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. Today’s episode is part two of our conversation 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. In this episode, we discuss how the book has been received, as well as the implications of the book and the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) study for sexual violence prevention work.

Chad Sniffen: in our last podcast that we recorded with both of you we talked about the basic framework of Sexual Citizens, the key concepts, sexual projects, sexual citizenship, sexual geographies, and you shared with us a lot about kind of the structure of the research.

And what I found interesting about, well, lots of things, actually, both our conversation and the book itself and various interviews that you've done is how your perspective as a sociologist and an anthropologist really contributes to the lens of this work that you've done. For me, that's interesting because I've been doing prevention work for a little over 20 years now in various capacities throughout the field.

And I've seen movements in what I see as movements in the field and especially as relates to prevention work. So I feel like the, the first movement really was born out of survivor activism and advocacy. So really things were framed out of the experience of survivors, specifically their experience of harm.

And so prevention work was often framed in that way then as more support and especially Federal funding came into the movement. Things started to be shaped by the law enforcement perspective on sexual violence and how to hold offenders accountable in a criminal context. Right. And then as once again, in the next shift of prevention it seems to me that there was a, a public health era.

That's, we're kind of still in where public health concepts really started to become introduced into the idea of prevention, especially as in the United States, as the Centers for Disease Control used their management of the Rape Prevention Education Program to shape those conversations. And so we, we started to get these more sociological and kind of bigger picture ideas around prevention.

It's become part of the conversation about how we can end sexual assault. And I see Sexual Citizens as an extension of that, adding more of a sociological and anthropological perspective on the experience of sexual violence and ways to prevent it.

Could you talk about where you feel the perspective of your research is coming from and how it relates to past perspectives and current perspectives of prevention and what you feel like you've learned from those perspectives and what you think your research has to say to contribute to those perspectives?

Jennifer Hirsch: Sure. So I think I've spent my whole career actually at the intersection of social sciences and public health. And I remember very distinctly observing the national conversation around campus, sexual assault in the summer before we began planning this research and thinking that what was missing was an understanding of both sexual assault and sexual behavior as socially produced. The project that I did immediately prior to this, one of them looked at the social organization of men's engagement and extramarital sex. So sort of what you could think of is like the social production of infidelity and, you know, my husband and I joke that, like, of course, if he did it, I would be really angry at him. But as a scientist, we have an explanation of that. Not as the reflections of people's moral failing, or the quality of their marriage, but rather something that is fomented by social organization.

And so we apply that same optic to understanding campus sexual assault in the work that we share in Sexual Citizens. So certainly like those insights about the need for a more ecological approach that come from the public health-ification of the problem, which I think is the era that like immediately proceeded ours are fundamental.

And yet I think the intersection between public health and social science that highlights the innovation of our work, I think remembering one of the, one of the most important contributions of social science to public health is understanding that people are not health maximizers. That you have to understand what we read as health behaviors, as social behaviors. And so that I think brings in our idea of Sexual Projects and the ways in which you have to understand what people are trying to get out of sexual interactions in order to understand what sets up some of the situations that lead to sexual assault.

I think another fundamental ways in which current social science is reflected in the research and Sexual Citizens is our intersectional approach to power. I mean, w and there we stand, not just on generations of sexual assault, researchers, but generations of feminist researchers who have pointed out how unequal power relations between men and women are fundamental to understanding sexual assault and our contribution to that is sort of yes and because a framing of sexual violence, that's only within sort of a violence against women, or that takes gender based violence to really only mean violence against women, falls profoundly short in the research we show how there are many other forms of socially organized power inequalities that are important to bring into the conversation understand the racial dimension and the wealth dimension and how queerness fits into understanding the much higher rates of campus sexual assault that LGBTQ students experience. In order to understand the much higher rates of campus sexual assault that queer students experience you can't get there with an analysis of power that just looks at inequalities between CIS women and CIS men. And then before I hand off to Shamus to talk about how we bring in some of the critical insights from the critique of mass incarceration, I just want to say one more thing, which is that I think you can describe our work as going beyond public health, but I think there's a way in which all of our arguments in Sexual Citizens are very much grounded in the power of public health, which focuses on change at the community level.

So our A-game in public health is not telling people to act better, and we're certainly not the first people to observe in sexual violence prevention that that's an important insight. But I think that in our insistence, at every campus we visit that we're not going to tell them the one intervention that's going to fix this problem, but that it's crucial to take a life course perspective to work across many areas of campus programming.

But also to remember that that. The problems that we face with campus, sexual assault are part of a much bigger problem that we face with sexual violence in many institutions. And so the scandals that you see every day in the media about sexual violence in athletics or in religious institutions, or with powerful political figures, like let's not be the goldfish and the goldfish bowl where like every time we go around and we're like, oh, this has never happened before.

