Revealing a hidden curriculum of Black women’s erasure in sexual violence prevention policy

ABSTRACT

This article aims to challenge the framework by which rape and sexual assault prevention in higher education are being constituted by centring Black women’s experiences of sexual violence within a prevention and response policy framework. Numerous research studies exist in the literature regarding the specific experience of sexual violence for Black women within a national context that remains deeply committed to White supremacy [Buchanan, N. T., and A. J. Ormerod. 2002. “Racialized Sexual Harassment in the Lives of African American Women.” Women & Therapy 25 (3/4): 107–124; Crenshaw, K. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167; Donovan, R., and M. Williams. 2002. “Living at the Intersection: The Effects of Racism and Sexism on Black Rape Survivors.” Women & Therapy 25 (3/4): 95–105; McNair, L. D., and H. A. Neville. 1996. “African American Women Survivors of Sexual Assault: The Intersection of Race and Class.” Women & Therapy 18 (3/4): 107–118; Omolade, B. 1989. “Black Women, Black men, and Tawana Brawley – The Shared Condition.” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 12: 11–23; West, C. 2002. “Battered, Black, and Blue: An Overview of Violence in the Lives of Black Women.” Women & Therapy 25 (3/4): 5–27]. Using the critical pedagogy principle of ‘hidden curriculum’ or how what is directly communicated through educational processes also conveys unstated values, judgments, and regulatory norms, the author analyses the first report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault [2014. Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault] for race-neutral language that contributes to the silencing of the sexual violence that Black college women experience. The necessity of race-conscious sexual assault policy is discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical race theory
• race and ethnicities
• violence
• whiteness
• language
• higher education
• curriculum
• education policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While the research cited in this paper largely analyses the historical legacies of slavery and rape on African-American women in the USA, I will use Black instead of African-American throughout to reference Black women’s experiences of sexual violence in higher education. This is due to the assumptions made about Black women by both African-American and non-Black people in the USA regarding their ancestry. For example, a Haitian woman with an American accent may be mistaken for an African-American woman because of basic judgements regarding her skin colour, present location, and accent. Thus, non-African-American Black women are often still presumed to be African-American and thus are subject to the myriad racist notions about African-American women’s sexuality that makes them vulnerable to sexual violence.