Preventing Relationship and Sexual Violence on College Campuses

STACY LEE: Welcome everyone and thanks for joining us for the webinar Preventing Relationship and Sexual Violence on College Campuses in the US, hosted by the National Institute of Justice. It is my pleasure to introduce Christine Crossland, a Senior Social Science Analyst at the National Institute of Justice.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Thank you, Stacy. And welcome everybody. Good afternoon, morning, or evening, wherever you find yourself. We appreciate your participation in today's webinar. As Stacy mentioned, I'm Tina Crossland, Senior Social Science Analyst in our Office of Violence and Victimization Prevention. We're very honored today to have Dr. Nancy La Vigne, NIJ's Director joining us. Nancy, thank you for taking time out of your day to be part of this discussion.

DR. NANCY LA VIGNE: It's my pleasure. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very much looking forward to this presentation myself, and we have a great panel of experts who will be sharing their knowledge with you today. I also want to thank them for taking time out of their busy schedules to share information on a really important issue. As I think we all know, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And that means that it's an opportunity, regardless of all the things we do throughout the year, to recognize issues of sexual assault, sexual assault awareness, and ways to prevent and respond to it. This month in particular, is a time to take stock on ways that we can better honor and serve survivors as well as what knowledge have we developed, and how can that knowledge be used to better prevent sexual violence, and when it does occur, find ways to heal the harms caused by these types of offenses. 

Now, NIJ has been toiling away at building research and finding ways to apply the findings from that research on the topic of sexual assault and relationship violence for many years. And we haven't done it alone. We've done it in close partnership with, for example, the Office on Violence Against Women, the Office for Victims of Crime, and many other federal agencies, as well as research partners throughout the country, and the all-important college and university campuses that are working to document when these types of events occur and find ways to prevent them. Part of that documentation is the collection of data, the systematic collection of data. We know that that has increased a lot thanks to the Clery Act and most campuses are collecting basic information when events of sexual assault occur on or in close proximity to campus. And they're often collecting other data as well. There's a lot of rich data that could be collected, and it's not just a matter of collecting the data and making these events transparent so that the campus community can be aware. But it's also about mining those data to better understand how variations exist across experiences with different demographics, different contexts, how variations exist in prevalence, and predictors that might occur differently in different types of campus settings. There's so much that we can learn from this data, and I'm just so excited that this presentation today will be digging into that more deeply. 

So, we hope you find this information helpful and that you'll learn something new, and importantly not just a new fact, but new information that can help better serve survivors of sexual assault on campuses, as well as prevent these acts from the future. So, I want to just close by encouraging your participation. There's a lot of different ways that you can engage with our presenters. There's the Q&A feature on the Webex platform. There'll be opportunities to engage with some real time polling that the presenters will share with you, putting questions up on the screen that you can answer. Those are fun because you can also see how other people respond. It's our way of keeping you engaged even in this virtual environment. So again, I want to thank our presenters for sharing their knowledge and joining us in this space and thank all of you. And I really want to thank Tina Crossland and our many staff who are making webinar possible – Stacy Lee and, I think Daryl's on this one too – folks behind the scenes who make it all happen, I'm so appreciative of you. I will now turn it back to you, Tina.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Great. Thank you, Nancy. We really appreciate you being here for the discussion today. So, before we begin, I want to do a quick introduction of our presenters. The first presenter is Dr. Lisa Fedina, an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Her research is focused on connections between forms of violence across the lifespan. We're also very proud to say that she is a recipient of an NIJ Research Assistantship and Graduate Research Fellowship, and we're so glad she's really expanding upon her scholarship. Co-presenting with her today are Doctors Rich Tolman and Todd Herrenkohl, who are professors also at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Dr. Tolman's work focuses on the effectiveness of interventions designed to change violence and abusive behavior and the impact of violence on the physical, psychological, and economic well-being of victims. Dr. Herrenkohl's work primarily focuses on the areas of child and family well-being, child maltreatment, and the psychosocial and development underpinnings of health-risk behaviors in youth and adults, substance use, mental and physical health outcomes of adversity, and resilience. And now, for the reason we're all here today, Lisa, I'm going to turn things over to you to help get us started. So, whenever you're ready.

DR. LISA FEDINA: Thank you so much, Tina. Thank you so much, Director La Vigne. We are just so excited to have this opportunity to present on the topic of campus sexual assault and relationship violence for NIJ's April Sexual Assault Awareness Month. So, thank you so much. We're really appreciative of everybody in the audience for making time to be here today. First, we just want to start with some acknowledgements. First and foremost, to NIJ for supporting this work and this study which looked at the prevalence and predictors of campus sexual assault among college students in the US. Our team members, which in addition to myself, Todd and Rich, also included some really wonderful data managers, research assistants, and our partners at Vector Solutions, who worked with us to obtain the data that we used in this study. And then, we also wanted to just acknowledge our existing partners and collaborations with our campus and community partners. So these groups consist of practitioners, of advocates, student representatives, local community members and survivors who participated in many meetings, many community conversations on this study, and really helped to contribute to the translation of findings to practice and policy. 

