The Rule, Not the Exception: Sexual Assault on Campus

M. Colleen McDaniel & Andrew Wright

AN APPREHENSION IS rising among U.S. anti-sexual violence activists. Four years after the first Trump administration massacred sexual assault survivor protections on college campuses by releasing harmful and exclusionary Title IX regulations, the Biden Administration — after failing three times to live up to the promise of a new final rule on federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination – finally only released half of the rule.(1)

That half-reform has been thrown away by the second Trump administration. Now this same administration is attempting the illegal overhaul of the Department of Education, leaving questions of the potential shift in enforcement of Title IX and other civil rights laws that were intended to respond to discrimination on college campuses.

The original Obama-era guidance around Title IX responded to rape survivors who called attention to the extremely high prevalence of rape on campus. The guidelines created strict policies to increase offender punishment and expand strict reporting requirements.

Mainstream narratives claim that survivors want safe investigation and hearing procedures after an assault, but what many of us, especially survivors with marginalized identities and those who see the harms of carceral responses to violence, are calling for is something that the Department of Education hasn’t acknowledged before.

We want action to hold accountable not only offenders, but institutions and communities, for the perpetuation of violence on campus. To do so, universities must recognize that sexual violence is the norm, not the exception.

Not So “Safe Spaces”

Since its inception in the United States, college life has been depicted as the oscillation between ascetic career-building and hedonistic experimentation.

As shown across popular American culture in films, TV shows and literature, college is not just about the promise of earning the degree and all the implied career potential. It’s about the overall experience of campus living that prospective students and their families strive for: community, character building, and new experiences.

Many survivors of campus sexual violence, however, learn all too quickly that this image of college life is a facade. We know too well the dialectical relationship between such a portrait of the idyllic college experience and the violent underside that upholds the system of contemporary higher education.

A false conception of campuses as inherently safe spaces has set up an ideology that exceptionalizes violence and in doing so, reproduces it.

The idyllic portrait of college campuses has come to be known over the last decade as the “safe space.” According to popular culture, a “safe space” is a place meant to be free of conflict, biases, threats, and criticism — although the term has roots in lesbian and feminist movements against violence dating back to at least the 1970s.(2)

According to activist Moira Kenney in a description of 1960s queer safe spaces in Los Angeles, it was here that marginalized groups found “a certain license to speak and act freely, form collective strength, and generate strategies for resistance.” The term was popularized and spread widely in the 2010s as students started establishing organizations that would ensure specific locations on campus would be held as “safe.”

From this, critics arose concerned about the state of college campuses. For example, establishment author and journalist Mitch Albom, asked “how does [the safe space] prepare students for the real world?” Albom claimed that safety on campuses “now means a protected bubble with no nasty comments, no judgment or criticism, nothing that might make anyone feel uncomfortable.”(3)

Many critics decry safe spaces for creating a false sense of security and sheltering people from the harsh realities of everyday life. Journalist John Lloyd similarly argues that “[t]here is no ‘safe space’ for a mind which wishes to understand something of the world. A liberal society cannot create boundaries to understanding between the approved and the forbidden.”(4)

Maybe campuses in some ways do attempt to create a sheltered, safe, unworldly space. Yet considering all too familiar stories of the professor who retains the position of power over students despite allegations of sexual harassment, the gymnastics and football coaches who are not investigated despite decades of reports of child molestation, a survivor not being taken seriously despite video evidence because the man who raped her is an athletic star, survivors are well aware that campuses are by no means safe.

In fact, if college campuses are safe spaces for anything, it seems to be only for the reproduction of sexual violence. It isn’t just that violence abounds on campus either. Campuses are unsafe because so-called “protections” for survivors are harmful as well.

Over the past decade, since the first release of federal guidance around Title IX from the Obama administration, many universities have taken federal guidelines as “How Not to Get Sued by the Department of Education 101.” For example, Title IX coordinators are often placed under general counsel; blanket mandated reporting policies force faculty and staff to violate survivor choice and report entrusted disclosures; and insufficient investigation processes retraumatize survivors at every step.(5)

Have survivors really won any rights, or have universities just figured out a way to avoid any and all liability for violence committed on their campus and by their community members? Add to this the utter lack of resources for effective primary prevention (stopping violence before it happens), and one could argue that those of us who are the most at risk of sexual violence are no better off than we were before 2011.

