Advancing Anti-Carceral Approaches to Campus Sexual Violence Prevention: Building Research Agendas to Support Trans Communities

Rates of campus sexual violence (SV) are high in the US, with transgender and gender diverse (TGD) students experiencing disproportionately high rates compared to their cisgender peers. Not only are TGD students vulnerable to SV, research suggests they are less likely to access campus-based SV support services or think that their reports of SV will be taken seriously or treated fairly (Cantor et al., 2020). Campuses across the US focus their SV prevention and response resources on complying with federal laws (e.g., Title IX, Clery Act); however, these laws are built on historical and contemporary heteronormative and cis-centric assumptions about how SV happens, who is harmed, and how resolution should be sought that exacerbates inequities and renders resources inaccessible to marginalized students (Mendez, 2020; Roskin-Frazee, 2020). TGD student perspectives are largely missing from conversations about SV prevention and response infrastructure on campus, which contributes to TGD students' continued distrust of and exclusion from these systems.

Although university systems to address SV are largely grounded in civil legislation and do not directly contribute to an increase in incarceration, we join with anti-carceral feminist scholars who challenge current approaches to addressing SV. College campuses engage a carceral logic that relies on punitive strategies that place the responsibility for SV on individual "bad actors" despite a lack of empirical evidence for these tactics. These anti-carceral perspectives, developed primarily by communities of color who have been targeted by the expanding carceral state, emerged from off campus anti-violence movements and are rarely applied to campus contexts. This roundtable will forge dialogue on the importance of engaging anti-carceral feminist and critical trans politics as lenses to build campus SV prevention and response infrastructure, particularly for TGD students and other minoritized students.

This roundtable session proposes to develop a social work research agenda to advance the study of anti-carceral campus-based SV prevention and response with a focus on TGD communities. First, presenters will provide a conceptual and historical overview of the role of carceral feminism in campus SV policy and practice and the issues this poses for TGD students. Drawing on their current research, each of the presenters will discuss the gaps they are addressing in their current research (1) bringing TGD student voice to identifying issues with campus SV prevention and response infrastructure on campus, (2) identifying the carceral enactment of Title IX on campuses and visioning alternative structures, (3) developing prevention programming that centers TGD students, and (4) collaborating with campus health providers for a full spectrum approach to support TGD students and their experiences of SV. Last, presenters will address implications for future social work research with a focus on engaging anti-carceral and transformative lenses in research practice and policy advocacy. The session will conclude with audience questions and general discussion. Through these discussions, this roundtable session will help increase awareness of this emerging field of study and advance an agenda for future social work research to bring anti-carceral and critical trans lenses to the problem of campus SV prevention and response.