Learn from schools with better climates.
Imagine moving to a town where one in four drivers will, at some point, be involved in a car crash that alters their lives forever. Now imagine that the town’s response is to fine-tune its driver’s ed courses and its incident reporting process — instead of redesigning its roads or implementing safety infrastructure to prevent devastating collisions from happening in the first place.
We would never accept that level of risk, or that feeble of a response, when it comes to car crashes. But that is effectively how many colleges across the United States are responding to sexual assault on their campuses. The best available evidence — a 2019 survey by the Association of American Universities — suggests that one in four undergraduate women will experience some kind of nonconsensual sexual contact during their time in college, whether by physical force or inability to consent.
College sexual assault prevention is suffering a crisis of imagination. On many campuses, it amounts to little more than complying with federal requirements by teaching students the principles of consent and bystander intervention. But while these educational programs seem to be effective at the “changing beliefs” half of the equation, research indicates that those changes aren’t necessarily translating to behavior changes or reduced incidence of assault.
Any college serious about this issue needs to think bigger. Situations in which consent is unclear or violated are shaped not only by individual beliefs and attitudes but also by how students live, socialize and seek support. Educational programs can change the former, but colleges must also be willing to experiment with ways to reshape the physical and social environment on their campuses to reduce risk — and stop thinking so narrowly about what sexual assault prevention looks like.
A promising case study
One natural place to look is the survey that yields the “one in four” figure. Thirty-three schools participated in the 2019 version. Rice University — my alma mater — had among the lowest rates of nonconsensual sexual contact: 13% lower than the average. Of the colleges that have publicly released their data, only Caltech reported lower rates. Like every other college in America, Rice educates incoming students about consent and trains them in bystander intervention. So what accounts for the gap?
I was fortunate never to experience sexual violence during my time as an undergraduate at Rice. I’d argue that it wasn’t because I was more careful or better educated on the risk factors than women elsewhere, but because the environment I lived in had been built, intentionally or not, in such a way that it was less conducive to sexual assault.
First, most of Rice’s small student body lives on campus in residential colleges of about 400 people each, creating a low-anonymity environment; it’s very difficult to behave badly and get away with it. This alone doesn’t explain Rice’s low rate; some schools with far higher rates, like Yale, also house students in residential colleges. But Rice also has no Greek life, which is itself a protective factor, since women see their risk of sexual assault increasing significantly just by joining a sorority. Instead of fraternity parties, the largest parties are hosted on campus by each residential college with security and emergency medical staff on-site. Drinking happens close to home, with little need to trek outside the bounds of campus or rely on others for rides. And faculty members and their families live directly alongside students as Resident Associates in dorms, acting as an ambient form of oversight.
Every incoming student is also assigned an “O-Week group” — eight new students and four student advisors who meet weekly throughout the first year, when data tell us students are most at risk of unwanted sexual contact — automatically embedding a student in a community and providing a touchpoint for early intervention. Rather than asking every student to watch out for everyone else, as in classic bystander training, this system concentrates responsibility. That vigilance is reinforced by Rice’s informal social norm known as “pumpkin grades”: Upperclassmen are strongly discouraged — not by professors or administrators, but by each other — from pursuing freshmen romantically until freshmen have received midterm grades in October. This gives new students more time to settle into the college environment, learn about available resources and learn whom to avoid, all of which limit risk exposure in those crucial first few months of college.
Rice hasn’t solved the problem of sexual assault — 22.6% of undergraduate women reported having experienced some kind of nonconsensual sexual contact in 2019, an unacceptable level of risk. And none of these aspects of Rice’s campus life have been rigorously evaluated to determine what, if any, causal effect they have. But they do suggest that prevention strategies that go beyond education alone are worth taking seriously.
They also hold an important lesson: Some of the most (potentially) significant factors at Rice involve parts of the administration whose primary official function is not sexual assault prevention. That means that reimagining how to better protect students from sexual assault cannot simply be about asking the Title IX office to revisit its policies; it requires university leadership to engage any aspect of campus that could potentially play a role — which is to say, almost every aspect of campus.
This idea has already permeated city governments, where there is growing recognition and evidence that multiple agencies, including those that oversee housing and social services, have a role to play in public safety and that public spaces can be designed in ways that meaningfully reduce crime. Campus sexual assault prevention needs the same wake-up call.