Harms of “Carceral Feminism”

The reason that Title IX applications thus far have caused so much harm to survivors is that they have largely been framed after carceral feminism — a view which utilizes surveillance, policing and state violence against perpetrators of violence as a tool for the liberation of women.

As described by Shepp, O’Callaghan and Kirkner in their 2023 review of the carceral logic of Title IX, although Title IX investigations do not “contribute to the prison-industrial complex in the form of putting people in cages…Title IX policies operate with carceral logic in a way that individualizes harm and focuses on punishment rather than restoration.”(6)

One of us (McDaniel) along with Gómez went as far as to say that current Title IX practices “mirror the criminal legal system.”(7)

The carceral anti-rape movement on (and off) campuses for decades has operated on the exceptionalization of violence. Herein lies a painful irony.

Movement activists have sought to de-exceptionalize survivorship — raising awareness about just how common sexual assault is (one in two trans people, one in five women, one in 17 men). Instead, the carceral approach of the mainstream anti-rape movement has exceptionalized perpetration, making the violence seem uncommon and committed by only a small number of pathological serial offenders.

Whereas lingering mainstream narratives often paint accusations of violence as false and proven perpetration of violence as accidental, an increasingly survivor-friendly view has made way for new portrayals of perpetrators.

Some prominent anti-rape experts have argued that rape is “a highly calculated, premeditated crime” committed by serial offenders. (Legally and in academic research, “rape” is often defined as a distinct action which requires penetration of the body; whereas, “sexual assault” includes a wide range of behaviors — including rape — such as using verbal coercion, alcohol/drugs, or physical force in order to impose a range of acts from unwanted sexual touch to penetration of another person against their will).

Although committing rape is certainly not the norm, some research has found that up to 60 percent of men have committed other forms of nonpenetrative sexual assault or attempted rape — meaning force was used with the intention of rape but for some reason penetration did not happen.

The Perpetrators and the System

As well, more recent (and replicated) research in the field of psychology has demonstrated that there are different kinds of men who perpetrate rape. Indeed, serial rapists may be a part of this problem, but many rapes are committed by “one-time only” offenders who become less likely to perpetrate into adulthood — particularly in the absence of peers who normalize rape and see binge drinking as a justification for violence.

The offenders are also most often family, friends, classmates and trusted others.

As recounted by McDaniel and Rodriguez (2017), this limited view of perpetration paints rape as the result of extreme, individual personality characteristics like narcissism and psychopathy, rather than the result of internalized oppressive values and attitudes.(8)

Decades of research pointing to the latter psychological explanation support the idea that because of the conditions of systemic oppressions (Capitalism, Patriarchy, White Supremacy), anyone is capable of committing the harm of sexual violence because we have all internalized their messages to some extent, and because the systems and institutions we operate in every day allow for situations that could put any of us at risk for violence perpetration.

This is not to deny that there are protective factors that lead many of us away from these behaviors, but to instead imply that this potential capability points to the systems over the individuals as the root cause for such a high prevalence of violence.

The former approach not only swerves away from critiquing the higher education system by placing the sole blame on the mental state of a few individuals, but also entirely misses the causal role that oppressive systems play in creating, normalizing and perpetuating sexual violence.

When individuals and their abnormal traits alone are to blame for violence, the popular answer is to punish and remove that allegedly small number of perpetrators, leaving behind a safer campus. This then allows for policing, a punitive criminal system, and incarceration to be the only answer for this violence.

It also leaves room for institutions of higher education to waive their responsibility in the perpetuation of violence on their campuses. If campuses are safe spaces that are sometimes infiltrated by “undetected” serial offenders, then the university must not be at fault for such extremely deviant behavior. The university can only respond not prevent.

Further, the implication that the only way to prevent a rape is to avoid such offenders: Cover your drink, don’t walk alone at night, dress and act in a manner that makes you less of a target.

Sexual Violence as Systemic Disaster

To take a deeper look into how the exceptionalization of violence reduces institutional responsibility, an analogy can be drawn to natural disaster studies.

Current disaster studies presume a “vulnerability approach” when looking at how and why a particular person or community is affected by a natural disaster. A vulnerability approach looks at a person or group’s capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural disaster rather than any systemic reasons — whether it be political or economic.

