Before I introduce today’s episode, we want to give a content warning that this episode contains detailed accounts of sexual assault and may be triggering or difficult for some listeners. Please take care of yourself, and if you need to skip this episode, we completely understand. 

Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, on understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I’m Laura Palumbo, and I’m the Communications Director at NSVRC. On today’s episode we are speaking with Dr. Jennifer S. Hirsch and Dr. Shamus Khan, authors of the book Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study on Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. This book draws from the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) study out of Columbia University, and this research is so powerful as it draws directly on stories from the students themselves – whose names have been changed – some of which we will be discussing. This episode is part 1 of a 2 part series, so be sure to stay tuned for the upcoming episode where we continue this conversation. 

Jennifer Hirsch: My name is Jennifer Hirsch. I'm a professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

Shamus Khan: And I'm Shamus Khan. I'm a professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University.

Chad Sniffen: Thank you for joining us today. The two of you wrote a book called Sexual Citizens, which is  linked in our resources. Could you tell us about the SHIFT study that provided the foundation for Sexual Citizens and where the SHIFT study was done and what the purpose of it and your three key concepts that you found as part of the study. 

Jennifer Hirsch: Happy to, and I'll open with a story to give listeners a sense of what it's like to read Sexual Citizens, as well as the argument that we make.

Lucy was a freshmen. She was new on campus and arrived with a very clear idea of what she wanted to have happen socially. She wanted to meet some boys, make out, and eventually lose her virginity. And so it felt super exciting to go with her hallmate Nancy, to one of the bars in Morningside Heights.

They were 18, which as, you know, under the drinking age, but they had good fakes. So they got right in and they were excited to meet some seniors, you know, at that felt like a powerful moment of opportunity and they danced, the seniors bought them two drinks, and then Scott invited Lucy back to his fraternity house and she said, yes.

You know, it was kind of thrilling. And so they stumbled up Amsterdam avenue in a warm late summer night. Her phone rang and rang and it was her friend Nancy who had gotten that bystander intervention, you know, during orientation week and wanted to make sure that Lucy was okay.

And so they waited outside the fraternity for the friend to catch up. And then they, they went in Scott, Lucy and Nancy. He asked the girls cause that's what young women are called on campus girls. If they had like drinks they said, yes fraternities are not allowed to serve alcohol hard alcohol on campus, which doesn't mean they don't do it.

It just means they keep it upstairs. So they went up to the second floor. Nancy had had a lot to drink and so she took like one sip and passed out. And Scott asked Lucy if she'd like you to talk to his room. And she did want to go up to his room. So they went up they started making out. Up until that point, it was all good. And then he started to unbutton her pants and she said, no don't to which he said it's okay. But it wasn't okay. Because then he raped her. That was a story that she had never told anyone as a rape. When she told her friends about what happened the next day, she recounted it as like one of those crazy orientation week stories.

And in Sexual Citizens, Shamus and I, are trying to change the conversation that people are having nationally around campus sexual assault, which has been so focused on improving adjudication or on campuses as a hunting ground. When we started the research that Sexual Citizens draws on, that was when that movie came out, and the idea was that people who assault are sort of sociopathic perpetrators, who must be found and expelled from campus the project that Sexual Citizens draws on the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, which I co-lead with my friend clinical psychologist, Claude Ann Mellins was a very big ambitious project supported by Columbia University that had three different components.

It had two kinds of survey research that was component one. It had this ethnographic research what Seamus and I can describe a little bit more and then a big community collaboration and policy development component because the work felt too important to just give the University a binder, which would sit on the shelf with all the other binders.
And so the goal in SHIFT was to address campus sexual assault as a public health problem and to understand how it's socially produced in a way that would map out a new kind of roadmap for what it means to, to think about prevention much more comprehensively. So I don't know, Seamus, if you want to talk a little bit more about the ethnographic study design.

