We’ve gotten accustomed to periodically being shocked by yet another tragic mass shooting in yet another apparently safe venue. College campuses are no exception—especially since the tragedies in 2007 and 2008 at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois, students and campus staff well know that the picture of universities as safe cloisters of learning is no longer a reality. So today, administrators are scrambling for ways to prevent future tragedies.
Doing something about easy access to automatic weapons might help. But failing that, one academic has an idea for another place to start. Michele Paludi, Director of the School of Management at New York’s Union College, thinks that schools need to take a new approach to violence prevention.
Paludi believes that incidents of intimidation and violence on campus have reached epidemic proportions—one of every 20 college women is raped, and 20 percent of college students experience intimate partner violence, for example. Her research argues that those acts, and crimes like mass shootings, become more common when “lower order” forms of campus violence—like sexual harassment, sexist remarks, hazing, and bullying—are ignored. She notes that 20 to 80 percent of college women report being targets of sexual harassment by peers or faculty.
Prevention, she argues, requires that colleges establish safe, nonretaliatory reporting procedures—effective and enforced policies about things like sexual harassment and sexist remarks, and training programs for the entire campus, including faculty. (Those ideas are especially pertinent since the Obama administration’s recent announcement of new requirements for colleges and universities regarding preventing sexual harassment and sexual violence on campus.)
If you’re considering working with your campus to establish policies designed to stop sexist forms of expression, you might consider drawing on her research. Her book Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus received the 1992 Myers Center Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States.
If Paludi is right that ignoring sexist remarks, harassment, and other forms of intimidation makes violence more likely, then faculty and administrators ignore it at their peril.
Steve
