Jill Dunlap remembers when “handling sexual assault on campus” meant the university official in charge of student conduct gave a sexual assault perpetrator a stern talking-to.
At some of the institutions where she worked, Dunlap said, administrators were hesitant to talk about assault and harassment during orientation, for fear of frightening parents.
That is no longer the norm, said Dunlap, who spent much of the 2000s working in sexual-assault prevention and response at places like the University of California, Santa Barbara, Northern Illinois University and the University of Missouri in Kansas City.
She is now the director for equity, inclusion and violence prevention at the Washington D.C.-based National Association of Student Personnel Administrators’ research and policy institute.
Nowadays, college students like Deborah Ramirez, the second woman to level accusations of assault against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, have more options for reporting such incidents.
Campuses have long had offices to adjudicate sexual assault, but in the past five years, many have shifted towards mandatory reporting on campus –– which means if a student tells faculty or staff about an assault, they have to report it to the police –– and hiring Title IX coordinators. “Where it used to be a quarter of someone’s job,” Dunlap said, “It’s now a full-time job.”
The change began slowly. The first sketches of national standards arrived in the early 1990s, said S Daniel Carter, president of Safety Advisors for Educational Campuses. The Department of Education laid out further guidelines for schools to deal with sexual harassment on campus in 1997 and those standards were reissued in 2001.
A 2011 Dear Colleague Letter that then-vice president Joe Biden sent to every college and university, coupled with more aggressive investigations from the Office of Civil Rights, drove colleges and universities to examine their procedures.
“For those of us who were doing the work, we were like, ‘Oh, now you’re being forced to … give it its due.’” said Dunlap.
Thanks in large part to those new guidelines and stronger enforcement, the past several years have seen a stark shift in how colleges and universities manage sexual violence on campus. Institutions that failed to comply with certain provisions within a year could be found in violation of Title IX and risked losing federal funding.
“It’d be nice to think that institutions would have done that on their own,” Dunlap said. But they didn’t.
Much of the impetus to address sexual assault on campus came from students, like Rachel Greenburg. In 2009, while an undergrad at Colgate College in New York, Greenburg connected with Students Active For Ending Rape.
At the time, she said, “There weren’t that many organizations or students who felt like they had the power to advocate for what they needed.” But students began to speak up, regardless.
Without the work of grassroots activism, she doubts much would have changed.
As a measure of its importance, Greenburg continues to serves on the board of Students Active for Ending Rape, which has grown from an informal group of Columbia University students into a 501(c)3 with a board of directors.
About the same time that students were advocating and speaking out on campus, the Center for Public Integrity and NPR issued a report describing an epidemic of underreporting, minimal punishment, and general disregard for the issue on college campuses.
“That had a big splash,” Dunlap said. Student activism continued to push the issue forward.
The actions of Greenburg and other activists alongside the evidence presented in the Center for Public Integrity report produced significant change. Institutions adopted mandatory reporting policies that oblige most employees to officially report any instance of assault that a student shares.
Meanwhile, investigators to address student reports arrived alongside the Title IX coordinators. Campuses now have to provide their policy in writing in a publically accessible place. And the federal mandates pushed schools to bring students to the table as they considered new policies.
None of that was required before the new mandates.
“[This] was the first time students began to understand that they had recourse if something had gone wrong,” Carter said. The number of complaints filed skyrocketed, as did public protest as students grew to use social media to amplify their voice and connect with groups across campuses.
While policies have shifted, a reluctance to address the larger structures at play frustrates Debbie Dougherty, professor of communications at the University of Missouri. “We’re dealing with this as an individual crisis over and over and over,” she said.
But, despite certain mechanisms for managing sexual assault on campus, the problem persists. “This isn’t an issue that’s created on campus,” Dougherty said. “It comes to campus every year.”
Mandatory reporting was a step in the right direction, but Dougherty would like to see a more fundamental shift in how these issues get talked about. “The focus continues to be on the targets and on the specific predator,” she said. “We need to look at the larger culture that makes those behaviors possible.”