Vulnerability and the College Kid: Legal Consciousness, Categories of Risk, and the Contestation of Title IX

• In Event: 374 - Section on Sociology of Law. Law and Culture

Abstract

Since the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter issued by the Department of Education, universities have faced increasing pressure from both the federal government and legal cases brought by students to reform and enforce sexual assault adjudication and consent policies. However, as the application of Title IX has been expanded in the service of protecting students from sexual assault and the mishandling of sexual assault policies, legal cases and activist groups have also sought to expand its application to the protection of young men’s education and students accused of sexual assault on campus. In the absence of a clear legal definition of the student-university relationship, the legal and social narratives offered by activist groups oriented towards the rights of accused students work to frame young men as vulnerable members of the university community by changing the focus of their identities to: first, vulnerable sons of families, particularly mothers; and second, individuals standing abject before a powerful and unfair university bureaucracy. The framing of young men as vulnerable members of the university community draws attention to the ways in which the categories of risk built into the application of laws and legal procedures may be contested and adapted, as well as how structures and tactics of social movements may be transported across political lines. Sociologists must devote attention to the ways in which innovations are produced by new applications of law and how potentially competitive or contradictory legal consciousnesses react to each other within a policy environment.

Author

• Kathryn Hendricks, University of Chicago