We wanted to kick things off with a couple of polling questions just to let us know how you first learned about this webinar, and then also for us to get a sense who's in the audience. So, you should be receiving a polling question. So, if you could answer, yes, “How did you first learn about this webinar?” And I'll give folks just a few seconds to answer. So we have a lot of folks who learned about this webinar via email, so--as well as some colleagues, listservs, et cetera. Thank you so much for sharing that information. That's very helpful to NIJ just to get a sense of where people are hearing about these webinars. So, thank you. 

The next polling question is, “What role would best describe you in your current organization?” We have a couple more seconds. Wow. Okay. We have basically from every role here. It's a pretty equal split. Although a good amount, 20%, from victim service providers and advocates, so that's awesome. And we have a handful of students, some policy makers and administrators, some criminal justice practitioners, educators. So, everybody, from this list is in this audience, which is fantastic. 

And then, last question, “Can you tell us what sector is your work primarily focused in?” We've just a couple more seconds to wrap up. Excellent. Okay. So we have about a third of the audience from academia, including some campus staff, about 20% from government, federal, state, or local, and then a sprinkling of folks from every other area, industry, NGO, public health, public safety, and others. So, thank you so much for answering those. Whether you're a seasoned pro in the field, or if you're just getting started, or if you simply just want to do more around this issue of sexual assault prevention on college campuses, your experience brings a really unique perspective to our discussion today. We will be asking you to share your thoughts and reactions to our study findings, and ideas on how we can move the field forward to implement more effective prevention strategies and help to improve how our institutions can better respond. 

Our learning objectives for today are to really just provide some high-level findings on patterns of sexual and relationship violence among college student populations, to identify implications for intervention and prevention approaches that can reduce violence on campus, and to identify some strategies that might better assess institutional-level or campus-level factors that contribute to students' experiences of violence. As Tina had mentioned earlier, we really want this webinar to be interactive and we're really looking forward to hearing your thoughts, reactions, and questions. And so, at a couple of places during this presentation, we'll be posing some questions to you, and then we'll be asking you to enter your responses into the chat feature, and share those responses with everybody. And Todd and Rich will be helping keep track of those as well to help facilitate our discussion. 

Preventing sexual assault among college students in the US has been an ongoing national priority. Prevalence studies that have used behaviorally based measures of sexual assault across different types of universities have fairly consistently suggested that one in four or one in five undergraduate women report sexual assault victimization. Additionally, the field has referred to a period of heightened victimization that occurs towards the beginning of a student's freshman year. This high-risk period is commonly referred to as the Red Zone. And given that many campus prevention strategies assume high risk in that early period, more reliable estimates of campus sexual assault during those first few months of college would be valuable. And these data are especially needed for historically underserved and marginalized student groups, including LGBTQIA+ students, students of color, to better understand the level of risks that these students face during this critical period. Furthermore, methodological limitations largely due to issues around sample size have limited the ability of researchers to disaggregate students' data specifically racial and ethnic, gender and sexual minority data. But ultimately, this type of research is really needed to understand the unique needs and experiences of students on college campuses and to guide tailored strategies for prevention and intervention. 

So, we conducted a secondary data analysis of the sexual assault prevention for undergrads course. This is formally known as Haven, online campus sexual assault intervention, and it consists of pre-intervention and post-intervention data gathered from students entering college across all 50 states. Some folks might be familiar with the Sexual Assault Prevention for Undergrads Program. You might even use it currently on your college campus as part of sexual assault prevention programming that's required by Title IX. The purpose of our study was not to evaluate the sexual assault prevention for undergrads intervention but to really capitalize on the strengths of this dataset, to fill gaps in research on knowledge specifically among different populations and subgroups of students, and to really better understand what differences might exist in the prevalence and predictors of sexual and relationship violence. The major strengths of this dataset, first, these data are anonymized. They are comprised of students from many different types of universities across all 50 states. It includes data across five academic years, and it has a very large sample size that really allows for analyses between and within groups that have, generally, have had low representation in research due to methodological challenges. 

The survey items in this dataset measure theoretically relevant constructs that drive most campus sexual assault prevention programs, and so the analyses using these data can be highly practical, as well as policy relevant. So, data on students' perceptions of their campus norms are included, their perceptions of their institutional responses to sexual assault are measured, students' attitudes towards consent, attitudes towards sexual assault and related myths or beliefs are captured, as well as some bystander-related items, particularly bystander efficacy. And then, in addition to these kinds of student-level predictors, the data have questions on students' experiences with both victimization and perpetration of unwanted sexual contact, as well as dating abuse and harassment, specifically within those first three months of college, of enrollment. The most recent data, which was from academic year 2021, has a sample size of approximately 600,000 students. 

