Chad Sniffen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Our podcasts are about understanding, responding to and preventing sexual violence. My name is Chad Sniffen and I'm the host for this episode, which is the second part of a multi-part series exploring the intersection of sexual violence and alcohol consumption.

[00:00:19] In this episode, you'll be hearing from Dr. Elizabeth Anderson, who is a research scientist at the International Center for Research on Women with the Global Health, Youth and Development team. You'll also be hearing from Dr. Elise Lopez, who is the Director of the University of Arizona consortium on gender-based violence. And you'll be hearing from Dr. Mary Koss. Dr. Koss is a Regent's Professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. Dr Koss conducted the first national study of sexual assault among college students in the United States, which was the basis of the book "I Never Called It Rape" which was re-released in 2019. More information about our guests along with links to their work can be found in the show notes for this podcast on our website at www.nsvrc.org forward slash podcasts.

[00:01:11] In our first episode. Dr. Koss gave us an overview of sexual violence and alcohol consumption, and she and Dr. Anderson talked about some of the ways prevention efforts can impact young men. And this episode, we continue that conversation and talk about the impact of sexual violence on women, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the dynamic of sexual violence on campus.

[00:01:32] So Dr. Lopez, now that we've learned so much about the act of perpetration in the context of sexual violence and alcohol, can you tell us more about prevention and education, and even healing from sexual violence?

[00:01:45] Elise Lopez: [00:01:45] Sure. So, we've talked a lot about perpetration and I think we also need to talk about victimization and alcohol and how those two are related. We need to say that just because somebody is drinking, and they get victimized does not mean it was their fault. Of course. And I think whenever we're talking about this topic, that's where we need to start. 

[00:02:08] But, that doesn't mean that we ignore risk factors, particularly for women that heightened their risk of being sexually victimized. It's a fine line to tread and people don't like to talk about it because it sounds victim blaming.  One of the things that I like to use as an analogy sometimes is that let's say, we're talking about driving. You wouldn't stop wearing your seatbelt, hoping that nobody else is drunk driving on the road. Right. 

[00:02:42] We know that women, especially college women, are victimized by men. So when we're talking about risk of victimization and talking about how women in particular can reduce the risk of victimization by men, we have to be talking about risk factors and it connects back to women's socialization, right? Girls receive messages from the time they're very small around being subservient about not speaking up about not being perceived as rude or bossy. Especially in their relationships with men.

[00:03:18] And so as we grow older and internalize those messages, when we're talking about men who are very close to us... partners, spouses family members, teachers, et cetera. That ingrained feeling of, well, I can't speak up against this person's behavior or, well, maybe it's my fault because of something I did that this person is chastising me or that they act this way towards me, or, in this moment I don't want to make him mad so I'm just going to let it go and move on. Those kinds of things that in a non-sexual situation come up can also come up in sexual situations. We talked about alcohol as being a disinhibitor as something that messes with interpretation of social cues. That is something that plays into these situations as well.

[00:04:15] Right. There's going to be that potential sexual disinhibition, but danger cues as well. Recognition of danger cues around men and women's lives tend to go down the more that they're drinking in a situation. And the less that they've been taught about what constitutes a danger cue versus what's a normal and healthy sexual behavior, or what's, what's flirting.

[00:04:44] And so putting that all together, we're going to see this much higher risk of coercive sex for college women. And there are other things we can be thinking about too, in terms of alcohol use among college women and how that's also going to increase risk of victimization. So consider that many of the alcohol fueled parties are held either an on-campus or off-campus fraternity houses, chapter houses, and there's going to be high levels of drinking there, and women are on men's turf and it's part of their social capital to attend these parties and to be seen as attractive and likable. Right. 

[00:05:29] When we look at sorority women's reasons for continuing to go to these types of parties that they know might be dangerous, we're looking at mostly social capital. If I come off as a woman who is turning down frat guys, or who is seen as kind of a bummer person to have at a party, it's not just about me. It means that my sorority is going to stop getting invited to the parties that are being put on by the more popular friends. And that's going to have a negative impact on my sorority.