Shamus Khan: Sure. So the ethnographic portion of SHIFT which is, as Jennifer said that basis for Sexual Citizens involved three kinds of studies. First we interviewed 151 students about their lives in general. So we didn't just ask people questions about sexual assault. We asked them about. You know how they ended up in college, what their life was like before college.

But the relationships were like with their family, their experiences with sex and drugs and alcohol before they got to college. And then we asked them questions about their sexual experiences. In more than half of these interviews, there were no stories of sexual assault. And so what we wanted to do in this study was not just study sexual assault, but study sexual assault in relationship to the broad ecology of sex or the broad ways that people had and experienced a range of sexual experiences.

And part of the reason for that was that we thought about sexual assaults as things that frequently emerged out of sexual situations. And so we wanted to know, like, what was it that made sexual experiences... false... versus something else. And obviously consent is critical to that, but like there's reasons why consent happens.

And so within those 151 interviews, they were each about two hours long. And for 25 of them, we did up to two rounds of follow-up interviews because there were so many stories to be told, primarily stories about assault, in fact. And so we ended up spending up to six hours with some of those people.

In addition, we ran focus groups to understand how students collectively talked about sex and those focus groups were groups that included first-generation students, students from minoritized backgrounds. So an all black student group, for example, an all Asian student group LGBTQ plus students, women only, first year students only religious oriented students.

And then in addition to those 17 focus groups, I think what really like helps the study sort of stand out was that we didn't just talk to students about their lives. We watched them navigate their lives. So a large portion of the ethnography was participant observation. And this included Jennifer and me hanging out at athletic events and spending time in dining halls.

But it also meant that we hired younger people, people with backgrounds that we trained pretty extensively to hang out with students. Yeah at night. And also during the day, but in spaces that students considered more private. So on an intermural sports league, in religious student spaces, hanging out in fraternity basements when there were parties, hanging out with students in their living rooms, playing Catan or making dinner together.

And that gave us sort of a sense of the broad life of students beyond just what they were telling us, but to situate that in their everyday experiences and actions. And so those three components of the ethnography are the basis of the stories that we tell of student experiences and sort of the whole portrait of campus life.

And again, the purpose of that is to say that sexual assaults don't just happen because of people's psychology. They happen because of the organization of our institutions and our culture. And so what the ethnographic graphic study tried to do was capture the dimensions of those institutional organizations and cultural features and use that to explain why sexual assault is and has been such a persistent feature of college life. 

Chad Sniffen: So if you, if you don't mind me asking you a follow up question how many, approximately how many hours of interviews did you have recorded, or did you do, or did your group do? I know it wasn't just you, but I know you had a large group.

Shamus Khan: I'm not exactly sure. I mean, we had over 10,000 pages of interview transcripts. Each interview was around a hundred to 150 pages. My guess would be that it would have been around four to five hundred hours of interviews. I don't know, Jennifer, if you would agree with that. 

Jennifer Hirsch: Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of mental math you're asking us to do on the spot, but I think that, yeah, if you figure that the first round of interviews was 300 hours and then those follow-up interviews yeah, I think, you know, somewhere between three and five hundred hours many hours a lot of days.

Chad Sniffen: So I asked this because that's an amazing scope for any survey and thats a really impressive amount of data that that you worked with. 

Shamus Khan: And then, you know, for the ethnographic portion we have over 600 hours. And actually we have a pretty extensive methodological appendix where we tracked the number of hours that we spent in different places. So for example, we spent 160 hours in dorms. We spent 55 hours in outside spaces, off campus. 186 hours in a range of campus spaces, 111 hours in off-campus indoor spaces.

So, you know, for those who are interested in kind of checking our receipts there's. Several appendices on our methodology that, that are, you know about a dozen pages outlining how much time we spend where the composition of our sample, which was very purposive. So you know, that, that racial composition, the sexual identities, so 73% identified as heterosexual.

You know the percentage that were receiving a financial aid and all of that can be, you know, broken is broken down for the reader so they can evaluate the quality of our data when thinking through the sets of claims that we're making and not just quality of our data, but that, you know,  how that data may influence some of the claims that we're making. 