Our analysis looked at the prevalence and student-level predictors of sexual and relationship violence, victimization, and perpetration across student subgroups, specifically looking across multiple gender identities, multiple sexual orientation groups, and multiple racial and ethnic identity groups, while accounting for school-level characteristics such as school size, whether the university is public or private, those types of characteristics. 

To date, we have published two manuscripts that report on subgroup differences in dating abuse and harassment among sexual and gender minority students. The first manuscript shown here appeared in a special issue on violence within sexual and gender minority communities. And this special issue was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. And the second publication here was published in BMC Public Health that looked at the subgroup differences in the outcomes specifically for unwanted sexual contact victimization. So today, we just wanted to highlight a few key takeaways from these manuscripts. First, we found that a large proportion, 17% of students reported victimization prior to entering college, before entering college. And this is a very important finding. It's one that is consistent with the literature on campus sexual assault suggesting that many students do indeed come to college with histories of childhood or adolescent sexual assault and that they may be at greater risk for facing re-victimization once they arrive on campus. 

Second, we found that there were significant differences in victimization during college by race, by sexual orientation, as well as gender identity, such that gender minority groups, sexual minority groups, and students who in particular identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or multiracial, reported among the highest rates of unwanted sexual contact just within those first three months of college. The inequities across race, gender identity, and sexual orientation are consistent with findings from studies of the general population, particularly national surveys on intimate partner violence and sexual violence. And so, our findings extend this knowledge to include college student populations that have been methodologically difficult to capture in some of the more traditional campus climate surveys. 

We also explored racial and ethnic differences within gender groups and within sexual orientation groups. And so within most gender and sexual identities students who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander reported the highest rates of unwanted sexual contact victimization during college. The data points on the right, the column on the right, highlight some of the findings by some of the subgroups but not all and I'll just highlight a few. Notably, over a third of Black and African American students identifying as trans women reported victimization within the first three months of college. Over half of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander students who identified as trans men reported victimization just within those first three months of college. These elevated risks of victimization remained for these groups even after controlling for campus characteristics and the findings were generally consistent across multiple years of the data. We also found similar patterns with these inequities, with the dating abuse outcomes as well as the harassment outcomes, such that students of color from these same sexual and gender minority groups also experienced higher rates of dating abuse and harassment within those first three months. Like all studies, there are limitations to these data which we detail in our publications that I've referenced earlier. And while these data are important to understand students' experiences of victimization, further research is ultimately needed to identify what the mechanisms are that are contributing to victimization among students of color and among LGBTQIA+ students, particularly mechanisms that relate to the role of structural, institutional, and community level barriers, factors such as pertaining to service access and resource access, legal protections, racial discrimination, stigma, how these types of factors might be influencing victimization outcomes. 

We wanted to pause at this moment to ask the audience what are your thoughts on these findings, and what factors or mechanisms do you think might be contributing to these differential rates of unwanted sexual contact as well as dating abuse and harassment? And so, we ask that you please type your responses in the chat box, and Todd and Rich will be collecting those, kind of, keeping track of those responses for our discussion. 

To begin to address this question around the factors or the mechanisms that are contributing to these inequities among students, we are conducting several analyses that we have underway, one, being a multiple group path analysis predicting victimization outcomes across student racial, gender, and sexual orientation groups. Preliminary analyses suggest that there are some group differences across student level predictors. So, for example, heterosexual students typically held more negative attitudes towards consent or more likely to uphold more myths about sexual assault and had lower levels of bystander efficacy as well as more favorable perceptions of their campus, or more positive perceptions of their campus around sexual assault response compared to students who identified as sexual minorities. Cisgender males held more negative attitudes toward consent in sexual assault compared to cisgender females and gender minority students. And then, we also saw some variation in these preliminary analyses across school characteristics such that students from larger universities and from public institutions versus mid-size or smaller universities or private institutions typically held more negative perceptions of their campus norms around sexual assault and reporting. So these are some preliminary analyses that we're trying to do to help explain what factors, mechanisms might help or that might be contributing to the inequities that we're seeing. I'll pause at this point to see if Todd and Rich, do you have anything to add on findings or results thus far, or anything else? I'm doing a lot of talking, so offer it up to you both if you have anything to add.

DR. TODD HERRENKOHL: I was just going to say on this particular slide, although these findings are preliminary, they begin hint at both the differences, Lisa, as you've talked about, in exposure rates. But also here, we begin to see differences, group-based differences in risk exposure and in context in the ways in which these things converge on the outcomes that we're seeing. So, I mean, from a prevention standpoint, as we get further into this and begin to talk about that, findings like these, I think, really become important to consider.

DR. LISA FEDINA: Thank you, Todd. Rich, did you have anything to add?

DR. RICHARD TOLMAN: Yeah. I was monitoring the chat, a few things have popped in there that I think are relevant to this discussion, some participants' thoughts on what some of the factors that might be in play. One comments about poor relationship and sexual education and secondary education. And I just wanted to highlight that because our findings about exposure to violence prior to coming to college campuses just really reminds us that a lot happens before people get to campus, and that what happens on campus is going to be influenced by those previous experiences. So, people who have had that kind of exposure, depending on how it was responded to in previous institutional settings may make them less or more trusting of what kind of response will happen on campus, for instance. So, I just think that developmental perspective is really important to highlight.