[00:06:05] So we see that coming into play this feeling of I have to do this because of social capital for my friend group or my social group. And I can't be seen as bad or a downer to the men who are making those decisions about how cool my social group, or my sorority is. Well, that's one thing and sororities cannot have their own parties.

[00:06:28] There are literally policies against sororities holding parties in their chapter houses. So we bring in this environmental feature where women are put into situations in frat parties, where they don't have control over what's happening in the environment, such as what kind of alcohol is being served, who is serving it, access to bedrooms, right?

[00:06:52] Things like that. If women could hold parties in their sorority chapter houses instead, but they do things like decrease access to bedrooms or lock bedrooms, things like that, that are going to change risks. You can also look at game-playing behavior, right? Things like beer pong, super popular among college students, right?

[00:07:15] The more something happens, the more you have to take a shot, there's plenty of games like that, that our students are engaging in. And then we come up with a couple of problems there. One is that you know this overlaps with the perpetrations Mary just talked about is that for men who already have some level of aggression, competitive game playing, especially in a drinking environment, heightened and kind of activates that aggressive tendency that they have.

[00:07:46] And so that then translates over into their level of sexual aggressiveness toward women in particular at these parties. So if you have all this. Game-playing that's fueling more alcohol use. You may see higher levels of aggression in men in that environment. The other piece that becomes critical around victimization is encouragement of heavy alcohol use among women.

[00:08:15] So we see this in media, we hear about it in songs, we see it in movies and television shows. And we get this huge reinforcement about women's heavy drinking. Right? Think about during a pandemic right now, how often we see women alcohol use being joked about especially married women with children, right.

[00:08:34] Wine moms. But getting back to college students. Women are put into these situations like playing things like beer pong, where they are expected to match the amount that men are drinking. And with most women and having smaller body sizes, they're going to become intoxicated a lot faster than men are with the same amount of alcohol.
[00:09:01] Right? So if they're all doing shots of vodka, women are going to be start to become more intoxicated way sooner than a man who's larger than her will. So that expectation to match the level of alcohol. We don't really talk about, and that's going to be critical to prevention when we're talking about decreasing women's risk of sexual victimization.

[00:09:24] So, you have this socialization around not challenging men, especially men that you know, and questioning their behavior, right? You don't expect somebody, you know, who's sitting next to you on a couch to sexually assault you. We have these situations where women are expected to drink at high rates.

[00:09:44] We have the normal disinhibition cues. We have that it's developmentally appropriate for young college students to still engage in risky behavior. And so when you put that all together, looking at alcohol environments that reinforce it, social norms that reinforce it, it's going to contribute in an important way to women's sexual victimization in college.

[00:10:12] Chad Sniffen: [00:10:12] That is a lot to think about from a prevention perspective

[00:10:16] Elise Lopez: [00:10:16] So when we're looking at alcohol and the more women are drinking the longer it takes for them to recognize danger cues, as they become more severe in a situation, kind of those red flags that say, you know what, something's not quite right here, or I don't really want to do this anymore because it looks like this person is pushing me a lot further than I want to go. It takes a lot longer to recognize. And you also have the fact that most of the time, these are going to be men who are much larger than the woman who's been drinking and in the situation. And so how do you leverage a small body against a larger body when you need to use physical resistance?

[00:11:01] If it's really hard, right? And a lot of the self-defense courses that are put out there for women to prevent rape aren't useful in these situations, those classes tend to focus on stranger rape situations, especially when it's something like a person popping out in a parking garage late at night and raping you.

[00:11:27] Right, which is highly unlikely compared to things you're going to find happening in a party where women are sexually assaulted. And so, first of all, there's limited education on physical resistance in those situations. And secondly, it's hard, right? When you're drinking, it's much harder to have control of your body movements.

[00:11:49] And so if you are getting into a situation where recognizing those danger cues is hard and you're not recognizing them until the risk is getting pretty high. And also, you have limited control of your body strength and you're with a person who is much larger than you, then we're seeing a situation where it really becomes easy for somebody to perpetrate against women in particular.

[00:12:23] There's one more thing I want to say about off-campus parties. Off campus parties aren't regulated by campus administration, right? We can't put out policies that say you can't do these things in your private residence, or you can't have parties of this size in your private residence.

[00:12:42] And what we've seen over the years is more students living off campus because they don't want policies that are going to interfere with their personal lives and with their social and drinking behavior. So how do we moderate that in prevention is a huge issue right now. We've also seen, I've seen this anecdotally, I don't know that there are any studies on this.

[00:13:05] Student groups or friend groups who have a lot of money to spend maybe living on campus, but together collectively, renting a home near campus that they can afford and basically using it as a party house. And so those policies then don't extend to that residence and it's more likely to fly under the radar for student parties that aren't being regulated by the campus.

[00:13:36] So we see that happening. And I think we also can't ignore the role of ride sharing services here and how that's contributing to student’s risky behavior around alcohol and sex. So when I was in college these things did not exist. Right. And if you lived on campus and you didn't have a car, you're going to hope for a ride with a friend, or you're going to bicycle somewhere.

[00:14:02] If you're trying to get to a bar or a party, and that's going to slow down your evening and how much you're drinking and how quickly. Not that doesn't happen. Right? I mean, people have been getting slashed at parties for decades and decades. But what we're seeing right now or in recent years is it is so easy now for students to party hop and bar hop with ride sharing services.

[00:14:30] I mean, you click a button on an app, and you've got a ride to the next party. And students can easily talk to each other about where parties are happening, and they can hit them in rapid succession. And so, you're drinking a lot more a lot quicker. And of course, that's gonna raise risk as well.

[00:14:48] This is a known thing for students and again, anecdotally things that I've seen and that I've heard from folks as well, is drivers from ride share services tend to know the areas where these parties around campus are happening in off-campus residences. So what you'll see if you go there late at night on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday is the streets are actually lined with drivers who are ready to take that call for a ride as soon as it pops up in their app. So that also may be contributing in a way that we haven't thought of before and haven't really conceptualized in prevention of how do we deal with these things.

[00:15:25] Chad Sniffen: [00:15:25] Dr. Anderson, how has the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way that students encounter sexual violence?  

[00:15:32] Elizabeth Anderson: [00:15:32] The COVID pandemic obviously has changed everything, but it has also revealed a lot of the fractures in rape prevention attempts that colleges and universities are making. So, dorms, for example, are not as full as they typically are, and maybe they're not fully staffed with people who are doing monitoring around the halls. Some of these off-campus housing areas that tend to be predominantly or entirely students are maybe not as full as they used to be. Bars are closed or operating at this point at limited capacity, which means that a lot of these places that maybe had some sort of community or bystander elements that maybe prevented some of these sexual assaults are no longer operating the way that they used to.

[00:16:12] I think that alcohol consumption is way up and that has having bigger effects at the population level than we've been able to see yet. But college students are certainly a population where, where that does matter. Students who typically may not have good access to alcohol through bars, if they're typically being carded and they're still underage are probably now more likely to be drinking at home or in an off-campus apartment or even on campus if surveillance and monitoring by campus staff is down.

[00:16:40] But the lower number of people in these communities it means that some of this community level accountability or bystander prevention may not be happening the way that it has historically, or at least in the ways that we have relied upon it to happen historically. Additionally, we know that domestic violence has increased so violence, including sexual violence between intimate partners or between college women and, and men that they know is, is likely up, and that includes rape most, which as we know, is facilitated to some extent by use of alcohol. 

[00:17:12] Everyone is skirting COVID social distancing recommendations, and we see that all across the board and college students are no exception. They're also suffering from the isolation aspects of the shutdown. And so people take risks including to meet up with potential sexual partners. 

