“When campus rape is treated as a PR problem, survivors become liabilities to be controlled, silenced and swept away.”

Writing at Al Jazeera, Dana Bolger explains how the corporatization of higher education — in which “reputation, not education, is the goal” — creates an approach to combating campus sexual assault that is about “the reduction of harm to universities, not to students.”

When campus rape is treated as a PR problem, survivors become liabilities to be controlled, silenced and swept away. Enrolled at institutions that host holiday dinners and fireside chats with their presidents, victims who come forward about their assaults might expect to be heard and protected; instead they too often find the pretense of familial love stripped away as they are placed under school-instituted gagorders, encouraged totake time off from their educations, retaliated against, suspended, expelled or even forcibly institutionalized. Researchers have found that this institutional betrayal (PDF) worsens the psychological and physical effects of sexual violence, exacerbating anxiety, dissociation and other symptoms. Some victims call their institution’s betrayal worse than the assault itself.

Universities, under the guidance of risk management firms, are increasingly taking merely performative steps — constructing highly visible but limitedly helpful blue light systems on their campuses, creating confidentiality policies that do more to shield schools than support survivors and implementing consent education programming that scarcely discusses consent at all. At Yale, administrators have hosted pie-baking contests to encourage healthy interaction, and at my alma mater, Amherst College, a campus committee has suggested outdoor movies to do the same. These efforts are little more than window dressing. They symbolize a professed attention to compliance but do little to meaningfully address violence on campus.

Read the rest here.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

Read more about Maya

Join the Conversation