DR. LISA FEDINA: Thank you, Rich. Great. Well, we'll continue to keep track of your responses to inform our discussion later. We wanted to move to highlight some implications for practice policy and research. So, these findings really highlight the need for prioritized funding, resources, and culturally relevant services on campuses particularly for American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students, as well as other students of color who also identify as a sexual and gender minority. Additionally, there were large proportions of sexual and gender minority students, particularly those students who also identify as students of color, experienced victimization prior to entering campus, right? So, those same groups of students who experienced elevated rates during college also experienced much higher rates of dating abuse, harassment, and sexual assault prior to entering college. So this really suggests that violence prevention programming and policies on college campuses need to account for students' histories of victimization, given that many of the same student groups who were victimized within those first three months of college also had the same or very high rates of victimization prior to entering college. And so, the prevention of re-victimization during college is essential to reduce the disparities that we're seeing by race and ethnicity within these gender identity groups and sexual orientation subpopulations. 

Finally, effective prevention strategies on campuses might also have the potential to reduce subsequent perpetration after leaving college. So, the types of interventions and strategies that are being implemented may affect and reduce behaviors, for example, of sexual harassment in the workplace or reduced intimate partner violence or partner abuse after leaving college and offer greater use of remedies for victimization in settings outside of college campuses after students graduate. 

The 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act includes many changes to the response and prevention of campus sexual assault, particularly around the campus climate survey data collection processes. So, our findings, I think, have implications for this such that climate surveys should be using and including the use of valid, reliable, and culturally-relevant measures of victimization, as well as perpetration experiences, and include measures to test mechanisms that might help explain and contextualize disparities and rates of victimization, particularly variables that assess structural factors, structural inequalities that limit resource access that limit legal protections for different racial, sexual and gender minority groups. In addition to campus climate survey data collection, there is a need for an approach that would support what we're calling a data ecosystem, right? This need for a thoughtful data ecosystem that moves beyond some of those cross-sectional survey data and data that's collected for the purposes of compliance within universities to useful data collection that will ultimately inform interventions. Relatedly, while we need to capture that individual-level data to inform programs like survivor support, to inform bystander intervention programs, we also need strategies that target institutional-level factors that contribute to building trustworthy, safe, and inclusive environments. In particular, we need research, education, and practice strategies that foster safe and inclusive social environments by addressing institutions and not just individuals within those institutions. Violence and harm are products of systems. So, understanding the mechanisms that create these harms and developing ways to intervene in those systems will ultimately do more to reduce violence. 

Now we wanted to turn to some prevention approaches and strategies that can further knowledge on how to prevent sexual assault and particularly in groups of students who are facing these inequities and at greatest risk. The public health model of prevention is one way, one platform of thinking about the levels of prevention that we can do this work at. So, we have primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. Many folks who work in the area of prevention emphasize the need for prevention to occur under all of these domains and really underscore the need to intervene early to lessen the risk and enhance protection for vulnerable groups. There is also some variation in this model that relates less to the timing of prevention strategies than the levels or risks themselves. So, universal programs are intended for everyone regardless of level of risks. Selective programs are intended for groups at somewhat elevated risks for a given outcome like campus sexual assault. Indicated approaches are for those who have already been exposed with the idea of lessening outcomes and consequences of assault and preventing reoccurrence. 

We also wanted to share some examples of primary/universal, secondary/selective, and tertiary, indicated prevention programs. So, upstream approaches in public health typically refer to programs that are intended to lessen risk for sexual assault. So, these are programs at the top, such Culture of Respect, the Green Dot Program, Bringing in the Bystander, whereas, the downstream approaches are intended to reduce negative outcomes and to prevent the recurrence of assault in individuals or groups that have already been exposed. These include things like campus counseling and support services, healthcare and health services for survivors, Title IX, campus police response, et cetera, are all part of the downstream approach to preventing sexual and relationship violence. 

Prevention strategies in college campuses currently focus on individuals, so on survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. These include programs such as risk reduction programs for individuals to reduce their risk of experiencing assault, reducing individuals' engagement in abusive or violent behaviors, and engaging peers and bystanders to change social norms and to empower individuals to intervene. But we need approaches across all levels of prevention and across all levels of the social ecology that address and shift social norms, policies, and procedures that will ultimately lead to the reduction of perpetration of sexual and relationship violence. So, the ecological framework provides a useful model for thinking about comprehensive prevention strategies that span levels of the social ecology and build on the tiers reflected in the previous slides. So, strategies at the organizational and community-level might engage leadership in promoting a culture of safety, a culture of respect at an organizational-level, or strengthen supports or enforcement responses on or off campus at the community-level. And so, these are some frameworks of prevention that we wanted to share and really emphasize the importance of working across levels of prevention and across all of these levels at the social ecology, individual, peer, organizational and community. So, I'll pause at this moment to see, yeah, Todd, Rich, if there's anything additional you had to add on prevention or anything else?