[00:17:31] Either people they're meeting online through dating apps or who they know already through college. And then the use of alcohol in those situations where they may be more isolated, just one-on-one with this person than they normally wouldn't have taken that risk with someone they don't know particularly well is going to influence the likelihood that someone else would be around or that they would be willing to take a greater risk than they typically would in normal times because of the feelings of isolation associated with the pandemic. Additionally, if they're using alcohol, as Elise was talking about, aspects of noticing risk are reduced for people who are at risk of victimization.

[00:18:03] Chad Sniffen: [00:18:03] Dr. Lopez, earlier you had mentioned some friends of yours who had changed just their normal dating behavior in response to the COVID pandemic.

[00:18:12] Elise Lopez: [00:18:12] I know people who have closed their social circles to what friends they were gonna see, like during quarantine, and go for walks with or whatever. And these friends that I have basically decided among the five or six of them. Okay. We're going to be each other's supports and see each other. We don't live together, but we're just going to each other so that we have some kind of socialization. And one of the pacts they all made with each other was that each one of them was going to only be sexually monogamous or dating one person at a time.

[00:18:51] And so if a friend was a single person, they couldn't be going on a dating app and meeting up with all kinds of people. They had to have a partner who was their partner and who the group  also deemed low risk. There was this whole social network around the same thing around communicable disease prevention with COVID and sex and then how that translates back into a small social circle. 

[00:19:16] Mary Koss: [00:19:16] I think what Elise said connects to your work, Elizabeth. So much of getting that all to work depends on communication. In pre COVID days, you could decide to meet up with somebody on match.com after one exchange. And now, some of the communication around being safe might be facilitated by these applications where it might be important to think about getting to know people a little better, their attitudes toward being safe.

[00:19:53] Elizabeth Anderson: [00:19:53] Yeah, people who are meeting on dating apps, especially during COVID risk, perceptions change. And so, people who are more scared of COVID might be more willing to meet up with someone that they trust less to or have a higher risk for meeting this person than they typically would. If something seems a little off, they might be still willing to meet that person if they deem them a low COVID risk versus someone who's a low sexual assault risk. Or something like  if you're certain, the person doesn't have COVID maybe you are less willing to meet up with someone who's not gonna fight you on condom use. So you're not going to be as willing to negotiate. Hey, this is a must for me, if your concern is more on COVID and not on using a contraceptive or something along those lines.

[00:20:37] Mary Koss: [00:20:37] You know what I like about Elisa's example is the sex pod concept, if people haven't heard about it, is the way you have a hookup in the age of COVID the way you have a relationship that is purely based on sex, that it's no strings attached, no emotional commitment. How do you arrange that in a safe way nowadays? 

[00:21:11] The suggestion has been made that it's harder because it can't be as anonymous and you have to have some hard upfront conversations about what's this relationship going to be about what's the future of this relationship? What commitment are we making to each other about limiting our outside exposures so that if we decide we're going to have a relationship that is for satisfaction of sexual desires and not intended to outlast the pandemic, we'll both be on the same page, and we'll both be making the commitments to keep each other safe and healthy.

[00:21:57] Elizabeth Anderson: [00:21:57] And I would add too, in terms of how sex and technology has been shifting during the pandemic. If you look at the rise of the service like OnlyFans and other dating apps as well, we start seeing new forms of technology facilitated violence whether it's doxing or bullying or stalking and all these things that emerged that are new forms of sexual violence against women.

[00:22:19] And so having an in-person interaction, isn't the only way that this sort of aggression can be perpetrated, and I think that's worth considering as well to go along with the more positive aspects of being able to find a partner just online. 

[00:22:31] Chad Sniffen: [00:22:31] Dr. Koss what final piece of advice can you give us to wrap up this episode with.

[00:22:37] Mary Koss: [00:22:37] The bottom line of what we've all been saying is drink responsibly. Understand that rape when intoxicated is a rape and third follow a safe protocol, perhaps using the many apps that are available to have safety conversations before you decide on intimacy that's going to expose you to COVID. So, our bottom line is drink responsibly, stay safe, and be sexy.