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No Boundaries

By Nathaniel Nash

Fall Semester blows in on the late summer breeze. Students begin to shake off their leisurely attitudes in preparation for the rigorous academic year. Campus comes alive and for many, becomes home.

But can we really refer to Boulder’s campus as home when a major practice on campus threatens our mental and physical health?

The issue at hand is sexual assault: the violation of space and privacy that ranges from unwanted advances to unwanted sexual acts. It is a major problem on college campuses, and CU-Boulder is no exception.

The campus administered a survey known as the “Sexual Misconduct Survey” to all undergraduate and graduate students last fall. The survey revealed that sexual assault is not just an issue among heterosexual women. Of the survey’s 10,019 undergraduate responses, 18.3 percent — representing a broad range of sexual orientations as well as genders — reported experiencing sexual assault while attending CU.

The university defines sexual misconduct as “non-consensual sexual intercourse/penetration and non-consensual sexual contact (collectively referred to as sexual assault), sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, intimate partner abuse, and stalking.” The survey asked students to identify themselves according to orientation (asexual, bisexual, homosexual, even “questioning”) as well as gender (Women, Men, Transgender Women, Transgender Men, and Genderqueer/Gender non-conforming).

To further illustrate that sexual assault picks no particular prey, results show a disproportionate rate of experienced cases among Transgender Men (41.7 percent) and Cisgender Women (27.9 percent).

Scarlet Bowen, director of the Gender and Sexuality Center on campus, said, “We know when we do national surveys that in a transgendered person’s lifetime, that one out of two (50 percent have an experience of some kind of sexual misconduct happen with them.”

University officials explained this week that the survey’s purpose was to address sexual assault and raise awareness among the student body. Amanda Griffin-Linsenmeyer, director of the CU-Boulder Women’s Resource Center, said, “Any incident of sexual misconduct is too many incidents, but I think it’s positive to have the data”.

There are multiple ways to prevent sexual assault as well as ways to help victims after an incident occurs. The most secure way to ensure prevention, university officials told Beyond Gender, is to be educated about what sexual assault is. According to the university safety and awareness website, “Sexual assault encompasses sexual contact, sexual intrusion, and sexual penetration without consent.”

Along with a definition, the site also offers a multitude of ways to help if you or a friend have been sexually assaulted, as well as a comprehensive guide on how to report sexual assault. Hannah Wilks, director of the Volunteer Resource Center and a former director of the Women’s Resource Center, recommends the Counseling and Psychiatric Services office (CAPS) and the Office of Victims Assistance, both of which are on the upper floors of the Center for Community building. Both services do not require a student to report sexual assault in order to be helped, but they are also well prepared to walk students through the reporting process.

Off campus, Moving to End Sexual Assault (MESA) provides a 24-hour crisis hotline as well as a 40-hour training program tailored to assisting students in dealing with a sexual assault experience.

CAPS also houses a volunteer program in which students train to become on-campus resources for their peers.

Wilks said it’s important to educate most or all of CU’s students, not just those who actually experience assault. She said this extent of education will lead to a stronger support system of students and staff, prepared to help each other when terrible things happen.

Part of this education is targeted toward incoming first-year students. As part of orientation, all first-year students are required to take part in an Effective Bystander Intervention session.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvmgmalbZpI]

Teresa Wroe, director of Prevention and Education at the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance, explains that bystander training is not solely for sexual assault violence but a platform for preventing all different kinds of harms. It is an effective way to relate topics to students in a non-confrontational setting. Paired with Effective Bystander Intervention training, she said the sexual-misconduct survey is an important part of recognizing situations in which sexual assault occurs — and putting a stop to it.

But moving to put an end to sexual assault can sometimes require interaction with the judicial system. How does the accused perpetrator get a fair hearing? The Daily Camera reported this week that a male CU student, recently accused of sexually assaulting two female students, now claims in a lawsuit that the university is treating him differently based solely on the fact that he is male.

Campus spokesman Ryan Huff said the young man’s claims were unfounded. But the student’s lawyers claim that this is another case of wrongfully accusing a student in order to enable CU to appear serious about eradicating sexual assault.

Here’s an impressionistic video describing the isolation of a sexual assault victim. It’s called “The Power of a Conversation” and it’s produced by Aabriti Shrestha, Nathaniel Nash and Rachel Boyce.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JnTx8cu_QE]