DR. TODD HERRENKOHL: The only thing I would add here — and I appreciate, Lisa, what you just said about working across levels of the social ecology. Clearly that would be important, and then in an ideal sense, aligning programs with the identified risk and protective factors, right, on a particular campus. So, that kind of tailoring idea, I think becomes really critical, particularly in light of the fact that there are limited resources typically for these kinds of efforts.

DR. LISA FEDINA: All right. Thank you for that one.

DR. RICHARD TOLMAN: Yeah. I’ll just maybe weigh in a little bit now, though we could talk about more if there's interest as well. But I think when we think about this ecological framework and the multiple levels in which interventions are taking place and overtime on a campus, there may be interventions as you were showing in the stream slide that occur at the beginning of someone's college career and then throughout their time on campus. We take into consideration that there's multiple touch points across time and that interventions may be hopping in at multiple levels. We can't really depend on simple cross-sectional surveys of the campus to capture what might be moving the needle or what might be capturing change. And that's that bullet point from the previous slide about a data ecosystem, how can we think about tons of information that we need on campuses that can really drive and inform ideas about what's working and what's effective and what combinations, interventions preventive interventions and other changes in programs and policies, what really drives a difference in both prevention of sexual assault, unwanted sexual contact and other forms of violence, but also effective responses to survivors of people who do experience those.

DR. LISA FEDINA: Thank you, Rich. That's a really nice segue into this next slide on future research. Our findings have a number of implications for future research as well along with this idea of a data ecosystem. There has been a number of methodological challenges that have prevented researchers from accessing campus-level factors. Those thinking of the social ecology, the institutional, the community-level factors that might be associated with violence. Particularly in conjunction with the individual-level factors, student-level factors that are associated with violence, which is critical to influence institutional-level change and to create strategies that meet the needs of all survivors. Relatedly, to implement prevention and intervention programming meaningfully and effectively on college campuses, it's necessary to determine if and how campus characteristics differentially affect students across race and ethnicity, across sexual and gender identities. And so there really is a need for datasets that layer on variables across ecological levels, potentially using methods such as data harmonization that would integrate and unify multiple sources of data. So the sexual assault prevention for undergrad dataset that we're working with currently offers significant potential to integrate variables at the student and interpersonal level with other sources of data that would capture the institutional information and campus level factors that we're trying to identify and understand and really maximize the opportunity to answer some more novel research questions that are difficult to address in a single cross-sectional survey as Rich was discussing. By using the sexual assault prevention for undergrads data, it would allow us to determine if there are certain campus characteristics related to demographics, related to the climate, other contextual factors on campus that are more strongly associated with violence and are particular racial and ethnic, sexual, and gender identity groups. But this is challenging to do in datasets with small sample sizes or with datasets that typically collect and assess these factors separately. 

So, we wanted to pause again and once again, solicit feedback and thoughts and reactions from the audience on this particular question of institutional and campus-level factors. So, we're really interested in hearing from you, the audience, about what variables we should be thinking about for our data harmonization efforts. We have some ideas, but there are so many experts in the audience that we know you have a lot to offer as well. So, what types of institutional or campus-level factors should we be looking at that might be influencing student experiences and outcomes related to sexual and relationship violence? And if you would like to type those into the chat, that would be fantastic. And Todd and Rich can gather those. 

in conclusion, there are notable racial and ethnic differences within multiple gender identity groups and multiple sexual orientation groups. Some of these student groups are experiencing victimization at very high rates just within the first three months of college. Preliminary analyses in these data suggest that there are some group differences in victimization outcomes across student-level predictors, which may help explain some of these inequities across race, gender, and sexual orientation. An ecological model can guide comprehensive responses to the risks that exist on college campuses for sexual and relationship violence. But most prevention strategies are currently targeted at survivor, perpetrator, or bystander levels rather than the institutional level. So future research must continue to investigate campus or institutional-level factors that are associated with victimization to inform policies and practices across the levels of prevention and that develop approaches to data collection that can inform integration of data sources, unifying of data sources that could allow us to look at this in a more holistic way. Finally, there is a need for campuses associated with efforts around data collection to go beyond compliance and to develop meaningful interventions and to demonstrate their effectiveness overtime. So, I can pause here to check in, Rich and Todd, if there's anything else you have to add? Otherwise, that's all we have for today. Rich and Todd, did you have any other conclusions or final thoughts?

