--- title: Colleges Need to Think Bigger to End Sexual Assault on Campus description: A Columbia professor urges all colleges to come together to find a public health approach to preventing sexual assault on campus. canonical: https://time.com/3740895/college-sexual-assault-campus-safety/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-03-11T19:56:47.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:59:42.888Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Colleges Need to Think Bigger to End Rape on Campus og:description: Colleges need to take a public health approach to ending campus rape. og:url: https://time.com/3740895/college-sexual-assault-campus-safety/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Colleges Need to Think Bigger to End Rape on Campus twitter:description: Colleges need to take a public health approach to ending campus rape. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Colleges Need to Think Bigger To End Campus Rape > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=eeac3858-5de3-4e0a-966a-78ee6c850f5e&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League [Watch (HLS stream): My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/o8izpqKu.m3u8) (6:50)  _Published 2014-05-14. In April, 23 Columbia and Barnard students filed a federal Title IX complaint alleging that the University mishandled sexual assault cases_ by [Jennifer S. Hirsch](https://time.com/author/jennifer-s-hirsch/) ## Jennifer S. Hirsch Mar 11, 2015 7:56 PM UTC by [Jennifer S. Hirsch](https://time.com/author/jennifer-s-hirsch/) ## Jennifer S. Hirsch Mar 11, 2015 7:56 PM UTC It’s been more than 30 years since I stood outside Tiger Inn at Princeton University, scared but determined. A friend and I were about to lead an educational session about date rape at one of three all-male eating clubs, part of a nascent effort to make the campus safer and healthier. Back then, candlelit “Take Back the Night” marches felt like the one moment every year when sexual violence became visible. Three decades later, there is a sustained national conversation about the issue both on campuses and far beyond. From my current vantage point as a professor of public health at Columbia University, I have watched the conversation evolve into [a robust debate over the respective roles of law enforcement and schools,](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/mishandling-rape.html) and [an energized national movement of student activists](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/29/carry-that-weight-columbia-sexual-assault%5Fn%5F6069344.html). But while debate rages over how to respond to sexual assault claims, there’s been an almost deafening silence around the critical issue of effective prevention. How do we stop campus rapes from happening in the first place? One thing is clear: the approaches most commonly found on campuses across the nation are not enough. All too often they consist of drastic and reactive policy changes, such as [temporary shutdowns of fraternities](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/us/university-of-virginia-officials-vow-to-combat-campus-rape-problem.html) and [bans on booze](http://fusion.net/story/41436/10-other-top-colleges-that-banned-hard-alcohol/), with an occasional foray into the dangerously absurd, such as the [recent push by gun rights advocates](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/in-bid-to-allow-guns-on-campus-weapons-are-linked-to-fighting-sexual-assault.html) to arm female students. Last year, a [CDC report](http://time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/evidence-based-strategies-for-the-prevention-of-sv-perpetration.pdf) for the White House reviewed 140 sexual violence prevention programs and found that almost none showed any evidence of impact. Moreover, even those few that did modify attitudes neglected the need for broader social change in campus communities, the study reported. Beliefs matter, but attitudes alone don’t produce sexual violence. So even the best and clearest educational messages—don’t rape, here’s what to do so you won’t get raped, here’s how to keep your friends from being raped—are insufficient. The time has come for a public health approach to the ongoing crisis—one that focuses on the social conditions that render students vulnerable to sexual violence. This strategy is both in line with the recommendations of the CDC report, and borne out by the history of public health. Consider that none of the [ten great public health achievements of the 20th century](http://www.cdc.gov/about/history/tengpha.htm) was accomplished solely by exhorting people to act differently, instructing them in the adverse consequences of not doing so, shaming those who did not change their behavior, or creating systems that would punish them if they did not comply. To the contrary, the 25 years that public health has added to life expectancy in the United States reflect a focus on context, on actions such as shutting down the water-polluting factory or lowering the speed limit to reduce traffic fatalities. What is the equivalent for preventing sexual assault on college campuses? What could we change about college environments to make non-consensual sexual behavior less likely to happen in the first place? That’s where there are some real gaps in the science. Complicating these questions is the fact that few complex health problems have a single major determinant. Faced with this information void, it’s incumbent upon universities and colleges to start devoting their considerable research capacities to finding out what works. Last week, my own institution [launched](http://www.columbia.edu/content/announcing-sexual-health-initiative-foster-transformation.html) such an initiative, a multi-year project that brings together a team of faculty from across the campus to study undergraduate life and to develop recommendations to transform the social fabric, to weave a safer campus. As the co-leader of this project—and as someone who has spent my career doing research on gender, sexuality, and health—I am hopeful that it will soon become one of many such initiatives around the country. Without question, there are pieces of this problem that are beyond the reach of schools. Students arrive on campus after 18 years spent in communities and families that teach them how to interact with other people. Few adolescents learn at home or in their church, synagogue, or mosque that consenting and pleasurable sexual intimacy is a normal part of a healthy life. To the contrary, America’s sexual culture is fundamentally unhealthy, with one of the highest rates of [teen pregnancy](http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/reproductive-health/teen-pregnancy/trends.html#%5Fftn2) of any western country. Most students still don’t get [medically accurate, comprehensive education](http://time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/sex%5Fed%5Fin%5Fthe%5Fus.pdf) in the basics of pregnancy and disease prevention at school. Images of masculinity that glorify aggression, representations of sexuality that normalize violence and coercion, and sadistic pornography also play a part. That said, school policies shape the fabric of daily life for students in ways that go far beyond what academic subjects are on offer: they determine where students sleep, what they eat, how they spend their free time, and even whether they can own lava lamps. They have enormous power to shape the architecture of campus life—both physical and social—in ways that could nudge students towards healthier, more respectful (and dare I say more pleasurable) patterns of sexual and social behavior. But those changes need to draw on evidence, not only good intentions. I know a lot more than I did that night outside Tiger Inn. I know that it is not just women who are targets of sexual violence. I’ve learned not to assume that a man is not a feminist just because he’s a popular athlete. And I know that this moment, when the silence of decades has become a veritable cacophony of concern, represents our opportunity for a “moonshot”—a giant leap for humankind towards understanding sexual violence so that we can prevent it. Universities and colleges are centers of knowledge production – asking hard questions and drawing on insights from across the disciplines to answer them is what we do best. As scientists and members of academic communities, now is the moment to make ourselves useful. Our power to transform starts with our capacity to think big, whether our goal is safer highways, clean water—or stopping campus rapes. ## Transcript My name is Emma [ UNKNOWN ]. I am a junior at Columbia college. I am a visual arts major. On the first day of my sophomore year, I was raped by a fellow classmate. I didn't report at first because. It's a big emotional trauma, and I didn't feel like dealing with it at first, until I met at that time, two other women who told me the same person who had assaulted me, had assaulted them. The school found a way to dismiss each of our three cases separately. [ MUSIC ] My rapist, it still goes to my school, and still is on campus. [ MUSIC ]. This is not a single campus issue. This is not an individual issue. This is a cultural problem. We have a huge issue with rape culture on all college campuses. There was a study that was done that shows that men on college campuses who are perpetrators. Are more often than not repeat offenders. The average number of people a perpetrator will sexually assault is six, according to this study. So this isn't a random phenomenon. This isn't this happens in an alley, this happens when everyone's incredibly drunk at a party. There is a certain profile for what sexual assault looks like on a college campus. And that is why we need administrators to be open, and transparent, about that. Right now, their approach seems to be to ignore the problem, to try to deny students access to resources, to deny that that's happening at all when it fact they really should be getting in front of the issue. Our hearing took place seven months after I reported the incident. The investigator in my case didn't take down many important things such as the position I was in when he raped me. My hearing panelists weren't even trained, one woman kept asking me how it was physically possible for anal rape to happen. Why Columbia didn't find him responsible? I don't actually get to write a statement of what happened. It's all the investigator's statement that they read. There's an office called the Office of Gender Based and Sexual Misconduct. You go in there and at that time a woman was working there so I told her what had happened. She was the one who took erroneous notes, and missed really important that I said. Since her statement didn't make any sense, my case didn't make any sense. I think another reason that the school didn't find him guilty was that they, they really didn't want to treat it as a serial rape case because we, all three of us reported, and then they would say you are not allowed to mention each others' cases, we are going to treat them separately. I think that. If the hearing panel have had known that this was a serial offender, they might have believed us more maybe? They also said that there was not enough evidence to determine that it was more likely than not. That the respondent engaged in behavior that met the de, definition of sexual assault. So the charge was dismissed. [ MUSIC ] There are many reasons why a student would choose to not go to the police, and go to, you know, a campus adjudication process. Many people don't want the outcome to be the person that attacked them to go to jail. If you're a person of color. Or if you're ****, the process of going to the police can also be one that is not necessarily competent or great to deal with. Some people seek out resources from their school in order to make sure they're not living in the same dorm as a person who assaulted them, which is very different from making sure that someone goes to jail. And I also think that improving processes on campus across the board. Including you know, therapy for survivors, adequate rape crisis centers, and adequate academic interim measures, are things that are important for everyone to have the police absolutely cannot give you when you're a student. Everyday I'm afraid of leaving my room. Even seeing people who remotely look like my rapist is a scary thing for me. Last semester, I was working in the dark room in the photography department. Which is a small dark room. He asked permission from his teacher to come and work in the darkroom during my class. I started crying and hyperventilating and. As long as he's on campus with me he can continue to harass me. They're setting up for graduation for all of the seniors and all of the bleachers are coming up on campus. And, I was just thinking about the fact that. Because of what the administration did, I'm going to have to be sitting on those bleachers with my rapist and a serial rapist at that. Knowing that he's going to get the same education as me and I'll be feeling horrible on my graduation day. A lot of students think that when they go to a campus, if they see that there are zero sexual assaults reported that that's a really positive thing, that, that must mean that campus is incredibly safe, it's going to be a great place. But actually when you consider the fact that the overall rates of sexual assaults on campus are as high as one in four, if you see a campus reporting zero sexual assaults that should actually be a red flag. [ MUSIC ] I feel like it's taken over my entire, entire college experience. This happened on the first day of my sophomore year. And here I am. I just finished my last day of school for my junior year. And I'm still talking about it and still thinking about it. And I know that I'm going to look back on my entire Columbia experience and see that's how the administration has failed me. and. It's, it's like a cloud that will always hang over me. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3740895/college-sexual-assault-campus-safety/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3740895/college-sexual-assault-campus-safety/"},"headline":"Colleges Need to Think Bigger To End Campus Rape","datePublished":"2015-03-11T19:56:47.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:59:42.888Z","description":"It's time for colleges to come together to find a public health approach to preventing sexual assault","url":"https://time.com/3740895/college-sexual-assault-campus-safety/","keywords":["health"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jennifer S. 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