And so the need for analysis that, that brings all of those things together and says like, okay, campus, we haven't fixed campus sexual assault because it's been regarded as a campus problem. And in our analysis, it's an everyone problem. I think that that's part of what our optic contributes. And so now I'll hand off to Shamus to talk about how the work that we present in Sexual Citizens is also very of the moment in terms of the critique of mass incarceration. That's emerged.

Shamus Khan: So we don't think of our work as radically new and different. We think of it as integrating a range of perspective. So building upon classic feminist approaches about gender and power, but then layering onto that intersectional framework to recognize that gender isn't the only form of power that there are lots of forms of power that we need to address.

I think the other major thing that has been informing our work is you know, a reflection on the kind of disastrous experiment with mass incarceration that our country has had over the last 30 years. And trying to put some of the insights of that that so many scholars have developed, into insights about sexual violence and, you know, the, the most simplistic way of putting it is like, we're not going to punish our way out of a problem or, thinking that if we just focus on what to do after an assault happens, we'll be able to prevent the assaults from happening in the first place. That is a very naive approach that we kind of know that yes, of course, punishment has a relationship to the likelihood of a crime being committed, but it's not nearly as strong as we think.

And if it's the only lever that we pull, we're not going to be able to move the needle. We're not going to be able to really change. And so, you know, what, what Jennifer and I want to do is think about, what are the community level transformations of prevention that aren't about what do we do after this happens, but instead, what are the things that all of us should be doing?

Not just the people who are engaged in sexual violence work, but you know, what is the big tent that we should be building? That is the big tent of community transformation that can get us where we need to be. And so, I think that the real advantage of our approach is not in its uniqueness, but in its combination and building upon the classic insights of previous scholars of feminist scholars on this building, upon the important individual level factors that psychologists have emphasized, and then layering on a multi-level model to think about what are the relationship factors of the organizational factors and the cultural factors that matter for that.

And then taking sort of theoretical perspectives of intersectionality, multiple forms of power and a reflection then as I've been saying on what criminologists have learned about how to move the needle on crime and problem behaviors, which isn't focusing on adjudication and how we hold people accountable and then punish them, which has been so much of the sexual assault conversation, particularly in the public, but instead on broader community transformation and interventions that would prevent any things from happening before they get to that moment of punishment and adjudication.

Jennifer Hirsch: One more part, actually I want to call out. Part of Shamus's work that I think is so important in our analysis and I think it illustrates how our point is not to take anything out of the prevention toolbox, but to put more things in. So bystander interventions great. Like we don't have that many things that have been shown to have any impact.

So it's not our goal to undermine any of them. But Shamus and maybe Shamus you can talk a little bit more about that brings his expertise, studying the interactions of social groups to lifting up some of the complications with bystander interventions in terms of how peer groups operate. 

Shamus Khan: Totally. I mean, you know one of the challenges for bystander intervention is that it's hard to get your wing man to be a blocker, right? I mean, if you, so much of social groups are organized around facilitating sex for their, for their peers. And so then to flip the script on that a little bit can really be a challenge.

And, you know, our, our insight there is that consent is super valuable as a perspective for prevention, but there are frequently always more than two people in that room. Not physically. I mean, usually it's only two people in the room, but metaphorically and in terms of the pressures of that moment, a lot of young people are imagining what their peers are gonna think about that situation.

You know, we, we heard stories from young people over the course of our interviews of women who had incredibly unpleasant sexual encounters. Who didn't feel that they would have that unpleasant because later they could brag about the guy that they'd hooked up with. Cause he was super desirable or men who had desirable sexual encounters or that they personally enjoyed, but their friends later mocked them for it because the woman wasn't attractive enough.

And we just saw again and again, how the pressure of groups was it is an integral part of how people set up and then it experienced their own sexual encounters. And it's not just a theoretical concept. Like the, the reason that's valuable is that we could say, okay, what are the multiple ways that we can leverage groups beyond just by standard intervention?

How can we have a deep analysis of group dynamics that isn't just about let's stop people from having sex that might be a problem because frequently, you know, sexual assaults, as we found were consensual until they weren't. Bystanders wouldn't have intervened because both people were pretty happy with how things were going for a while and then they got into a room and one of them ceased to be happy about how the situation was and the other person assaulted them.

And so, you know, having a little bit of a broader perspective about those group level dynamics about thinking about relationships between groups and groups as sort of status order spaces which in English, just being like groups as being driven by a lot of status concerns of their members and of the groups between the other groups, you know, Sexual Citizens tries to open that up a little bit and, and that the hope is to give more possibilities for intervention for people so that when they read the book, suddenly they begin to see, actually, there are lots of other things I could be doing that may actually help move the needle on this issue.