DR. RICHARD TOLMAN: Well, I just wanted to bring in some of the things that are getting mentioned in the chat that's relevant to all that we've talked about. And one comment was about the reputation of the Title IX office as an institutional factor. To go back to the idea that so many students on campus are bringing previous experience with unwanted sexual contact and other forms of violence with them when they get to campus, to the extent that there's institutional betrayal or lack of trust in those earlier experiences, people are also, no doubt, bringing that to campus along with them. And that could increase the distrust that students have in what kind of response they're going to get to a report of unwanted sexual contact once they're on campus. And that intersects, I think, with the racial and ethnic identities and the sexual minority identities that people are bringing to campus as well, where they'll have increased reason to be mistrustful. Both a local or current reputation intersecting with those previous experiences is a really powerful combination and maybe suggest that the kinds of responses that we have really have to be tailored and directed towards those communities. 

Another related comment to that was a suggestion of peer-to-peer events and approaches as being really important. And again, that really is important to think of who are students' peers? Who do they relate to? Who looks like them? Who has an identity that maps out onto theirs? And so, the involvement of students in those minoritized groups in prevention programs and representation in those programs would be really a critical factor. I'll pause there. There were some other comments too, but I wondered if Todd picked up anything or there's any responses to what I just shared.

 

DR. TODD HERRENKOHL: Yeah. I'll just also offer that there were some good comments that were coming in earlier in the presentation around factors contributing to some of the subgroup differences that we're seeing, things around cultural bias and cultural influences, system level kinds of factors, power and privilege. Of course, all these things are really important. And again, kind of underscoring, I think this focus on prevention and how we're trying to articulate pathways to prevention. Really investigating these factors become so critical, right? So as we begin to think about what are the universal programs and more tailored approaches that we need to be considering, really understanding, unpacking these findings just becomes really important. I'm excited about the next stage of the research that we're planning to do. And it sounds like folks in the audience here are also very engaged and interested on what might come of that. So, appreciate all the comments people are making.

DR. LISA FEDINA: Wonderful. Thank you, Rich. And thank you, Todd, for those initial comments. So that is all we have for you today. At this point, we turn back over to Tina and we are excited to answer questions and continue our discussion.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: I just want to thank our presenters and I also want to thank the audience engagement participation. It's really great to have that real-time feedback. I have at least four questions that I don't think were answered. So, I'm going to ask those. The first one is, “For a graduate-level institution, is any of the research based upon post-graduate students?”

DR. LISA FEDINA: That is a great question. “Does any of these data reflect graduate students?” There were graduate students, yes, in this dataset. For our particular analysis, we included undergrad, yes, and up through graduate-level of students, but we did not look at potential differences between undergrads and graduate students. We may have done that probably in our early preliminary work. But that's a great point. I'm sorry, I missed who said that. Laura. Because I think the nature and context of violence and abuse changes developmentally, as students move through their college tenure and are engaging more in romantic relationships and partnerships. And so, the nature, I think, of sexual violence, dating abuse, and harassment, would be contextually different for older students. So, I appreciate that question.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Okay. The next question is, “Can you see if these students are experiencing violence from other students or people off campus?”

DR. LISA FEDINA: That's a great question, Tia. Yes, Todd and Rich remind me if I'm wrong in this dataset, but there are not additional indicators of who had perpetrated the abuse questions that are asked among victims. Was the person who did this behavior, were they another student? Were they a partner, et cetera? So, in this particular dataset that is not captured to understand who perpetrated the abuse. Rich and Todd, is that your recollection as well?

DR. RICHARD TOLMAN: Yeah, there's no data when people are reporting on victimization of who was the perpetrator of the victimization. But we do have data on perpetration, though the measure isn't something that we feel that we have as much confidence about as the victimization measure. And in that case, that gives us a window into who is willing to say that they've participated in unconsented sexual activity while on campus. The data on that, at least among cisgendered heterosexual men in some preliminary analysis that we ran showed that those men were likely to have more rape-accepting attitudes than other men. I think that's not maybe a surprising association with actual perpetration or reported perpetration of sexual assault. But another level of our analysis showed that. This relates to some of what was coming up in the chat as well. Students who said that they were going to become associated with Greek life or with athletics were more likely to report that they had perpetrated unwanted sexual contact. So, that's at least a window into some propensity for becoming a perpetrator of campus sexual assault and maybe validates some of the campus approaches that do look at some high-risk groups on campus and target them specifically for preventive intervention, knowing that that's a place where there may be higher levels of perpetration.

DR. TODD HERRENKOHL: Christine, one of the people in the audience mentioned, I think that this is in relation to the comments I was making about risk factors, reminding us that disability status can be another risk factor putting people in vulnerable situations. Christine, you may want to clarify a history of remote learning during K-12 education. What I took from that actually was there's question about whether being in kind of the pandemic mode, remote learning lessened young people's opportunity to kind of learn skills and strategies to address issues that may arise on college campuses and how that might factor in. It's kind of an interesting question about current events or recent current events, if you will, and how they may impair or influence the kinds of things that students may now be experiencing. So, anyway, it's an interesting question. Christine, feel free to clarify if there's something more there.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Okay. Another question, “What are the risk factors that render Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American students as more likely to be victims?”

