Til it happens to you - Sexual violence on campus

Bystander intervention videos help provide prevention guidelines 

by Tarah Hodgkinson

There were six educated, relatively privileged, Canadian women sitting at that table. And yet not one of us was free from the experience, or the fear, of victimization, especially on university campuses.

Last year I attended a Take Back the Night event with several women in downtown Vancouver. We took over the streets protesting women’s inequality and violence against women. A few of us gathered for dinner beforehand and began to discuss the issue of victimization and sexual assault. Soon the stories about each individual’s experience, the experience of her friends, her sisters, her cousins, her colleagues and other women came to light.

I realized how many of my female counterparts had been sexually victimized in one way or another and how much of this seemed to happen in and around our undergraduate degrees.

SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

Recently Mateja blogged here about safety and prevention in elementary schools. We also need to discuss sexual assaults occurring across North American college and university campuses every day. Until recently little attention has been paid to this issue.

CBC News has tried to gather data on campus sexual assaults across Canada. They found that over 700 women had reported in the last few years, but this fails to acknowledge that more than 65% of women do not report sexual assault to officials. This is not surprising considering less than one percent of reported cases result in formal action.

Several schools in Canada also reported no sexual assaults in spite of the fact that research indicates almost 40% of women over the age of 16 have experienced sexual assault.

Comedic videos offer another way to humanize sex assault statistics 

Unlike the U.S., who has passed a federal law that all universities must report ALL crimes on campus, Canadian colleges and universities are not required to publish reported crimes like the number of sexual assaults.

Several universities across Canada have surveyed students and drafted new sexual assault policies in the wake of recent high-profile cases. But far too little is being done on the prevention side. While some universities have developed poster campaigns or coffee cups messages to draw awareness to the issue, few seem to have any active prevention policies.

Universities may claim that it is not their responsibility to address prevention and that the police or other agencies have that responsibility. However, the U.S. Department of Justice found that college-aged women (18-24 years of age) have the highest risk of sexual victimization of any group of women.

PREVENTION

Prevention can involve many things. Many argue that first we need to change rape culture and they are correct. However, these strategies will take time and in that time women are being victimized.

Some steps are already occurring. At Western University in London, Ontario, there is a dedicated CPTED expert who reviews buildings and grounds for potential crime opportunities. In Quebec, Bishop's University requires sexual violence prevention training for all incoming first-year students. The University of Toronto also offers something similar.

Several other universities across the country offer blue-light posts/poles in public areas that allow potential victims to hit a button and speak with security or notify them of their whereabouts. Others offer walk-home services, in which a male and female volunteer will walk a student home late at night.

Campus student patrols - a fixture at many universities

Some action has been taken, but these strategies are merely band-aid solutions. If universities are extensions of our neighborhoods, perhaps we need to create places where this conversation can be expanded further? For example, on university campuses many women’s centers exist, yet there are no centers for men.

Many criticize men’s centers by claiming that all places are men’s places but these centers could be headed by trained feminist men, in partnership with women’s centers, who can encourage nonjudgmental and open conversations about proper consent, among other things.

A non-university example of this kind of culture jamming center called the Dude's Club, already exists in Vancouver. This may be a better way to change the cultural narrative by creating a safe space to learn to act differently in public spaces.

What does "good" look like? The story of Westville

There's plenty to complain about when it comes to crime neighborhoods. Not enough cops. No social help. Groups tripping over each other. Warehousing the poor into tract housing. The list goes on.

What does the "ideal" neighborhood look like?




I doubt there is an “ideal” safe neighborhood. Still, it is easier to complain about what is bad rather than imagining what good looks like. So imagine this...

Imagine a neighborhood in an old historic city, population 130,000 (300,000 in surrounding areas). Imagine over a third of the population are poor and the city has a long history of crime. There are, of course, safe places sprinkled around as there are nasty gang-ridden crime hotspots. Our neighborhood lies on the north-west corridor of the city.

This is a real neighborhood where I used to live. It is called Westville and it is in New Haven, Connecticut. It came to mind when I thought about good neighborhood development.

You can live in New Haven and never see violent crime, or you can walk in some neighborhoods and see gang shootings. In the 1990s, as elsewhere, crime declined. But murders have changed direction since 2000 and there are worries about teen violence. Youth curfews are discussed even though of 9,000 city teens only a few hundred account for most teen violence. Still, shootings and violence ripple through some neighborhoods like fear-generating tsunami.

Then there is Westville. In the north of Westville, West Rock Mountain towers over some of the poorest homes. In the south of Westville, some of the wealthiest. In the more-or-less center lies a small commercial corridor with restaurants, shops, a nearby park, and mixed housing of various incomes. To me this core area was the most vulnerable to the larger forces of change, change that might go in either direction.

Over the years a small group of residents, artists, and business owners began to turn things around. First they organized pot-lucks, art-walks, festivals, and other informal get-togethers. That got people to dialogue. Then a local activist convinced housing groups to look at Westville. Change at that point was slow.

I went to one meeting where residents told a private developer not to go away, but instead to modify the shape and scale of his multi-unit housing – some of which he did. I saw police work with neighbors at a liquor board hearing to get a bar owner to curb disorder problems at his bar. I watched shop owners fixing their storefronts with city funding and then hiring someone to sweep the street.

On their own these events are unremarkable. Coordinated together over time, they add up. They ignited community cohesion that triggered change. When a plan surfaced to widen streets and increase speeds along the main street through Westville, residents sought and won a historic district designation to stop it. If you've ever read work by famed urbanist Jane Jacobs - Westville is history repeating itself.

Today a permanent neighborhood association has formed to carry work forward. It connects Westville together. Their websites say it all.

See the Westville site
See their neighborhood organization

You could say Westville was successful because rich residents to the south anted up and got cops to tackle crime. You could, but that’s not how it happened. Police played a role. But in many instances they were asked to play a role, not do it themselves. Nowadays you can see from the Westville websites how vibrant the place is today. Take a look at the crime maps of New Haven and Westville.

Look at the crime maps

Search the map from Jan to Dec 2008. You’ll see only a tiny handful of crime reports in Westville compared to everywhere else in the city. At the beginning, when I lived there, crime was more common. I brought my university crime prevention students to Westville to study crime trends. It was a very different place then to what it has become today.

Westville is not perfect. Nowhere is. There are complaints about rowdy students in the new multi-family housing. There is a rash of graffiti. Yet people are speaking up and coordinating their actions in an organized way. Clearly, something positive is going on. We can learn from this.

I once asked what is meant by the term "healthy neighborhood". A healthy immune system lets a person recover quickly after an illness. Same in a healthy neighborhood like Westville. That is what neighborhoods should look like.

Preventing crime in LA

Check out this video. It explains the approach adopted by Bratton and mentioned by J. Q. Wilson in the previous blogs.

2007 - From the video clip: "We can talk crime prevention all day...if we're not engaged with the community, if the community is not engaged with us to point out who is doing what...there are too few of us to be in every neighborhood." Jim McDonnell, LAPD Assistant Chief. 2007

1961 - From Jane Jacobs: "The public peace of cities is ...kept primarily by an intricate, network of voluntary controls and standards among people themselves. No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down." Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities