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Hemangini Gupta and Bill Flack
- What is the kind of work that you’re doing around sexual harassment and sexual violence on college campuses?
I do this work in local, national, and international contexts.
Locally, I’ve been conducting campus climate surveys focused on sexual violence victimization at my school (Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA) since the early 2000s. I do this work with teams of undergraduate students (and occasionally master’s students), and have found their involvement to be vital in making the research relevant to their social intimacy cultures. Recently I’ve also been involved in reconstituting a local coalition against campus sexual assault consisting of faculty, student support staff, and students, to share information and resources and to work collaboratively across the various boundaries in our campus community.
Nationally, I’ve had the good fortune to be involved in the Administrator-Researcher Campus Climate Collaborative (ARC3; https://www.arc3survey.org), a group of campus sexual assault researchers, student life deans, and Title IX coordinators (these folks are responsible for on-campus adjudication of cases that are brought to the university’s attention) that came together in 2014 and 2015 to develop a research-based campus climate survey in response to the 2014 White House Task Force (https://www.justice.gov/archives/ovw/page/file/905942/download). The ARC3 survey is currently being revised, and the 2.0 version will (hopefully) be available some time next year. I was also recently invited to be on the Advisory Committee for the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education (https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/action-collaborative-on-preventing-sexual-harassment-in-higher-education) at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Internationally, I’ve been very fortunate to have two Fulbright Scholarships focused on sexual violence in higher education, one at Ulster University in Northern Ireland (fall 2015) and the other at the University of Galway (fall 2019). One result of the Fulbrights has been the establishment of a research network that includes colleagues from throughout Ireland and the U.K. (including colleagues at the University of Edinburgh). I’m currently on the Fulbright Specialist Roster and available to help with short-term projects focused on assessing gender-based violence in higher education.
2. Was there a particular event that got you interested in this work?
Yes. Students in my first seminar on psychological trauma (I trained as a clinical psychologist, and did a post-doc at the Boston VA Medical Center) got interested in the discrepancy between prevalence rates of campus sexual assault reported in the research literature (there wasn’t as much of it at the time, back in the early 2000s, as there is now) and information on the numbers of cases reported to authorities in my university. Based on their own experiences and those of their peers, they thought that the rates on our campus were closer to those reported in the literature than those in annual campus safety reports, and so we decided to do a survey to find out. Turns out the students were right.
3. How does this work relate to your research?
This work is my research, although I also do research on “trigger warnings,” that is the effect of telling students about potentially disturbing content in academic assignments before they’re exposed to it so that if need be they can prepare themselves for the possibility of experiencing distress. I also do some work on promoting equity and justice in college curricula.
4. What are some of the challenges that you encounter with measuring and calibrating data related to sexual harassment and sexual violence?
Some of the major challenges in this work are trying to ask the right questions in the right ways, being as inclusive as possible with regard to those groups who are targets of harassment and violence and to the types and contexts of harassment and violence, and the lack of support for – and often backlash to – doing this work.
Regarding measurement, sexual harassment and sexual violence occur in social and intimacy cultures that are always changing, and so researchers are always catching up with those changes (this underscores the importance of involving members of the groups we’re interested in in designing the research!). My favorite example of this goes back to our first survey at Bucknell. The students insisted that we assess hooking up as a risk factor, and I had no idea what hooking up was (well, I knew a bit because I had watched ‘Sex and the City’ where they’d talked about “friends with benefits,” but that was the extent of my knowledge). Turned out that hooking up was more strongly related to sexual assault than alcohol consumption, and that it was (is) a fairly complex phenomenon (hookups vary in lots of different ways).
So we try to improve our measures as best we can. One current example is the new revision of the Sexual Experiences Survey (Koss et al., 2007), commonly considered the “gold standard” for survey-based assessment of sexual violence, due to be published very soon. It’s been changed and extended in some interesting and, hopefully, useful ways, for example replacing “consent”-based language with “permission”-based items that are designed to be closer to respondents’ experiences.
Inclusivity is a huge challenge in this work, both in terms of how and what we ask about in survey questions and with respect to including sufficient numbers of those who’ve experienced sexual harassment and assault especially from members of groups that are typically minoritized, marginalized, and otherwise oppressed within our campus communities. Response rates vary in this kind of research, but it’s very difficult to get large percentages of the campus population to respond to research surveys about emotionally distressing experiences, and the smaller the subgroups the more challenging it is to obtain response rates sufficient to analyze statistically.
Over-sampling of those subgroups is one way to deal with this problem. Another is to use a combination of surveys and interviews focused more on qualitative information, so called “mixed methods.” While ideal in combination, this kind of work is labor-intensive and requires substantial resources of time and funding. That’s not an excuse not to do it, of course, and there are excellent models such as the critical approach taken by Michelle Fine (https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/michelle-fine) and colleagues.
Finding support to do this work is also difficult. Although the situation has improved somewhat over the last few decades, it remains difficult to find grant funding for this kind of work, especially in the international context. And sometimes it’s not just lack of support, but rather denial that sexual violence is a problem and aggressive criticism aimed at stopping the work of researchers, community workers, and activists. As Susan Faludi and others have taught us, when work against oppression has an impact we can expect backlash from those with a stake in maintaining the status quo.
About Bill Flack
Professor Bill Flack trained as a clinical psychologist and has focused increasingly on critical and community psychologies. His research is aimed at understanding and eliminating sexual assault and other forms of gender-based violence in the context of higher education. His teaching and research help students to understand the shortcomings of current psychological knowledge in order to improve it toward more socially just ends.
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