DR. LISA FEDINA: Thanks, Tina. I'll clarify as well. In our dataset, we combined those two groups. So students who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, we actually combined into a single category due to sample size issues. So, I think it's just important to note that we grouped those two groups of students together after consulting with some experts who specifically work within those communities. And so, I think that's a great question, and one that we don't fully understand. Why for these students in particular? Those patterns are also consistent with what we know of adults in the general population. So national surveys have demonstrated that American Indian and Alaska Native adult men and women tend to experience exceedingly high rates of intimate partner and sexual violence. And so, I think that's being reflected within college student populations here. But we need more research. I think that better helps to explain and contextualize those risks, particularly, ones that attend to the perspective we're coming from is understanding the root causes of inequality and how historical forms of discrimination and oppression create conditions for greater levels of risk and vulnerability. In turn, how those same conditions create greater protection and privilege for individuals who are members of the dominant majority. That's a research question that I think is so important to be answered, and we could begin to get some insights if we're able to capture and integrate data that attend to those structural level factors and variables that we can only explain so much at an individual level.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Someone did ask, “Is there a profile of colleges with high stats of sexual assault from which you did your analysis?”

DR. LISA FEDINA: Was there a college or university that had a high profile?

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Well, as the colleges and the universities that reported high rates of sexual assault, if I understand the question correctly, “Is there a particular profile that stands out from that?”

DR. LISA FEDINA: That's a very good question. Thank you, Lily. That's it. The profile. Yeah. There were over 500, 600 colleges within the academic year, 2021, data. The campus characteristics that we have access to in that particular year, include things like, the campus size, their enrollment size, whether they're a small, medium, or large university, whether they're public or private, two-year or four-year. We're mostly looking at those characteristics as covariates or to control for those factors in predicting student outcomes. So, I can't for certain say that there was like a particular profile.  Todd and Rich, I don't know if you have any other thoughts to this question. But I can't think of findings off the top of my head that looked at the rates of victimization across those campuses. If, for example, it was a larger school that was public, four-year, that kind of look that had a certain profile. But that's a good question.

DR. TODD HERRENKOHL: That's a very good question. I do think that that's kind of a direction or one of the primary directions that we hope to go in, which is really trying to not establish—a profile necessarily of a particular campus. But to really understand the risk and protective factors at those different kind of levels of social ecologies, we're just talking about so that we can really inform not only theory about the ways in which sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact occurs, but also how to really intervene in a very intentional way. So the more that Lily or whoever was asking that question, is really onto something, that really understanding—the kind of a mix of these factors as it relates to the different outcomes we're looking at is super important again, from an ideological, theoretical perspective, and also a prevention and intervention standpoint.

DR. RICHARD TOLMAN: I'm just going to add that I think that's definitely a direction we want to pursue in our search both with some of the existing data we have, but to really enrich our understanding of what institutional factors are in the campuses that we have data for. If we could link those, then I think we could really shed additional light on those profiles or factors that may drive increased risk on campuses. I would just add, in addition to the demographic composition or whether it's a residential campus or a two-year, four-year campus in size, there also is the layer of whatever the campus policies and what programs and interventions are that work on that campus, and how are they distributed and how are they targeted. If we could get to that layer of data, we'd be very much adding to what we know in a helpful way that could guide campuses into addressing their particular configuration in an effective way.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: So, I do want to add that we talked a little bit about the unique nature of this particular study data, and there was a request in the Q&A section about how folks would be able to get access to these data that you all worked with. That information might help them to know the type of relationship that you had, where you started, how you got access, and where the study materials are that they may be able to get access to them. I can also provide that link information to all of our registrants when we send everybody who registered a copy of the webinar and so forth, so. Lisa?

DR. LISA FEDINA: Yeah. Rich, I'm actually wondering. Rich, if you would like to take this question about you have some a little bit of background history around the partnership and where folks can go.

DR. RICHARD TOLMAN: Yeah. It was hopeful. One of the folks on our campus that helped create the Haven sexual assault prevention intervention from the graduates had been connected to our campus and then a conversation with her had helped to really tune us in to the potential in this very large dataset that was not being leveraged so much for additional understanding. With that contact, we contacted the company that was collecting the data and asked if we could create a research partnership where we would get access to the anonymized data which we were successful at. One of the keys so the data is not directly accessible through us because we have a specialized contractual relationship. But folks can contact the current stewards of the data, Vector Solutions, to talk about potential additional research partnerships and all our documentation includes all of the work that we did to clean the data and to put it in a format that other researchers could either replicate some of the things that we've done or save them a lot of steps in accessing the data. I think we have high hopes for greater access to harmonized datasets for folks who are going to be looking at this for many years to come. This is maybe a starting point but expanding kind of systematic data gathering across campuses with good information about institutional factors in which institutional factors, I think, could really lead to people being able to see whether a campus fits and what kinds of interventions might be the most productive to be instituted on their campuses and drive policy and programmatic initiatives on campuses around the country. So I guess I'm asking back in what way can people get that access to what we've shared with NIJ to begin those next steps for access to the data.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: As with all of our NIJ-funded studies, the study landing page on the NIJ website will have any publications that are associated with this study, as well as links to where the data/study materials are archived. If it's not necessarily the data itself, it's all the data materials that were used to create the analyses because NIJ encourages the replication and duplication of NIJ-funded studies.

