New book, “Hear Our Stories,” suggests using an intersectional lens to address the unique experiences and needs of women of color.
In 2013, President Barack Obama signed the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act into law, requiring colleges and universities to institute sexual violence prevention programming for all enrolled students and provide protections for survivors of sexual violence. The act spawned new scholarly research, reporting requirements, student activism, and programs to protect and support students. Much of the effort focused on reducing the role of alcohol and drugs in sexual violence and encouraging bystander intervention.
What it did not do was solve the problem. It is estimated that about one in four students who are women will experience nonconsensual sexual contact while in college, with even higher rates for some depending on racial and sexual identity and the environment of the institutions they attend. The issue of sexual violence on college campuses remains a troubling and persistent problem, and efforts to make progress in reducing its incidence continue to fall short.
Jessica Harris, an associate professor at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, is trying to understand why and what can be done about campus sexual violence.
As part of her research, Harris conducted interviews with 34 women of color across three universities, all survivors of campus sexual violence, who shared their experiences with her. She shares their insights in an important new book, “Hear Our Stories: Campus Sexual Violence, Intersectionality, and How We Build a Better University.”
In these conversations, these women showed Harris how sexual health education, institutional reporting policies, prevention programs, and resources for healing were riddled with intersectional failures. The policies, programs, and procedures meant to prevent and respond to sexual violence often failed to account for how intersecting systems of domination, specifically racism and sexism, influence survivors’ experiences for women of color, and the needs for addressing campus sexual violence. The ultimate intersectional failure, however, Harris contends, is that we rarely listen to the stories of women of color. Their “epistemic advantage,” the hard-earned knowledge of women of color, has been ignored throughout the battle against campus sexual violence. Instead, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners often take a race-evasive approach to violence, which denies the significance of race in sexual violence and focuses on the significance of gender.
“We continue to fight today’s battle against campus sexual violence because of the intersectional failures of yesterday,” writes Harris. “Intersectional failure occurs when intersectionality is absent, denied, forgotten, or intentionally distorted within spaces and places where the effects of multiple systems of oppression are present.”
In “Hear Our Stories,” Harris analyzes sexual violence on college campuses through this intersectional lens. Listening to and drawing on the stories of women of color, she explores the intersectional realities of campus sexual violence, including survivors’ racialized and gendered experiences with campus rape culture, betrayal by institutions of higher education, prevention programming, reporting and disclosure, and feminist and anti-racist movements. In doing so, she challenges dominant approaches to campus sexual violence, showing why institutions continue to fall short in preventing and responding to campus sexual violence and how by addressing these failures, they can move toward more effective campus sexual violence prevention and response.
We talk with Harris here about her new book and its implications.
UCLA Ed&IS: To begin, can you tell us in general what the book is about?
Jessica Harris: I think first and foremost, it is about women of color. It’s about the women and their stories. It’s also about intersectionality – the idea coined by the scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw that systems of oppression and domination – racism – sexism – sexual violence, and more, are connected or linked.
Intersectionality offers a critical framework for understanding sexual violence that too often has not been considered. And evading intersectionality in our work on campus sexual violence results in intersectional failure. It’s also about sexual violence. And it’s about institutions – the three institutions the women I interviewed attended, and the diverse yet similar experiences of women at these three institutions.
UCLA Ed&IS: So, how do race and racism shape our approach toward reducing sexual violence?
Harris: To borrow from Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda, if you don’t consider race and racism, you’re only addressing those that are above the floor. You’re only addressing the most privileged or singularly disadvantaged. You’re only addressing white women, white cisgender, upper-class, middle-class, heterosexual, white women. You’re not considering the experiences of others that you could learn from to address the problems. If we’re only listening to the CIS, heterosexual, white woman, that’s just one experience, and it’s a very privileged experience because we’re listening to them and we’re saying, “We will address that, we’ll give you these resources that you say are important.” But for women of color, those same resources might not be significant.
UCLA Ed&IS: What is the main thing you want people to understand about the book – what is the takeaway?
Harris: Originally, the title of the book was, “Our stories are different.” It’s a direct quote from a survivor. We changed the title, but that is still the takeaway. The stories of these women are all different. We cannot address sexual violence in a unilateral one-size-fits-all way.
The other takeaway is something very tangible. One of my biggest “a-ha” moments in working on the book was about our sexual education curriculum. It’s terrible. Every single woman I talked with, except one whose mom was a nurse, said it was horrible, just horrendous. I think it’s a huge issue with why we see so much sexual violence.
UCLA Ed&IS: The book draws on 34 interviews you did with women of color who were victims of sexual violence. What was it like to do those interviews with women about something so traumatic, so personal, so intimate?
Harris: It was lovely. It really was. I still am not sure how I was able to get 34 survivors of sexual violence to talk to me. But they were ready to tell their story. It is such a heavy topic. But I would say that 90 to 95% of these women were ready to talk. They had reached a place in their healing or processing journey where they were ready to speak to someone. There was a lot of pain, but I don’t think there was a lot of trauma or trauma they had not worked through.