Jennifer Hirsch: And I would I lift up maybe one more way in which Sexual Citizens feels very social scientific to us, which is taking into account who we are as people. And how that's reflected in the work. When you read the book, we hope, we think that it reads with a lot of empathy and compassion, and we wrote it as people who have a lot of admiration and care for young people.

I mean, I wrote it as a, as not just a, an anthropologist in public health, but as a mother, you know, both of my sons were emerging into this age group as we did the research and they're both white, cis, hetero men and white cis hetero men are the people who commit the greatest proportion of assaults, just numerically.

And I wanted to write a book that would land with them and their peers in a way that they would feel seen and included rather than talk at. You know, Shamus, his first book was about the experiences of young people at an elite boarding school. And so he also has a lot of experience engaging with young people compassionately. And so we wanted to write in a way that reflects our experience, our, like our personal relationships with the young people and our care for them.

Chad Sniffen: I am fascinated about your perspectives on what you've learned and the impact on bystander prevention since that is still kind of fairly dominant model. I think that there's a whole nother podcast series in that. It seemed like you had written a paper or specifically related to that one of you had written a paper? 

Shamus Khan:  Well, Jennifer and I have never written a paper off this project alone.  We have a paper called Friends, Strangers and Bystanders. And one of the things that, that paper notes is how bystander intervention as we observed it in the Columbia and Barnard context was very gendered.

So it tended to be men seeing themselves as being good men for protecting women. And so there was a little bit of this like gendered dynamic of the protection of women, but that the other critical feature that we observed was that men reacted very differently as by standards, depending upon their relationship to the man.

So, you know, if it was a group of men who were throwing a party and it was a stranger who was acting inappropriately they would kind of physically be quite rough with them and removing them from the party as a way to demonstrate their, you know, masculinity, but also most of us don't want to be known as the place where sexual assault happens and they don't want sexual assault to happen in their communities.

These men had a strong desire for that. And so they kind of like, would forecefully, physically remove these guys. If, however, the guy whose acting inappropriately was one of their own, they had very different strategies. Now it wasn't that they didn't intervene or facilitated assault.

But in the words of one guy he told us like, well, one of the strategies was to like smoke the guy up, like to get him stoned on pot so that he would chill out, get the spins or throw up. Right. And so those are like the three possible outcomes, but all of those were desirable and they had multiple deflection strategies for their peer group men.

So others would be to try and remove him from that context where he'd be like, okay, I'm going to bring this guy out of here. Like, let's get them to play a game of beer pong so that he's no longer interacting with this woman. And that kind of highlights what we were saying earlier about the status hierarchies and social connections, influencing how people practice by standard intervention.

Chad Sniffen: So both of you have been on this extensive introduction of Sexual Citizens to universities and communities across the country and been talking about the framework. Could you tell us what feedback you've gotten about the book, how it's been received and what you've heard other people say to you about your work?

Jennifer Hirsch: I think the first part of the answer to that question is actually how it's been received in our home community at Columbia, where from the beginning we were in conversation with campus administrators. Most research has no impact on the world and sexual assault research is no exception to that, right.

People just like turn out findings and then. They don't do anything. And we, from the beginning, we wanted to, to have an impact in our own community. And so it was thrilling and this is the SHIFT, the broader SHIFT project, not Sexual Citizens, the book to be in conversation with someone like the vice-president for housing and dining, who, when we talked about the implications of sexual geographies for sexual assault, like you could see the light bulb go off and he started to see himself as a sexual assault prevention stakeholder and made decisions accordingly.

So he decided to keep one of the dining halls open all night so that when students were coming home, coming back to the dorms from parties or bars, they had someplace to go to be together. That was not a room with four pieces of furniture. And so that is sort of the paradigmatic public health intervention that doesn't change individual behavior, but that seems to change the environment through which people move.

So the reception on campus has been very very engaged and then nationally, it's been thrilling, right? I mean, to live together, the social life of the book we visited by the end of this spring, it will be more than a hundred campuses. I've done a lot of public writing and we are all in with getting the message out and there's not a single campus that we visit where we don't get a side message from a student saying you told my story.

You know, and that's heartbreaking in a way, because there are so many stories of sexual assault, but also I think the ways in which we make room to talk about sex that is not assault, but that is hurtful or feels bad. Or as students would say is kind of "rapey." That's not a conversation that there's room for on a lot of campuses. And so I think there are so many ways in which students feel seen in our work in a way that gives them energy to make change. And Shamus can talk a little bit more about some of the impacts that we've had on specific campuses. 

Shamus Khan: Yeah. So Jennifer and I are just hugely devoted to the social life of the book. And you know, as Jennifer said, the reason for that is that this was a lot of work and for the people listening, you know, Jennifer and I were pretty new to research on sexual violence. Some of our work had commented on it before, but we weren't sexual violence researchers.

