Campus Sexual Violence and the Cost of Protecting Institutions: Carceral Systems and Trans Student Wellbeing

Background and Purpose

Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) university students experience disproportionately high rates of sexual violence (SV) compared to their cisgender peers. Title IX and other mandates provide the foundation for most campus SV prevention and response infrastructure; however, these policies embody a carceral logic which places the burden of responsibility for violence on individual actors, obscuring how systems of power and oppression contribute to SV. TGD students avoid engaging with SV prevention and response resources despite their comparatively frequent experiences of victimization because these resources have the potential to harm them and their community. TGD voices are largely absent from campus SV solution building, exacerbating TGD students’ institutional distrust and alienation from campus resources. To address these gaps, the current study conducted focus groups with TGD students to understand their perspectives. This study engages anti-carceral feminism and critical trans politics to (1) understand the limits of current university systems to serve TGD students, (2) vision alternatives to support healing from violence, and (3) advocate for cultural change.

Methods

Five qualitative semi-structured virtual focus groups (N=21) were conducted via Zoom with TGD students from a research university in Pennsylvania. Participants included undergraduate and graduate students who identified as White (n=14), multiracial (n=4), Asian/Asian American (n=1), Black (n=1), and Hispanic (n=1). Focus groups were transcribed verbatim and data was analyzed by thematic coding as outlined by Braun and Clarke.

Results

Several themes and sub-themes emerged in our analysis. The first theme was students’ view that the university’s priority is evading liability for SV rather than supporting students who have been harmed. Further, we explored how a compliance-centered approach erodes the effectiveness of such efforts with the subthemes (1a) the inability of black and white processes to address the complexities of SV experienced by TGD students, and (1b) the view that Title IX processes mirror the criminal legal system. Our second theme was our participants’ expectation that they would experience discrimination from SV response resources broken down further into the subtheme of (2a) trans exclusion from SV prevention and response. The final theme described participants’ visions for approaches to SV prevention and response beyond punishment that are effective, inclusive, and student-centered.

Conclusions and Implications

Current approaches for SV prevention and response are not only insufficient for TGD students, their reliance on carceral feminist-informed enactments of policy excludes and harms TGD students. Our participants want to be a part of a campus that values their experiences, identities, and needs more than performing the optics of compliance and punishment. While strides have been made to build restorative and transformative approaches to SV off campus, the application of these approaches to college campuses is limited. Researchers and practitioners on university campuses have an opportunity to create SV prevention and response interventions that move from a focus on individual harm and culpability to center repair of community harm and meaningful accountability; however, this shift will require time, creativity, and vision beyond our culture’s carceral understandings of “justice,” and accountability.