Critical and Transformative Methods for Studying Sexual Violence Among College Students

Sexual violence (SV) continues to plague college communities across the United States. Despite research from various disciplines about SV among college students, rates of SV among college women remain unchanged since 1957 (Cantor et al., 2020; Kirkpatrick & Kanin, 1957). Further, perpetrators target students with minoritized identities, including queer and trans students, students with disabilities, and Women of Color at even higher rates than their dominant group peers (Cantor et al., 2020). However, most current scholarship about SV among college students does not reflect an understanding of the relationship between power and violence (Linder et al., 2020). In addition, policy and practice replicate the same systems of domination plaguing SV scholarship, creating a cycle of scholarship, policy, and practice that does more harm to students at risk for SV victimization and students who survived SV.

In a recent study, we learned that more than 86% of research published between 2006 and 2016 focused on sexual violence among college students using quantitative methods (Linder et al., 2020). Further, upon deeper analysis, while many researchers collected demographic information about their participants (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation), they did not engage in analysis about minoritized students’ experiences with SV. The vast majority of research published between 2006 and 2016 employed positivist or post-positivist paradigms and failed to consider the role of power in SV. As a result of this research, our field has learned some about the experiences of cisgender, heterosexual White women and their experience of SV, and little about everyone else’s experiences. Perhaps unknowingly, many researchers examining SV among college students engage in epistemically oppressive research, in collusion with systems of domination like cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and global capitalism. The failure of research to adequately examine the problem of SV through a critical, power-conscious lens results in ineffective policy and practice that fail to eradicate SV among college students. As campus environments continue to transform and shift to address the challenges and injustices of the current sociocultural world, scholarship must also shift to engage critical perspectives and to eradicate inequity and injustice on campus.

In this special issue of the Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, we highlight scholarship that models some strategies for engaging in more critical and transformative research related to addressing SV among college students. Although we acknowledge that no research is perfect, we also desire and intend to create spaces for people to develop epistemologies that push researchers to interrupt dominant ways of examining SV. In this special issue, we highlight several manuscripts from authors who seek to interrupt dominant paradigms in SV research.

The four articles included for this special issue all center transformative ways of examining and disrupting the current scholarship on SV. In “The Carceral Logics of Title IX,” Shepp, O’Callaghan, and Kirkner challenge readers to understand the use of Title IX as a tool of oppression by illustrating the relationship between traditional carceral practices and the implementation of Title IX. The authors argue that, “Title IX policies operate with carceral logic in a way that individualizes harm and focuses on punishment rather than restoration.” Shepp et al. provide insight for activists and administrators seeking to interrupt dominant ways of addressing violence among college students.

Woods challenges us to consider strategies for effectively understanding the experiences queer and trans People of Color with SV. In particular, Woods notes the possibility of using participatory action research or power-conscious collaborative research to more effectively understand survivors’ experiences. By doing so, Woods names the importance of people with minoritized identities having more control over how their stories, experiences, and perspectives are employed in the literature.

In the article, “Toward a Methodology of Healing: Promoting Radical Healing Among Student Survivors Through Research,” Karunaratne advocates for SV scholarship to center healing, instead of perpetuating current hegemonic research trends. Specifically, Karunaratne provides an exemplar of how to center radical healing in the entirety of the research process, not solely in the focus of findings and implications providing a liberatory lens for conducting SV scholarship. This article showcases the impact of radical healing methodology with examples from two critical SV qualitative studies.

In the final article, Anderson Wadley and Hurtado employ a critical discourse analysis to interrogate power structures inherent in the interpretation and implementation of Title IX as a policy to address SV among college students. In their article “Using Intersectionality to Reimagine Title IX Adjudication Policy,” Anderson Wadley and Hurtado note the failure of Title IX to protect any students, but especially students with minoritized identities. By focusing on individual-level punishments, rather than systematic failures, Title IX protects institutions of higher education over students. Anderson Wadley and Hurtado challenge us to consider restorative and transformative justice practices as an alternative to addressing issues of SV among college students.

The culmination of each of these articles provides a transformative, healing, and intersectional approach to examine and eradicate SV. By centering transformation, healing, and power in scholarship, scholars can transform higher education culture and practice to mirror values of equity and autonomy supporting the right for each student to live and learn without the threat of violence. Our hope is the articles shared in this special issue will help contribute to different ways of thinking about scholarship examining SV among college students, and provide examples for future researchers to cite when they want to employ transformative approaches to scholarship.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.