And it is emotionally hard work, and I think we have a lot of appreciation for the people who do that work and you know shout out to you all who are listening along. But we thought, this was challenging and we wanted to not just produce the work, but then to commit ourselves to disseminating it and not in a, just a pure fame and status thing.

But thinking like we thought that we might have a framework that could really help move the needle a little bit. Because unlike so many people who've worked in this area, we had a huge amount of institutional support. I mean, most researchers have walls put up in front of them, limits placed on them. IRBs, university administrators. Everybody kind of gets in their way. We had doors open to us, right. We were in just an incredibly privileged place and it allowed us to do things that I think others haven't been able to do. Not because we were so much better, but because we had a different opportunity structure than they did.

And so Jennifer and I have wanted to commit ourselves to transforming the campus climate, not just at Columbia and Barnard, but more broadly. And you know, so we've had so many conversations and it's super exciting to see, you know the folks at Stanford right now we're redesigning a lot of their sexual assault prevention trainings around the concepts of the book.

So you can go to their website and they have made this sexual projects quiz, and they're in the middle of having a sexual citizenship quiz. And it's not a quiz like you get a grade at the end, but it's sort of meant to sort of have an evaluative impact on young people so that they can begin to reflect on what they're doing with their sexual lives and why.

Morehouse College right now is using the book as one of the reads for next year and organizing it's April Sexual Assault Awareness Month programming around it. And it's exciting to see them sort of think about, especially, you know Jennifer and I have this commitment to working with religious organizations and institutions because we think that they're under leveraged.

And also you know, standard is like are religious organizations and institutions places where harm happens, like yes or no. And how do we prevent the harm? Well, that's a pretty low bar, right? Like we could move the needle a lot more with those organizations as well in enlisting them as critical groups.

And Jennifer and I have also worked with policymakers at the State and Federal level to try and get LGBTQIA inclusive sex ed as part of what's happening in the military to working on the state level to try and have a comprehensive sex ed part of what states are requiring and mandating for the young people in their states.

And so, there are many planks that we want to work on for the social life of this book to kind of convert the privileges that we had in doing this research into opportunities that many people can realize. And if we can play a role at helping to bring things to fruition, that people are envisioning, like we're gonna do it. We're both deeply committed to that. And have been for the last 18 months. And I expect we'll be continuing to do this for years to come. 

Jennifer Hirsch: One more piece of the uptake that I think we both find particularly exciting is working at the secondary school level. In April we'll be giving a presentation to the New York State Association of Independent Schools.

And we, you know, there's a lot of nice blurbs on the paperback edition, but I think maybe our favorite is the one from a high school teacher that describes Sexual Citizens as the most exciting, most relevant, most important book I have ever taught high school seniors. 

You know, not a lot of learning goes on in the spring of senior year and so to use the book as an opportunity for young people to think about these issues before they get to college. We see a lot of potential in that and would be very excited to think about how to build out that secondary school engagement piece further. So, yeah, we're, we're all in here. 

Chad Sniffen: So other than the book itself, which sounds like the primary source, what are other resources that people who are interested in the framework of both Sexual Citizens and SHIFT where are other resources people can explore to learn more about how the frameworks being implemented, how they can implement the framework itself and just about the concepts in general. 

Shamus Khan: So on our website, SexualCitizens.com, we have a lot of materials. One, you know, we have a lot of materials of us talking about the book. And so for organizations and institutions that sort of want to have the conversation be heard, they don't necessarily even need to bring us there. They can use a lot of those materials.

We also have a series of guides there. Jennifer and I recorded 10 micro lectures, short lectures on different concepts of the book, what it means to take a public health approach, what our methodology was, one on LGBTQIA students, one on race, one on each one of the main concepts behind the book.

And the idea was to have these sort of brief introductions. Five to 10 minutes, each that tell stories behind the book that people can listen to at their own convenience. We also have lots of podcasts there and actually I'm sure that we're gonna add this podcast when it's done. And then  we constructed a discussion guide because one of the values of the book is not just in the framework, but in the stories and telling the stories of students of consensual and nonconsensual sexual encounters.

Part of our vision for the discussion guide was like, sometimes it's really hard to talk with people about their particular sexual experiences, but it can be much easier to talk about a situation that somebody else was in. And so for parents or communities that want to have conversations about challenging sexual situations in the discussion guide, we sort of identify pages where we say there's a, there's a description in this of a student who experiences a non consensual sexual encounter.

There's a description here of race or of queerness or of a man being assaulted by a woman, you know? And so th the vision there is that people could read those passages, which are quite short, you know, Two pages usually, and then have a discussion. What would I have done if I was in Adam's situation? What are the things that we could do as a community to prevent that kind of experience?

And so there's a lot of material there on the website. I think that can be useful for people, either us giving talks us on podcasts, us giving micro lectures, having these discussion guides for either the classroom or for parents or for community organizations.

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.