ACPA Executive Director Presents to the US Department of Health & Human Services on Violence Against Women

Remarks by Cynthia H. Love, Ed.D.
Executive Director, ACPA

Provided to: US Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Women's Health on a panel including White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez.
Thursday, February 25, 2016 10:30 AM

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about the prevention of sexual violence on college campuses. It is an honor to join White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez on this panel.

Allow me to introduce my professional home and association, ACPA—originally the American College Personnel Association, now known as College Student Educators International.  ACPA is a 92-year tenured higher education association founded by a woman, May Cheney, in 1924 at the University of California in Berkeley. 

The traditional telling of her story is that she started the group because women deans were being paid 2/3s less than male deans for the same work and were largely excluded from the professional and social networking of male deans. 

At ACPA we are proud that our organizational DNA is justice infused, sensitive to the barriers that women and underrepresented people face and deeply infused with concerns for administrative accountability, equity and inclusion.

My remarks are drawn from the ACPA Beyond Compliance publication authored by the ACPA Presidential Task Force on 

As a profession, we sit at a critical political, legislative, social and cultural crossroad.  We must actively contribute to the discourse about sexual violence, question taken-for-granted assumptions about the problems and solutions and turn our gaze inward to develop critical consciousness of our intentional and unintentional complicity with a culture that enables and encourages sexual violence.

The administrators we support, higher education leaders, must be able to translate knowledge and awareness of the changing landscape of sexual violence into dynamic leadership in thought and action.

ACPA members have a particular sphere of influence today that rests with the scholars, staff and administrators on college campuses who define their roles as student affairs, life, activities, services and support.  Title IX investigators, conduct officers, identity advocacy center directors, housing and residential life coordinators, student activity directors, respondents and more find their professional home with us.   

We are often the catalysts of cultural change when we can exercise our capacity and competence to create a holistic, safe and healthy environment in which students can learn and develop.

We are ethically guided by The Council for the Advancement of Standards (CAS), which created a guide forSexual Assault and Relationship Violence Programs that is considered the minimum information that student affairs professional must possess to be considered competent.  It is important to understand that this competency is not required of the majority of campus professionals, faculty and administration.  It is also important to know that themajority of individuals who work in higher education are not exposed to this information in their undergraduate, graduate or post graduate programs.  

Professionals of all types must proactively seek out this training outside their campus responsibilities or campuses must infuse this training in professional development on campuses.  

ACPA offers 24/7, 365 day per year training on-line on these topics for free to members because members report that campuses, by and large, do not pay for this type of training for anyone other than Title IX and conduct officials.

One solution is to incorporate this training as part of the mandatory sexual harassment training that all employees are required to take on many campuses and, in addition, these professionals should be supported by 24/7 on-line training accessible to everyone including students.  This would create a baseline of awareness raising and information for all professionals. 

Next, let’s consider students.  They arrive on college campuses with little or no prior education on consent, sexual ethics and how to engage in healthy sexual and non-sexual relationships.  

They do not know about campus policies unless they read the handbook or encounter one due to behavior. They have no working knowledge of state laws and how they define various forms of sexual violence. 

Awareness building and information delivery on clear policies and definitions at the outset support effective adjudication and we believe they also serve as critical educational tools for sexual violence prevention.

One of the deep challenges in addressing sexual violence on campuses lies within the disconnect between institutional leadership, key institutional initiatives such as recruitment and retention and the actual work of reducing sexual violence and other forms of violence on student life.

It is too often true that institutional leaders do not champion the policies and procedures that are developed to prevent violence.  This work is often considered an “assignment” for staffers and outside the purview of the President and Chancellor.   External pressures creating by the federal government is shifting this dynamic somewhat but not nearly enough.

Sustainable prevention of sexual violence requires organizational and cultural change that is led by and supported by senior leadership, including presidents, boards, vice-president and deans.  Sexual violence is ultimately prevented by individual, institutional and social change.

What must happen?

Require mandatory training for all professionals and students.  

Require institutional leaders to champion these efforts and break down siloes between divisions and departments on campuses.  Attach these efforts to senior leader evaluations.

Why? Because schools have not responded effectively to sexual violence after almost 40 years of activism and advocacy with little change in the outcomes. The rate of sexual violence in postsecondary institutions has remained essentially the same with 20-25 percent of college women experiencing rape or attempted rape. 

Recognizing this cultural challenge on campuses, in the Spring of 2014, ACPA’s President, Kent Porterfield and I issued a call for members of our Association to participate in the ACPA Presidential Taskforce on Sexual Violence Prevention in Higher Education which authored the Beyond Compliance Report that we now provide all campus members of ACPA.

Many of our members are leading voices for reform in the area of sexual violence prevention and response on college campuses.  As “reformers” our focus is on a holistic approach in which all stakeholders are provided comprehensive education about sexual violence prevention and equipped with the skills necessary to recognize, develop and defend healthy and safe relationships in the community. 

We believe it is fair and necessary to say that if a person lives on, works on or learns on a campus, that person should participate in the minimum education necessary to understand informed consent and the policies and resources on campus, healthy relationships and sexuality, the roots of sexual violence and empowering actions (including bystander intervention). 

For students it is essential that this training is integrated through out the entire student experience (pre-arrival, orientation, residence halls, student leader training, returning students, Greek Life), presented in varying formats with understanding of adult learning styles, messaged consistently and tailored for specific communities (athletes, Greek life, study away, men, LGBTQ+, communities of color, international students) and inclusive of multiple and intersecting identities

We recommend six strategies for institutional leaders:

1.  Champion sexual violence prevention—frame the importance of this work as connected to other key campus priorities, for example connect the dots between comprehensive sexual violence prevention and response to the institutional commitment recruitment and retention of students.

2.  Allocate sufficient resources.  The media has revealed the underbelly of the under resourcing of sexual violence prevention on campuses.  The quality of response to sexual violence develops student awareness and trust, which can correlate with a spike in the reporting of sexual violence.  If institutions only devote resources to respond, they lose the opportunity to actual change the culture and prevent sexual violence form occurring in the first place.

3. Create campus wide response and prevention teams

4. Implement diverse response and prevention efforts

5. Audit prevention and response initiatives

6. Provide complementary and consistent messaging across all divisions and departments.  A single prevention strategy will not reach or appeal to all students.  Fraternities and sororities need tailored work that will be different from that for women’s and multicultural centers.  The power dynamics play out differently in these spaces. 

The good news is that the strategies that address sexual violence as a systemic social justice issue both respond to and prevent sexual violence effectively while at the same time helping us root out misogyny, sexism, homophobia, trans phobia, racism and other unequal power dynamics and societal norms.  

When campus climate starts to shift around any one of these, there is a lift and improvement to all.

Movies like the Hunting Ground, media scrutiny and focus, student activism and the federal government attention on potential Title IX violations has directed the public’s attention to the ways in which postsecondary institutions address sexual violence, mostly how we fail. 

Today, I wanted to share with you how we can succeed.