Prevention by design
A student’s physical and social environment — where they spend time with friends, what kind of social events are available, how they get around campus — is a mostly unmapped category of prevention. Colleges already invest heavily in shaping that environment for other reasons, including building state-of-the-art dorms and funding student clubs, events and communal spaces. They can and should also be shaping that environment with sexual assault prevention in mind.
A recent study of Columbia University undergraduates, for example, found that one factor driving sexual assault risk is the relative lack of semiprivate spaces for students to socialize outside of bedrooms. That’s an environmental design problem. To help solve it, the physical design of student spaces could start to routinely account for sexual assault prevention the same way architects design spaces to encourage environmentally conscious behavior. That same deliberateness could extend to how colleges design everything from campus lighting to peer-advising programs to reduce risk.
Some schools have already started experimenting along these lines. Yale, for example, created alternative gatherings before and after formal dances so students have options for socializing with dates aside from bringing them back to a dorm room. Drawing on the principles of hotspot policing, MIT and Williams College worked with researchers and students to conduct walking tours of campus for students to identify areas where they felt unsafe, and then designed specific interventions to address each issue, like better lighting for dark sidewalks.
On campuses where Greek life isn’t going anywhere, even small structural changes can shift the balance of power. Because the National Panhellenic Conference bars alcohol in sorority houses, fraternity-hosted parties are the norm, with men controlling the alcohol, guest list and private spaces. Independent sororities like Dartmouth’s Sigma Delta aren’t bound by that rule: Members serve their own alcohol, decide who enters their parties and are empowered to kick out bad actors. Proposals to loosen the Conference’s alcohol ban for sororities, or encourage more independent sororities like Sigma Delta, have surfaced before. They deserve renewed attention now that Cornell, in the wake of a high-profile alleged assault at a fraternity house, has vowed to take a “serious look” at Greek life on campus.
Colleges looking for a more systematic way to generate ideas like these don’t need to start from scratch.
Enter the Haddon Matrix. In 1968, William Haddon Jr. developed a method for systematically addressing injury prevention that has since become standard in fields from traffic safety to fire safety to children’s car seat design. The Haddon Matrix examines how factors intersect to cause harm across three time periods (before, during and after an incident) and four actors (the “host” or person at risk, the agent who causes the harm and the environment, both physical and social).
Applying this framework to campus sexual assault, as a Johns Hopkins analysis has recommended, would push colleges to think about the problem more holistically by prompting new questions that lead to new potential solutions: Where does risk concentrate on campus? What is keeping bystanders from intervening? What determines whether a student who has experienced assault finds the right resources to support them?
The answers won’t look the same for a small liberal arts college in Vermont and a large state university in Alabama. But widening the scope of possible interventions opens up new levers for change.
Where do we go from here?
Since Title IX was enacted in 1972, colleges have built robust compliance machines that ensure they’re fulfilling their legal educational and reporting obligations. But all of this compliance is failing to make much meaningful difference in the safety of their students. What they haven’t yet built is a robust prevention machine that is focused on systematically identifying and addressing sexual assault risk on campus.
To be successful, such an effort can’t be siloed within a Title IX office, because the problem is shaped by all aspects of student life. Instead, a college president should convene a cross-campus council tasked with understanding what drives sexual assault and what might be done to prevent it. This should be a standing body with an annual mandate to assess progress, generate new ideas and pilot programs, and support implementation across departments. Like cities’ multiagency efforts to reduce crime, this council should bring together representatives from housing, facilities, student life, Greek life, transportation and campus safety alongside Title IX coordinators, so that each aspect of student life is shaped in ways that can reduce sexual assault risk. Efforts like New York City’s Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety could serve as good models.
And colleges should pursue these changes with the same urgency they bring to Clery Act compliance. Federal regulations already require that schools consider “environmental risk and protective factors” in the design of their sexual assault prevention strategies. Schools should also commit to fielding an annual sexual assault survey, publishing the results and partnering with researchers where possible to test whether the changes they make are making a difference.
We have encouraging evidence that environments shape behavior in other contexts, from road design that reduces crashes to street lighting that reduces crime. We still know far less about what works on college campuses. But that should also give us reason to hope: There are far more promising ideas colleges can try — if they’re willing.
