Reporting Sexual Harassment: Toward Accountability and Action
Annie Hill: Victims are not the problem; universities must change cultures conducive to sexual misconduct.
How Can We Increase Reporting of Sexual Misconduct on Campus?
Brian A. Pappas: Mandatory reporting is just one piece of a larger effort needed to address sexual violence on campus
What Do Students Think of Mandatory Reporting?
Christina Mancini & Justin Pickett: College students, on balance, support mandatory reporting policies.
Mandatory Reporting Policies Protect Universities, Not Survivors
Rose Miron & Lena Palacios: In the age of #MeToo, many individuals and institutions have expressed their commitment to preventing sexual violence. Yet, in their haste to hold individual perpetrators accountable, many have become actively complicit in silencing the voices of survivors, particularly through mandatory reporting policies that are being hurriedly adopted on college campuses across the U.S.
The Intersection of Interpersonal and State Violence Against Women
The problem of police brutality in the U.S. has largely and rightfully highlighted police killings of unarmed Black men. Still, when police violence against women can be connected to women’s personal experiences with intimate partner violence and sexual violence, researchers helping craft policy must work toward a comprehensive understanding of both men’s and women’s experiences with law enforcement. Police brutality is not a new phenomenon. Researchers, scholars, and activists such as Andrea Ritchie, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Hillary Potter and grassroots movements like #SayHerName and INCITE! have long described and documented the problem of police brutality – specifically, police brutality against women and trans women of color. The #SayHerName brief documents cases in which women call police to report intimate partner or sexual violence, only to be met with inadequate, harmful, and abusive law enforcement responses. INCITE! has explained how police violence and intimate partner violence intersect in the lives of women of color, including women of color who are trans, bisexual or lesbian, immigrant, undocumented, living on tribal land, have prior criminal convictions, or are involved in sex work.
Misogyny and Racism in Sessions’ Unraveling of Asylum Law
In June of 2018, after tortuous weeks of hinting, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed Matter of A-R-C-G, a 2014 case recognizing some types of domestic violence claims as a valid basis for asylum in the U.S. Utilizing a rarely employed mechanism, the AG certified a case, Matter of A-B-, to himself in order to instruct Immigration Judges under his authority to cease considering domestic violence claims legally sufficient for asylum. The case, technically a Memo from the Attorney General to Immigration Judges, appears at first blush to merely reverse A-R-C-G-, but Sessions went much further. The decision is racist, misogynistic, and dehumanizing. It bears all the ugly hallmarks of the world’s rising nativist leaders.
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