The Wrong Way to Prevent Sexual Assault

A t the start of my freshman year of college, my peers and I attended several orientation events, including a series of brief lectures related to campus dos and don’ts. One of these was about sexual assault — specifically, how to avoid it. Before beginning, the speaker told us that oftentimes, conveying advice about preventing sexual assault can sound like victim-blaming, but that the blame is always 100 percent on the perpetrator. Then, listeners and administrators alike applauded the speaker. Following that, the speaker moved on, and nobody ever actually told us how to avoid being sexually assaulted.

This sort of lesson is dangerous and misleading. Our culture may be able to sway perpetrators from committing atrocious crimes, but evildoers have always existed and won’t disappear tomorrow. So, unless human nature changes, we should treat sexual assault as a problem whose solution is twofold: stopping perpetrators and preventing people from becoming victims. By downplaying the latter, we strip people of their autonomy by falsely telling them that they have no control. But there are steps students can take to keep themselves safe. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) advises alcohol safety and on-campus safety tips, such as having exit plans for unsafe situations, going to parties with trusted groups, protecting your drink, and knowing your limits.

Do colleges prioritize these lessons? It doesn’t seem like it.

Yale University’s consent-education program explicitly rejects “[telling] women to rely on ‘safety tips’” because “those methods don’t work, and often end up fueling victim-blaming.” It instead focuses “on the ways sexual violence is woven throughout the fabric of daily life.” The program is influenced, per its own citation, by feminist theory that deems power “inherent in all relationships.”

Cornell University’s “Sexual Violence Framework” emphasizes environmental and cultural factors, such as “examining and shifting group cultural norms that may contribute to the risk of sexual violence.”

Dartmouth College’s “Sexual Violence Prevention Project” is a four-year curriculum that aims to teach students to “use their power in positive ways to foster equity & belonging” and to “check-in and step-in” to prevent assault. Once again, however, this instruction’s main goal is to “shift the culture” and to challenge “the norms that allow power-based violence to persist,” as opposed to the forgotten value of caution. Although “check-in and step-in” is a preventative measure on the part of the bystander, bystander intervention should not be the only form of assault prevention put forth.

In a 2020 interview for Columbia Magazine, Jennifer S. Hirsch, a Columbia University professor of sociomedical sciences, and Shamus Khan, sociology-department chair, discussed their book Sexual Citizens, the product of extensive research on and observation of Columbia’s campus and student body. Although Sexual Citizens is not an orientation curriculum, the sexual-assault-prevention strategy it offers reflects a central interest in environmental and power dynamics. The researchers noted young people’s lack of education “on how to have sex without hurting someone else,” their diverse reasons for having sex (pleasure, social status, emotional comfort, etc.), and “sexual geographies,” such as how a sexual connotation may arise from two students sitting on a bed.

Hirsch explains, “One response might be, ‘Don’t go back to someone’s room unless you want to have sex.’ But we look at sexual assault as a public-health issue; our focus is on changing the environment.” For instance, she supports creating spaces for students to go late at night to “have the kind of interactions they want to have.” The book project was a success, receiving coverage on NPR’s All Things Considered and in the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, the Atlantic, and nearly a dozen campus newspapers and alumni magazines, including Harvard Magazine and the Daily Princetonian. Yet once again the authors brushed aside — if not outright rejected — personal responsibility, despite the fact that individual decisions are relevant to public-health questions. If washing your hands is a public-health measure, why shouldn’t this apply to personal precautions to avoid sexual assault?

For instance, in one of the many resources offered by the Sexual Citizens project, the following story is shared:

Lupe, a first-generation Latinx student, felt isolated from their heritage by Columbia’s white binge-drinking culture. They sought refuge at a Dominican nightclub, where their drink was spiked. “Lupe should have been safe sitting at a bar, listening to the bachata, but if there were a space where Lupe felt at home on campus . . . then they’d never have wandered away, in despair at their isolation.”

The resource provides a solution in which “Latinx students borrowed a fraternity living room to celebrate Mexican Independence Day,” but even questions this situation because it was left to the whims of white fraternity members’ “generosity,” forcing them to be guests instead of in control. Even if the changes necessary to create this space were put into place, it would be a slow process. In the meantime, why not teach students to, say, watch their drinks? Even granting the premise — which there is reason to doubt — that a more equitable world would reduce sexual assault (which has after all existed in so many different social structures), so long as that number is not zero, individuals will still face particular situations in which their choices are a factor.

This downplaying of agency is more far-reaching than one would expect, and troublingly so. CDC sexual-violence-prevention resources, again, emphasize developing communication skills, “protective” environments, social norms, “social-emotional learning,” and even “opportunities to empower and support girls and women” such as “economic supports for women and families,” especially considering that “historical trauma and structural inequities impact health.”

In truth, the environmental approach to sexual-violence prevention is a lazy one that shields institutions from dreaded accusations of victim-blaming and instead allows them to claim a progressive narrative about addressing societal ills by taking down the oppressor and adjusting the power dynamics. That sounds great, but it does not protect women, who constitute the majority of victims.

In fact, this approach degrades women, implying quite heavily that they lack agency and are perpetual victims. The narrative it creates is: The insidious systems at work are at present creating highly personal horror stories, but all we can do is create structural change, which will magically halt the existence of a human act of violence that has occurred across many cultures and throughout history. Any prescription of personal responsibility is a form of blame, as Yale’s consent-education site declared.

This is false. We may not “blame” cancer victims for their illnesses, but we do tell people from a young age not to smoke and to put on sunscreen. Cigarettes are a known risk, as is too much exposure to UV rays. Why shouldn’t this logic apply to sexual assault? Rape is never the fault of victims, who can take full precautions and still be assaulted. That does not contradict the fact that effective precautions, such as those offered by RAINN, exist and merit discussion.

We live in a defective world. It is not wisdom to tell people they have no control over a situation as they experience it. It is wisdom to learn from the trauma of others, and to try to take control of one’s own fate.