Professors Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan of Columbia University’s SHIFT (Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation) have indeed written a landmark book. This book should be required reading for all of us who work in any way with violence prevention, and for anyone who feels authorized to opine about sexual violence, especially in relationship to college campuses.

Hirsh and Khan report on extensive, robust SHIFT research; the project used multi-modal research methods, including ethnographic research compiled through 150+ two-hour interviews with students; focus groups with students; participant observations in dorms, the bus to athletic fields, fraternity basements, and spaces of worship; a survey of 1600+ undergraduates; and a 60-day daily survey of approximately 500 students (x-xi). They employ a public health ecological model that refocuses attention from individuals to systems (xi). Hirsch and Khan are also very specific about what they are studying:

rather than study every possible dimension of sexual misconduct, we focused intensively on sexual assault. By assault, we mean unwanted nonconsensual sexual contact: this includes rape and attempted rape, but also unwanted nonconsensual sexual touching (xxviii).

In noting the severity of the issue of campus sexual assault, they share statistics that have been consistent across much research:  over 1 in 4 women, 1 in 8 men, and more than 1 of 3 gender non-conforming students experience sexual assault. It is important to note that for the men who were assaulted, their data show that two-thirds of them were assaulted by women (21). Tellingly, Hirsch and Khan share that “heterosexual students in our study frequently either laughed or were a little taken aback when asked how women sought or ascertained men’s consent” (127). The stereotypes that men always (or should always) want to have sex carry considerable weight in campus culture.

Sexual Citizens frames its discussion through three primary concepts: “Sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies” (xiii). The concept of sexual projects “encompasses the reasons why anyone might seek a particular sexual interaction or experience” (xiv). The notion of sexual citizenship is all about “one’s own right to sexual self-determination and, importantly, recognizes the equivalent right in others” (xvi). And finally, sexual geographies “integrates the built environment into our perspective,” understanding that “sexual outcomes are intimately tied to the physical spaces where they unfold” (xix).

Hirsh and Khan pay enormous care to honoring how the students with whom they speak label and interpret their own experiences. They also attend meticulously to the impact of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic class in reporting their results and in their analysis, noting that “it is only possible to make sense of campus sexual assault by looking at the intersection of gender with other forms of inequality” (xxi). This is very much an analysis that recognizes and accounts for the role of power and privilege in these issues.

The book traces the development of policy and legislative interventions, including Title IX, Clery, and VAWA, but notes that these interventions are insufficient in preventing sexual assault. Hirsch and Khan discuss the role of alcohol in campus sexual assault and show that it not only creates vulnerability for potential victims, but that “less remarked upon are the ways in which heavy drinking raises the risk of assaulting someone” (61). Additionally, they comment that “what goes unacknowledged is that young adults don’t get drunk and just happen to have sex. They frequently get drunk in order to have sex (81). However, Hirsch and Khan consistently and emphatically refuse to blame victims or excuse perpetrators as they discuss the role of alcohol.

Sexual Citizens also refuses to moralize about students’ sexual choices:

We’re not against hookups or casual sex per se. We’re concerned about it in a context where people (mostly women and queer students) lack clarity about their own sexual citizenship, and where many (mostly, but certainly not only, men) also fail to recognize equivalent citizenship in the person they are with (112).

The exploration of what Hirsch and Khan call “sexual geographies” (xiii) is especially interesting. They note that “an unexamined fact of college life is that juniors and seniors have access to better space – either suites with a shared living room and single bedrooms, or apartment style living. This is a critical aspect of the geography of partying on campus,” and a space where alcohol is likely to be consumed (70). These spaces are conducive to partying in ways that a shared room in a residential hall are not. Juniors and seniors are also likely to be able to legally purchase alcohol which, as noted above, is a factor of vulnerability. Space also impacts perceptions of consent: “Students frequently assume that someone choosing to be alone in a room with them signifies consent” (115).

Other points worthy of note:

• Students are also having sex that wasn’t assault, but wasn’t good sex and, in fact, certainly had elements that were like assault (81)
• For both men and women, the man’s orgasm is the most important thing (95-6).
• Hirsch and Kahn recognize a wide range of power dynamics at play, “which are about gender but also about race, year in school, and other forms of privilege – or precariousness” (116).
• Sexual Citizens discusses the fact that, as we have known for years, most campus assaults are committed by someone that the victim knows, but that these assaulters “haven’t been fully integrated into the broader understanding of why assaults happen or what we should do about them” (157).
• Sexual assaults have community level impacts in terms of affecting friend groups, but also in terms of “collective interpretation” (219), where friends may be helping (or hindering) a survivor to make sense of their experience.
• Few of the students they talked with reported their assault to Columbia, which Hirsh and Khan characterize as a “rational” decision, observing that “the low probability of being able to successfully get what they wanted out of the reporting process was particularly important in students’ calculations” (213). They are also scrupulously far in noting that their study design “was likely to elicit responses from those who were most dissatisfied with their experience” of reporting (214).

Sexual Citizens spends considerable time critiquing the process of adjudicating sexual assaults on campus, but they do not attach blame to those involved in the process. Instead, they assert that even with trauma-informed, experienced investigators, the process is messy. There are many contributing factors, but this is perhaps the most significant:

Our legal system uses what scholars call an adversarial process. This is not an accident; it was designed so that the parties involved argue before a neutral evaluator, each seeking to advance their own interest. There’s little about the process that pushes both parties toward a shared understanding, . . . It is contentious by design (215).

This is true of campus processes as well. Also:

It’s nearly unendurable for the students who report having been assaulted. But it’s also nearly impossible for investigators. The steps required to help those harmed get what they need – which typically involves affirming their experience – run directly counter to the legal procedures of ‘blind’ justice (217).

What do Hirsch and Khan suggest? They warn against looking for an easy fix. They note that “Sexual Citizens does not offer one solution; rather, along with some very specific suggestions, it presents a new way of thinking about this problem, one that could generate a score of different intervention studies” (272).

However, here are some of the important takeaways for me:

• We can’t do effective sexual assault prevention work without recognizing the necessary connections to “broader projects of social justice” (249).
• We must do a better job educating young people about sex and healthy relationships, and we can’t wait until college to do it. We are all complicit in this epidemic of sexual assault.
  • Most of us have never committed assault. But all of us have allowed social conditions to persist in which many young people come of age without a language to talk about their sexual desires, overcome with shame, unaccustomed to considering how their relative social power may silence a peer, highly attentive to their personal wants but deaf to those of others, or socialized to feel unable to tell someone ‘no’ or to give a clear and unambiguous ‘yes’ (255-6).
• Consent education is necessary but insufficient. Rather, we need to be “providing opportunities for students to clarify their own sexual projects and for programming that provides opportunities for young people to reflect critically on how they can enact those sexual projects in a way that is grounded in respect for sexual citizenship – both their own and others” (258).

I could write even more about this book, but perhaps this is enough to convince you of the importance of reading it — if you work with college students, or on issues related to sexual assault and sexual violence, or if you just want to help build a better, safer, more just and equitable society.

Written by Donna M. Bickford, Ph.D., Director, Women’s and Gender Resource Center

March 2, 2020