Jennifer Hirsch: One thing that I would add on there is that the research design points, not only to our thoroughness as researchers, but also to the extraordinary level of institutional support that we have Columbia, I mean, this was a moonshot level project. And the reason that we could do so many things is because we had really substantial resources. I think it, it shows a lot of vision and courage for a university to say, yeah, here is a ton of money. Do whatever you think necessary. If you need some communications or administrative support, let us know and circle back, with finding.

So like that's not the experience, I think of a lot of sexual assault researchers on their own campus. And so the productivity of the broader shifts study with, you know, more than two dozen papers, as well as sexual citizens, I think it reflects so well back on the university, seeing  that what we need is research to advance a new approach to prevention.

Chad Sniffen: And it is definitely an experience every researcher should have at some point in their career.  Could you start to talk to us about the three key concepts of the SHIFT study and Sexual Citizens: sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies.

Shamus Khan: Sure. What we hope a lot of people take away from this work is a new heuristic or a new framework for understanding sexual violence. And that framework is centered around these three concepts, sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies. And in order to highlight these, let me just tell a story.

And then after telling that story kind of use the concepts to reflect through it. So Charisma was a Black and Latino woman who described Columbia and Barnard to us as a White space. And what she meant by that was in her words, it was filled with White guys who drank too much couldn't dance, listen to terrible music and didn't find her attractive.

And because of that, she ended up sort of, looking elsewhere, other than campus to find sexual partners or people that she thought would be interested in her and that she would be more interested in. And so she told us a story of meeting a guy who lived out in Brooklyn through her, and, you know, after awhile of texting him back and forth ended up going out to visit him one Saturday evening.

And for those who don't know, sort of the, the, the geography of New York Morningside Heights in where Columbia is in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where this guy lived are, you know, about 10 miles away from one another. But to get there on a Saturday evening can sometimes take up to an hour and a half.

 You know, the subways weren't running the lines were being repaired, et cetera. And she finally ended up getting to this guy's place, somewhat miraculously, actually, as we tell him that in the, in the. In in the book. And she ends up, you know, in his apartment. They smoke a joint are kind of hanging out.

They're making out a little bit, and then he starts to put his hands on her body and she moves them away. And then he does it again and in the story he ends up raping her twice that evening and the next day. And Charisma said to us, you know, body language was always my plan A and I didn't have a plan B I didn't have another way of communicating.

Now, one way to read this story is to talk about what an awful guy this was. Right. I mean, he should have listened to her. Although she didn't say anything about his hands, she did move them away. And she did describe to us in the first time that they were in her words having sex. She said no.

And she said that he must've interpreted that as she was uncomfortable because he switched positions that they were in. So she made some excuses for him, but you know, just seeing his terribleness, misses large portione of what is happening in that. So Sexual Projects, Sexual Citizenship, and Sexual Geographies helps us see a lot more. Sexual Projects is the answer to the question, what is sex for?

And it might seem like only academics could ask a question, like what is sex for? But as it turns out sexist for lots of different things, it's to connect with a partner it's for pleasure. For LGBTQ students, we found that sex was frequently a way that people came to understand their own identities.

Sex is about people's status in their group or the, or the status of the group that they're a part of. So sex does a lot of things. It's kind of it's, it's not just a one-on-one behavior. It's a, it's a broad social behavior and like most social behaviors that has multiple meanings for us. In order to understand why assaults happen, we need a better sense of what people's sexual projects are. Now we only had Charisma's story in that encounter. But it was pretty clear that the guy that she was with had a firm sense of his own Sexual Project. It was to get off. It was to have sex. Charisma's Sexual Project, however, was not as clear to her.

And over the many stories that she told us over the course of her interviews it became increasingly clear that no one had really talked to Charisma about what sex was for. And she ended-up figuring it out for herself in a pretty effective way, but through a lot of trial and error. And so one of the arguments that we make in Sexual Citizens is that communities need to do a lot more communicating with young people about what sex is for.

