Op-Ed: Campus Sexual Assault Initiatives at Cornell; It’s On Us

28 MARCH 2019 (intended for Cornell Sun)

One of the first “assignments” we receive as incoming freshmen at Cornell is completion of alcohol and sex-related education programs, through which we are told the infamous “one in four” statistic: one in four women at universities experience some form of sexual assault by the time they graduate. The next biennial campus climate survey of sexual violence will be in a couple of months, but we don’t expect the number to have changed, as it has stayed stagnant since decades ago. In recent years, the university has been on a dramatically improved trajectory -- the new Title IX Office in 2016, a new Title IX Coordinator, Education/Training Coordinator, and implementation of mandatory first-year Consent Ed (peer-to-peer) presentations last fall, the Intervene program, and now an ad hoc group and university-wide campaign in the works.

Though all such efforts are laudable, there is still ample room for improvement if Cornell wants to lower these numbers anytime soon. To actually prevent sexual misconduct incidents from occurring, Cornell’s sexual assault prevention and response education programs must work to instill a sense of shared responsibility and accountability in every member of the community, delving deeper into bystander intervention and increased mobilization against sexual assault. There is already ample evidence that bystander intervention programs can change attitudes about shared roles in prevention, increasing bystander efficacy and intent to intervene, as Banyard et. al (2014) also show. With this in mind, I describe here two evidence-based methods for improving education programs at Cornell.

From Potential Victims and Perpetrators to Potential Bystanders

Foremost of this proposal is that we must expand the narrative from risk reduction as potential victims and prevention as potential perpetrators to intervention as potential bystanders. By addressing the audience as potential bystanders who can intervene to prevent incidents of sexual assault or harassment, students would be approached as potential allies, making them less defensive or fearful and rather understanding of their role in prevention of a community-wide issue. Given the “one in four” (and 1 in 16 men) statistic, every classroom or group situation we enter will have at least one person who has been affected by campus sexual assault, directly or indirectly (often a peer we know who has been directly involved). Educators should therefore emphasize not only that most perpetrators are serial perpetrators keeping incident counts up, but also that the perpetrator is most often an acquaintance of the victim.

With these and the fact that students will likely encounter a situation that demands bystander intervention at some point in their years at Cornell, the educator would invoke personal relevance, an essential audience characteristic to effect attitude or behavior change. One study found that with topics of high personal relevance, all that mattered to successfully persuade the audience was the strength of the argument (Petty, 1981). Another study found that under conditions of potentially high personal consequences, individuals are more persuaded if they are presented with strong arguments in favor of a position and process the argument logically and systematically, resulting in a stable attitude change (Chaiken, 1980).

These studies lend support to the effectiveness of addressing all audiences as potential bystanders, as an increased understanding in the prevalence and relevance to themselves would, ideally, change self-perceptions from a passive, unrelated bystander to a critical community member who holds responsibility to intervene in potentially dangerous situations and discontinue rape culture. Through a shift in focus, we can expect to move away from viewing victims and survivors accountable to holding the whole community accountable, asking ourselves “How could we let this happen in our community?” and “How can we learn to say something?”.

Using Peer-to-Peer Messaging to Break Down Intervention Barriers

The message that it is our collective responsibility to mobilize against sexual assault and to be an upstander will be most effective coming from other students. In other words, Cornell should invest in expanding and improving the peer-to-peer education programs here, such as Consent Ed and Cayuga’s Watchers. Why? According to the Social Identity Theory of similarity (Tajfel, 1979), we are more persuaded by messengers who are similar to us -- peers who understand the undergraduate scene and the barriers to bystander intervention, but who have also learned the best intervention methods. Our self-esteem and self-perception of competency to intervene is affected by the successes and failures of groups to which we belong; if more of us are mobilizing and successfully intervening, we can expect the “bystander effect” (in which onlookers are less likely to offer help to a victim if others are present) to be reduced as well.

Finally, bystander intervention education should explicitly offer easy-to-follow intervention methods that allow students to break down barriers to bystander intervention per the Situational Model of Sexual Assault Prevention (Burn, 2009; Latane & Darley, 1970). Educators should demonstrate that intervention is neither hard nor invasive, but rather simple, yet incredibly powerful with its potential to prevent another sexual misconduct from occurring. These programs should, altogether, teach all Cornellians to speak out against social norms supportive of sexual violence and prepare them to provide support to survivors when a friend opens up to them about their* experience, increasing the audience’s sense of responsibility for intervening and their feelings of competence in doing so.

With comprehensive sexual assault prevention and response education, we have the power to create new community norms and to change the campus culture around the all-too-pervasive issue, relaying the message that “friends don’t let friends hurt others” (as in the 1983 slogan, “friends don’t let friends drive drunk”). Granted, new changes have only recently been implemented and others are still being planned, making their outcomes hard to gauge. Nevertheless, it is critical for administrators and students alike to truly understand that campus sexual assault is a community-wide issue pertinent to all members, as opposed to survivors and perpetrators alone. We must strive not only to expand the scope and frequency of sexual assault education, but also to reframe the narrative of such programs that instill a sense of shared responsibility in prevention at Cornell to see a change in both the numbers and campus culture.

*they/them/their are used as gender-neutral, singular pronouns.