Landmark study interrogates the predictability of college campus sexual assault

Have you ever thought about how the only place for two people to sit in a dorm room is on a bed? Or wondered how a four-character text message (“u up?”) came to automatically be equated with a request for sex for an entire generation? I graduated from college a year ago and I never questioned these norms, until I read Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus — a new book by Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Kahn, public health scholars at Columbia University.

Many may remember Columbia as the site of a historic sexual assault controversy in 2014. Then-student Emma Sulkowicz gained national attention for her performance art piece called “Carry That Weight,” in which she sought to protest sexual assault on Columbia’s campus. More recently, the campus is the site of a landmark study on the state of American college students’ sexual health — specifically how young people are experiencing sex and the predictability of sexual assault on college campus.

At the book launch, which I attended earlier this year, Hirsch explained why she spent the last five years holding the interviews at the heart of Sexual Citizens, some of which brought her to tears: “Let’s stop working one penis at a time.” She and Kahn write that “thinking about sexual assault as a public health problem expands the focus from individuals and how they interact, to systems.”

Compare the issue to water pollution in a community: We could educate people about water filtration techniques, and encourage each of them to use them, or we could go upstream and remove the toxins from the water, reducing our reliance on individual behavior to make necessary societal change.

In Sexual Citizens, Hirsch and Kahn use the anonymous stories of college kids to guide each point they make. I see myself and my friends in these vibrant, colloquial voices. It hurts because this means I must also recognize the violent language and behavior that they express as having been accepted and internalized by us as well. Many Ivy League students are, at the very least, familiar with consent and gender inequality taught during mandatory orientation trainings. Yet, as the book describes, these students say “it’s OK” when their partner says “no.” They feel like they have to stay the night or it would be rude. They nonchalantly describe fraternities or friend groups as “rapey.”

The word “rapey” is a great allegory for my generation’s acceptance of casual sexual violence — not tolerance, but acceptance that it’s an experience bound to happen. Now more than ever, women are taught how to resist sexual assault and how to report it, how to grieve and how to overcome it. But where are the teachings about how to have sex that doesn’t harm others in the first place?

“Without question, individuals bear responsibility for their own actions,” Hirsch and Kahn stress. “But the confusion around sexual projects, the lack of clarity about one’s own and others’ sexual citizenship, and the creation and perpetuation of sexual geographies that intensify power inequalities, these are our fault.”

These three categories — sexual projets, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies — comprise a radically new framework for thinking about sex. A sexual project is a reason for having sex; examples might be to gain social status, to gain experience, to feel good, or to make your partner feel good. Sexual citizenship is understanding one’s right to their sexuality, and acknowledging that others hold the same right. We see a denial of sexual citizenship when people feel entitled to others’ bodies and others do not feel entitled to their own bodies. Sexual geographies figure almost as a third partner in an encounter. Having a roommate that you don’t want to wake up, being a freshman at a party in a senior housing complex, taking a drink that a stranger offers because you’re a broke student — such constraints are mostly unique to the college experience.

Reading Sexual Citizens, it was impossible not to think of my own experience in the “red zone,” what experts call the first few months of freshman year, the period in which most college students experience sexual assault. I’ve never been able to describe what happened to me one night as “assault,” and certainly not “rape,” for so many reasons. We’d had consensual sex before, we were drunk, we were (and still are) friends. Most of all, I didn’t want it to be a big deal, for me or anyone else.

A study participant described seeing a counselor after she was raped: “And even then, I was like, ‘This is so ridiculous, I’m probably wasting your time, there are people outside that have actual problems.’ I recognized in her what I couldn’t see for myself: This is a pandemic. Unwanted sexual contact doesn’t have to be something inevitable, something that one in four undergraduates will experience, something that one in three women worldwide will experience in their lifetime.

I’m not, however, asking myself or this participant to change how we feel. The research team found that 57% of students who described an assault indicated that it affected their life in some way. The identities of “victim” and “survivor” don’t apply to everyone; neither is “predator” a stable identity, which is clear from the interviews Hirsch and Kahn conducted with men and women who have assaulted others. Instead, Hirsch and Kahn want us to move away from identity categories to categories of experience. When students blamed themselves for what happened (drinking too much, being too trusting, being too scared to speak up), the authors saw indicators of socially produced behavior. Binge drinking is often about an intense discomfort with sexuality, a discomfort that is not natural and does not have to exist.

The sorry state of sex education in the United States is one of the targets of Sexual Citizens’s proposed systemic changes. The federal government continues to fund abstinence-only-until-marriage teaching, which is a blatant denial of young people’s sexual citizenship. In 2018, 37 states required that if sex education is taught, it must include abstinence, and 26 states required that it be stressed. Only 13 states required that the information taught in sex education be medically accurate. The bar for safe sex teaching is somehow worsening, national data finds, with marginalized groups getting the least information. Only 6% of LGBTQ youth report that their sex ed included information relevant to them. (Throughout the book, Hirsch and Kahn remind readers to approach gender-based violence intersectionally. Every single Black woman interviewee reported an experience of unwanted touching. “That bears repeating,” they write. “Every single one.”)

If education is part of the problem, it can be a part of the solution. We are clearly failing at sexual assault prevention. If we stop focusing on that as our ultimate goal, and instead take on the promotion of young people’s sexual citizenship, our whole culture could change. Assigning Sexual Citizens as required reading for all college students would be a perfect place to start.