Sexual Citizenship is the idea that people have the right to the kinds of sexual experiences that they want and the obligation to recognize the equivalent rights of others. The man that Chrisma was with, with had a really clear sense of his right to sex. He had however, no sense of his obligation to recognizing Charisma has equivalent rights. When she moved his hand away. That was her way of expressing her Sexual Citizenship and saying, I don't want this kind of experience. And he just totally ignored it. And so there was a real failure of Sexual Citizenship in that room with that man.

However, there was also a failure of the communities that had raised Charisma and helping her cultivate her own sense of Sexual Citizenship. You know, she like so many of the women that we spoke to just didn't feel like she had the right to sexual experiences. And in particular, she didn't have a clarity of when she had the right to say yes.

And that really kind of clouded clarity on when she had the right to say no as well. The fact that she didn't have a plan B that all she could do in terms of her communication was use body language suggests a fundamental silence and shame around sex within her past. And that's a real problem. It's not a Charisma problem, it's an us problem. 

Finally, geography is the idea that that space matters and space. Isn't just a backdrop. It's a critical player in how our sexual lives unfold. And part of that space is the geography of power and power relationships. And I think that there are three critical aspects of the power relationships and Charisma story.

First she was in this guy's apartment. And the fact that he controlled the space that they were in is really consequential. Secondly, Charisma described Columbia and Barnard, as we said, as a white space or a white institution. And what that meant was that there was a non-trivial degree of control over space by white people.

And that is an aspect of an institution that is modifiable, right? So thinking about how we could transform the control over space, and it doesn't make White people, bad people for controlling space, but it does make it bad that there aren't other opportunities for queer people, for people of color, for women to control spaces as well.

It wasn't just white people who controlled space. It was primarily white men. Finally, there's the element of class in this. And, you know, for a lot of the students at Columbia nontrivial amount of them, they could have just opened up Uber, call the car and gotten whisked away from this guy's apartment, but that's a $60 cab ride.

From Brooklyn to back to Morningside Heights, it is not a cheap ride and Charisma couldn't afford it. And so, you know, her experience there of an intersectional experience of Columbia as a white institution dominated in terms of the party spaces by men. The experience of being in this guy's space, the experience of class, the intersectional character highlights here, how geography and power are deeply intertwined in intersectional ways.

And we need to think about those intersectional intertwining of space and power where gender matters, but genders not the only thing that matters as an aspect of why sexual assaults happen. 

Chad Sniffen: Thank you for explaining all of that for us and for sharing the stories of those students. I think it's also important for us to clarify it that you're not using those students' actual names.

Both of you wrote a blog post for us that applied some of the concepts of Sexual Citizens and the SHIFT study to building safe online spaces. Could you talk about the distinction between online and offline spaces, the fluidity between them and also you mentioned moral panic in your blog posts. Could you talk a little bit about how fear of technology kind of drive some perspectives on the problem of sexual violence?

Jennifer Hirsch: Yeah, so when we were asked to write a blog post about Sexual Citizenship and online spaces. And our take on that, I think was a little bit of a pushback too, to lift up the fact that, that you can't have Sexual Citizenship online if you don't cultivate it offline. So there is a long history of moral panics around technology and young people's sexuality. And in particular, around young women's sexuality, I mean, If you know anything about the history of the bicycle in America, what you may not know.

You would know that when, when young women started riding bicycles in the 19th century, there was this frenzy of worry that they might disrupt women's menstrual cycles. So the sort of freak out about online connections we've been here before in this goldfish bowl.

And what we found in the research that we share in Sexual Citizens is actually young people as digital natives move, move fluidly between digital and in-person spaces. In part, you know, if you're at a party you can spend two hours talking to somebody only to find out after you've invested your whole evening in chatting them up, that they're there with someone or that they're not interested in people of your gender.

