil rights policy.

Authors

• Quinn W. Mulroy, Northwestern University

• Simone Ispa-Landa, Northwestern University