A program designed to help female college freshmen resist sexual assault is creating a lot of buzz among victims’ advocates and college educators. Most were encouraged to learn that incidents of rape had been cut in half among participants in a Canadian study of the program, which involved four three-hour sessions in which the women learned to recognize the danger of coercive situations and to fight back, verbally and physically.
Still, some questioned whether the approach puts too much responsibility on women to resist rape, and not enough on men to treat women with respect.
The study involved about 900 freshmen at three Canadian universities and was written up in The New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday.
During the year following their participation in the study, 5 percent of the women enrolled in the resistance program reported having been raped. That compared with 10 percent of those in a control group who read and discussed brochures. Incidents of attempted rape and nonconsensual sexual contact were also much lower among participants in the resistance program.
The lead author of the study, Charlene Y. Senn, a social psychologist at the University of Windsor, talked with The Chronicle about the study. An edited and condensed transcript follows.
Q. How does this approach differ from others that are intended to empower women?
A.
This is 12 hours, and the longest risk-reduction program before was about seven and a half hours. All of those other efforts so far have been either ineffective for all women, or effective only for women with no history of prior victimization. Or the effects only lasted for two to four months.
Q. How would you respond to concerns that this approach puts the onus on women to avoid being raped?
A. Many of the poster campaigns in which women are told what they should wear, or where they should go, or what they should do — I agree, they’re entirely inappropriate. This program is not that. But we have to do multiple things. We do need to stop perpetrators and hold them accountable, but our efforts to do that at the college or university level have been almost entirely ineffective and have created a backlash.
We can’t do perpetrator kinds of education at the university level. We have to do that much earlier.
We can make ending sexual violence everyone’s business through bystander intervention, like the program I’m involved in on my campus. At the same time, we need to support survivors and give women the tools they need to fight back. If we know we can actually reduce the number of rapes women are experiencing, it would be unethical not to do it.
Q. Why focus on acquaintance rape?
A. On campuses, over 90 percent of the perpetrators are acquaintances. Most women are oriented and trained and socialized to fear the stereotypical stranger rape and to avoid the underground parking garage or walking home alone at night across campus. That doesn’t protect them from far-more-common threats. We’re trying to help women work through the complex emotional obstacles to recognizing cues in the men they might like or at least know. It’s giving women information skills and practice to more quickly identify potentially dangerous situations and to get out or use force if necessary.
With acquaintances, women are unlikely to use force, and much more likely to use methods like reasoning or pleading or crying, and we know those are ineffective.
Q. Was there anything in the results that surprised you?
A. I didn’t expect the size of the impact to be so large — that only eight women would need to have participated in the program in order to stop a nonconsensual, nonpenetrative act, and only 22 women to avert one completed rape. Also, the fact that the impact was apparent one year later, while most programs don’t work for more than a few months. I was pleased that we didn’t need a booster within that first year.
Q. Your phone has been ringing off the hook with media calls. What do you think about the response?
A. I’m thrilled because it seems that giving women the best knowledge and tools, and confidence that they can defend themselves, has been missing from the dialogue. Bystander intervention is very important, but it’s a long-term process. I’m thrilled this is getting out there so we’ll be working on all of those fronts simultaneously.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