One other thing that these conversations show us is that it doesn’t take a lot to help these women, to help women of color. I was talking one-on-one with women of color. I was using intersectionality to frame the interviews, asking them questions about their race and gender and how it feels to be experiencing this as a woman of color. And they were like, “Hey, this is the first time I feel seen, this is actually healing. This interview has been more healing than anything else I’ve done.” I think for many, it was healing, it was empowering. And for me, it was such a privilege.
UCLA Ed&IS: In doing the research and interviews, was there anything that surprised you?
Harris: As I mentioned my biggest “a-ha” moments were the findings about sexual education. I was like, “Oh, my God, every woman is saying that sex education was really bad.” I did two interviews with each woman, and in the first, I had no questions about sex education. They just freely came out and said, my sex education sucked, or that sex education in general is bad. So, in the second interviews, I was like, “We gotta talk about sex education.” It was a huge finding. I think that was the biggest thing.
I think a lot of it was them saying, “Hey, we get to college and we get this 30-minute presentation on consent, or this 30-minute presentation on don’t get sexually assaulted – and here’s what to do if it happens.” And some of these women were saying, “Could we just dial back here for a second because I don’t even know what sex is. I didn’t understand that I had bodily autonomy. I was never taught that. I didn’t understand that was part of having an intimate relationship.” And I think that goes back to intersectionality.
I have these quotes burned in my head. One woman told me, “I can’t go home to my mom. My mom’s not white, so I can’t go home to my white mom and say, “Hey, X, Y, and Z about sex or sexual violence.” Because in my Mexican culture, in my Mexican Catholic culture, we don’t talk about that. I’ve never heard my parents say the word.” That has a lot to do with historical trauma, religious oppression, racialization, and taboos around sex, around communities of color. It does go back to intersectionality.
UCLA Ed&IS: How has intersectionality, or perhaps the lack of considering intersectionality shaped our response to sexual violence?
Harris: Without considering intersectionality we have failed to look at how racism sexism and classism shape sexual violence. And that has a tangible impact on how we respond.
In the interviews, so many women of color told me they were hesitant to report their perpetrators. Their perpetrators were all cisgender men, and the majority were men of color. These women are violated by men of color. Yet the response institutions have to these women is a generalized race-neutral approach. As institutions, we say, “Title IX gives you the right to report, we’ll even give you confidential reporting.” Yet women of color are saying, “There’s no way in hell I will report my perpetrator because that’s throwing this man of color under the bus, which is different than throwing a white man under the bus, right? Because if I report a white man, the police won’t get involved, he’s going to get off. There’s no threat to his life. I’m not I’m not demeaning him. I’m not setting him up for failure for the rest of his life. But If I report a man of color, he might get killed. He will probably go to jail. I’ll ruin his chances for the rest of his life. I can’t be that person as a woman of color. I’m not going to do that to my community. I’m not going to do this to this man.”
But the institutions are not listening to women of color, they are only listening to white women. They aren’t considering race. So, we sit here and say we have reporting procedures and wonder why women of color aren’t reporting and why we are failing.
UCLA Ed&IS: What are the lessons you draw from the book that can help us deal with sexual violence on campus?
Harris: I think the big thing for me is that we can’t just look at individual behavior. We can’t just look at whether you reported your assault, or you didn’t, or you drank alcohol, because your decision to drink alcohol made this happen. That approach has failed us. This is an intersectional failure. The thing I want people to take away from my research is that it is not just the individual. It’s not just that this person touched this person, or this person drank alcohol, and then this happened. It’s about how the disease of patriarchy, of toxic masculinity, and racism that is in our society and that our institutions oftentimes adopt is influencing what we see with sexual violence. And, we need to pay attention to how racism, sexism, and classism are shaping these experiences.
UCLA Ed&IS: What’s the impact of this book on you as a scholar? Has it changed how you think about and approach your work and what you want to do?
Harris: I think it has huge implications for research. I think we need to stop doing individual-level research on sexual violence, that is pretty obvious from the book. And the policy aspects of the sex education curriculum are really important. We need to focus on the sex education curriculum. And there are big implications for practice.
We need to think through other ways of healing for these women, to consider transformative and restorative justice, not Title IX and compliance culture.
Writing the book has changed me as a scholar. I feel a lot more confident in the work I’m doing. I feel so impassioned by this work, by these women. It’s probably made me way more of a qualitative scholar than I ever was. Just listening to people is such a beautiful gift.
I absolutely know two places where my work is going. One is a focus on campus climate. And to my surprise, that has a lot to do with policy. The campus climate surveys that we currently have to assess sexual violence, they suck. They are about compliance. They’re not useful. A lot of my research right now is around how we make these surveys more useful. How do we conceptualize campus climate for addressing sexual violence in a more robust way? Which is beautiful because it takes my research in higher education and merges it with the sexual violence field, which doesn’t know much about campus climate.
So, those two things are coming together, and I am starting a new research project with colleagues in the sexual violence field around that. In the long term, I will be implementing a comprehensive sexual health education curriculum, perhaps at the [UCLA] Lab School, perhaps at some LAUSD institution, across elementary, middle, and high school. I want to follow students for 10 to 20 years to see what happens when we teach people comprehensive sex education. What happens, and what does it mean to their college experience?