A Better Framework for Addressing Sexual Assault on Campus?

If you want to sell students on the unavoidability of philosophy, just have them attempt to define what “consent” is for a medical or romantic context. Students begin brightly with confident answers, then I put up some legal definitions which remind them of more contexts, and then we think of factors that do not get recognized by any of the definitions. We have to think and re-think and re-think and always leave the classroom puzzled and unsure.

Both that medical consent usually assumes understanding patients cannot actually have about upcoming procedures and that romantic consent can be difficult to make merely verbal, have been pointed out for quite a while, of course. But the new work by researchers Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan of Columbia University might finally give us a framework that re-centers our understanding of sexual consent in a way that solves some of the philosophical questions we’ve (for too long) expected something like legal consent to answer.

So instead of “What exactly is consent?” what if we ask ourselves, “What is your sexual project?” This is what we are all supposed to ask ourselves, Hirsch and Khan write in their deeply researched new book Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. It was recently featured on NPR and is full of the kind of sociological detail on college students' daily lives and outlooks and identities that no one could possibly access without sustained and careful methodology. (The section explaining their methodology is fascinating in itself, as they discuss how you study something you “cannot observe,” how you study stigmatized behavior, and the confidentiality challenges involved in studying student behavior).

"What is your sexual project?" is a good question because you realize in answering it for yourself that it cannot just be pleasure that you are after. Not that alone. We’d choose very differently if so. And you also realize that your partner is going to have answers as complex as yours, with a very small chance of a simple match. It’s this kind of realization that can get us to begin to think of ourselves as “sexual citizens,” negotiating with others with the same type of status and agency and complex aims. (Maybe we realize this in other ways, using other concepts already, but still, "sexual citizenship" is a reminder that you would not want to push someone into sex if you realize that it is not merely some mutual good, but that instead you are interfering with their having their own "project" honored for the sake of your own. And what is your own in such a case?)

The third portion of the framework recommends that we consider our “sexual geography.” This is a way of reminding us of the role various situational factors play in sexual behavior. The economically precarious are more vulnerable to sexual assault, and the youngest students on campus are more vulnerable. In both cases, this may be because there is a lack of a person’s own living area with which to keep herself or himself safe.

When it comes to campus sexual assault—a major public health problem, the prevalence of which hundreds of studies across dozens of types of campuses converge—the authors recommend that a college really consider the impact of the various geographies: Are the fraternity houses the only places where parties are held? Do dorms have enough private spaces where you do not need to sit on a bed?

Finally, the approach does not praise conventionally legal and punitive approaches to sexual assault. Those, they point out, actually discourage the offender from admitting to or taking responsibility. And they do not count on sexual assault reduction being tied to (far) better law enforcement. Instead, a restorative justice approach is recommended.

It would be interesting if, of all things, our sexual assault crisis—on campus, but not just on campus, of course—were tied to efforts to reform our criminal justice process, and became a model for restorative justice practices. The work of these researchers clears the ground so that you can almost imagine that type of transformation of our current, very unhappy, practices.