I don't know if anybody got a chance to look at the Q&A. I don't think I missed a question, but I could be wrong. Just by way of a reminder, I know people are starting to drop off, but we do plan to have an email sent to all our registrants that will give you a link to this particular webinar and the slide deck that you have seen today. We can also include information regarding the other study materials that you may want to access as well. 

Lisa, Todd, and Rich, we did have a request if they could provide your contact information, so if anybody wants to reach out to you; if you could go ahead and type your email address into the chat box now, so anybody would like to reach out to you knows how to. We can also make sure that that's sent to everybody when we send out the materials. 

There is another question: “Have data been set that were not anonymized so that the students who have been victimized could get the help they need.” The data are anonymized, so that would be a no.

DR. LISA FEDINA: Yes. Natalie, I will say, the person who asked this question. Students who were responding to these surveys were provided with resources and supports. So, if students did want to seek help and report or seek health care, mental health support, whatever they might need, then they were provided with those resources at the time of the data collection.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Well, I think we do not have any further questions. I do want to provide an opportunity for our presenters to make any last-minute comments before I'll wrap things up. Lisa?

DR. LISA FEDINA: I'll just say thank you so much for everybody for being here. There is some really wonderful feedback that folks have provided around explaining and understanding experiences across student groups and the types of structural factors or campus-level variables we should be thinking about in our next steps in this work, so just really thank folks for sharing really helpful and insightful feedback. Just thank you for your time and please don't hesitate to reach out to any of us if we can be helpful, and no matter what sector that you're in or the work that you're doing.

DR. TODD HERRENKOHL: Yeah. I'll just echo Lisa's comments and just say, again, that we really are interested, Rich, Lisa, and I in dialoging and having opportunities to collaborate around these data to the extent that we're able or other projects that people are working on. This is such a critical area of research and I think one of the things that we've realized very quickly is just that there's not a ton of researchers out there. There's just not a great deal that's published in this area, particularly around campus-level influences. So, to the extent that we can work together to elevate the importance of that work and begin to dig in around these issues, I think, the better. So, again, do reach out and know that we're interested in connecting.

DR. RICHARD TOLMAN: I would add that campuses should not be such a dangerous place for students and institutional betrayal or lack of proper institutional response should not add to the damage that's done. So, it's a really crucial area for all of us to be working in and to do our best to see about what we can do to move the needle. I just wanted to thank NIJ for the support and the vision to continue to support this kind of work because it is really important. And this is one of the places where this kind of work is really being fostered, so thank you so much for that. Also I'd go echo our accessibility for folks who want to talk more or add some further thoughts would be very useful for us going forward, so thanks.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Okay. So again, I see a lot of thumbs up. I see a lot of applause, emojis, and hearts going up, so I appreciate the fact that you join me in thanking our presenters and expressing appreciation for their valuable insight and dedication to addressing this particular problem. I know I'm walking away with a few things which are although we've made a lot of progress in addressing sexual violence on campuses. I think today's webinar shows that there's still much work to be done as colleges and universities improve their ability to receive and respond to reports of sexual abuse and violence. They must be sure not to neglect the actual prevention of it. Also, while good prevention program models already exist, I think today's findings highlighted that there's a need for tailored programming specific to campus culture as well as to the population. And so, looking at downstream efforts such as responding to violence and victimization or violations, while they're important, I think institutions must also work upstream to just kind of bring in new programming and policies online that we can actually reduce these numbers and that type of thing. 

So, the call to action for me is that research alone is insufficient. We need to do more of it, but at the same time, to reduce the violence, we need to get more research and form policy changes out there, educate, get targeted prevention and intervention strategies, and most importantly, community engagement. So, I thank you all again, you, the audience, for taking part in today's conversation, and hopefully, it will continue. 

Dr. La Vigne likes to emphasize that research is great, but we want to make it actionable at the end of the day. So again, thank you all to the attendees; I do want to thank you for joining; I know your time is very valuable. We don't take that for granted. And I also know you're probably doing a lot of hard work out there yourself, so we greatly appreciate it. And I would be very remiss in not thanking the incredible team behind the scenes. These are the folks who make everything happen and that would be Stacy, Daryl, and Michael. Thank you for all your help in making this easy. And I will actually hand things over for just a final farewell from Dr. La Vigne.

DR. NANCY LA VIGNE: Thank you. I'm so thankful for your work and so proud that NIJ has helped sponsor this research. It's really important and impactful, so thanks to you all, and have a good day.

CHRISTINE CROSSLAND: Take care, everybody.

STACY LEE: This will end today's presentation.