And so there's this element of efficiency, but also there's all kinds of ways that online flirting is a prelude to in-person connecting And, you know, I've had parents one time asked me, like, is it true that young people are on the Tinder? And I explained to them that like, yes, they are on the Tinder.

But that actually the people that are looking for are friends of friends and that they're not looking like in many cases, they're not looking for total strangers. And so there's an integration between their virtual sexual world and their either in-person worlds. And so in arguing in the blog post is we do that, that you can't have Sexual Citizenship online if you ignore it offline, you know, if you pour sour milk into a new glass, it's still sour. And so there are, there are real things that we can do to promote Sexual Citizenship in the world. Like it's not just an idea. It's actually a framework for a strategy. I think we've seen in America, a persistent denial of young people's right to sexual self-determination expressed even in the pretty good sex education that some young people are lucky enough to have access to, which still frames becoming sexually active before marriage as like a worst case scenario. Which is, I mean, in fact, most people are, are sexually active before marriage. And so things that we could do, like concrete policy advances to promote Sexual Citizenship in the world, which would then have repercussions online, would be to make sure that young people have access to confidential, affordable, accessible sexual and reproductive health services.

Right? You can't have sexual self-determination without reproductive self-determination. And so if young people need to go before a judge in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, that is a really powerful message about their lack of access to Sexual Citizenship. The second recommendation that we have for promoting Sexual Citizenship in the world is inclusive, medically accurate.

Comprehensive sexuality education in the research from the broader SHIFT study the survey actually in a paper that my husband was the first author on, John Santelli gotta name check him, we found that young women who'd had comprehensive sex ed before college that included training in practicing how to say no to sex they didn't want to have, which is not abstinence only sex education, is just sex education that includes a skills development component, like any good education. Those women were half as likely to be raped on campus. That is a big effect size. I don't need to tell you, but for the listeners, that is an effect size that is larger than most social science research finds.

And so essentially comprehensive sex ed is a vaccine. To prevent campus sexual assault and like the target effectiveness for the COVID vaccine. It wouldn't prevent all sexual assaults. You know, we were shooting for 50% with the vaccine now, like thank the Lord, they overshot that. But the comprehensive sex ed obviously wouldn't prevent all assaults, but it could prevent a lot of them through providing opportunities for young people to think about the kinds of relationships that they want to aspire to rather than trying to scare them into never having sex. So it could also through being inclusive, provide a sense of recognition and belonging, which is really absent for a lot of queer youth. Remember there are nine states in America that actually mandate by law that if sex ed is offered, it has to discriminate against queer youth. It must be homophobic. And so like the first step is to undo the harm that's being done.

But then the second step is to, to move policy at the state level or nationally to deal with the inequity. The situation that we have now with such a patchwork across states and school districts means that you know, wealthy kids in progressive school districts get this thing that keeps them safe and other kids don't.

So that's, you know, we have a sort of national commitment to inequality in that, but it's time to move on that. And then the third strategy for building sexual citizenship offline in ways that would have repercussions online. Is to make sure that schools in general are climates of inclusion and belonging.

Every single black woman that we spoke with in our research, every single one had experienced unwanted non-consensual sexual touching. That is not a kind of sexual assault that you're going to prevent by doing a class on consent, right? That's about racism. And so the, the vitriol that black women experience online is not separate from the assault that they experienced offline.

And so I think thinking about Sexual Citizenship must be intersectional and it has to, has to engage with a broader project of building more equitable institutions whether that's at the K through 12 level or at the higher education level.

Chad Sniffen: I want to thank you both so much for your time and for the incredible contribution that your work has made to the field of sexual violence prevention and we are hoping to do a second interview with you. And so our listeners can look for that second podcast in our feed.

Jennifer Hirsch: Thank you for having us. It was a great to be in conversation with you. 

Chad Sniffen: This has been Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan authors of Sexual Citizens, now available at bookstores in-person and online.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at www.nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.