The vulnerability approach suggests a purely (depoliticized) social view of disasters, emphasizing the capacity of individual responsibility over the responsibility of state governments or public departments to reduce vulnerability and increase safety.

Such an approach can never demonstrate vulnerability as a result of systemic injustice because of its liberal assessment which focuses on individual characteristics. Researcher Peer Ilner pointed this out in his work, Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response Between the State and Community.

In this book Illner uses a social reproduction critique of disasters, claiming that “vulnerability emerges as a systemic corollary of capitalist everyday life.” Vulnerability is defined as “the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact” of a disaster.

According to Illner, disaster studies take a vulnerability approach because they “held onto the normative idea of a more or less stable everyday state that is impacted by a sudden disruption,” adding: “[v]ulnerability studies misses the systemic nature, in which power structures make populations vulnerable; not only in disaster, but in everyday life.”

Applied to interpersonal violence, rape is similarly viewed as a sudden interruption to the everyday rather than part of the power structures already in place. But how can this be when sexual violence is so prevalent?

Taking the systemic view of disasters, we can better understand how exceptionalizing sexual violence in higher education similarly creates a vulnerability approach.

The typical view of sexual assault or harassment on campus is that which happens between students. Yet other common power dynamics that stem from the hierarchical structures within universities tend to be ignored.

Consider the role of professors and administrators in positions of power over students, which is not a momentary interaction, but an everyday reality. Sexual misconduct by professors is very prevalent in colleges across the nation, and this is especially true for graduate students.

Often these perpetrators target those in subordinate positions. Such misuses of power, even when consensual, have led some universities — a notable few spearheaded by graduate student unions — to implement bans on amorous relationships between university employees to prevent this.

Furthermore, the dismissing of witnesses or silencing of survivors, as in cases like Michigan State and U.S. nation gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar and Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, points less to a deviant bad actor and more to an institutional practice.

It’s not that the vulnerable are those who experience the most violence, but rather that the experience of that violence creates the vulnerability of both current and future survivors. System-imposed vulnerability in higher education not only allows for the prevalence of sexual assault, but it reproduces this violence at the administration level.

By taking such violence to be “exceptional,” the universities themselves create a distance between the institution and survivors. That is, sexual assault becomes a matter of misfortune rather than the direct result of the power dynamics and violent norms created and reproduced by universities.

Betrayal of Trust

What domestic (in the home) violence and campus violence share is a presupposed trust of not just specific people or figureheads, but of an institution itself.

Whether in marriage, family or the state, domestic violence survivors are betrayed by people who are presumed to be trusted or loved ones. Likewise, students and workers on campus must also presuppose a minimal level of trust in administrators, professors, security officers, coaches, roommates, cohort members, etc. — yet these all too often are the sources of violence on campus.

However, violence is perpetrated, though, vulnerability is not considered to be derived from one’s relation to the institution but as specific individual criteria (i.e. one’s social identities). Those whose professor commits sexual violence against them are not considered “vulnerable populations” for reasons that are institutional.

For example, a university that has a history of protecting predatory professors might only consider potential victims as vulnerable because of what they bring to the university — their race, gender, or intoxication levels — and not the ecology of the university itself as a hierarchical structure, wherein the educator retains full power over the learner rather than seeing education as a collaborative process.

Likewise, the very conditions of vulnerability are reproduced not only in presupposing who is a vulnerable population while ignoring the power dynamic of the institution itself, but also in the exercise of that power in the guise of what is normal or that status quo.

Cases like Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar showcase not only the crimes of these individuals, but how others allowed for them to continue and how these crimes were institutionalized. Even when Nassar was reported or Sandusky was caught, those who experienced or witnessed this violence were assured this was not out of the ordinary — that knowing about the acts was not enough to stop them.

When knowledge of a crime is not enough for those with the power to prevent it to actually do so, vulnerability becomes the norm while those labeled as “vulnerable” are still further exceptionalized.

This vulnerability ideology plays directly into carceral approaches to violence. Not only do these approaches take the perpetrator to be some disordered individual who has strayed from the standard path of civilized living, but they repress accountability, responsibility, and even the psychological potential in transforming violent behaviors — e.g. via intervention and restorative justice practices like healing circles.

This makes resorting to punitive measures the only solution.

Displaced Responsibility

Ultimately, this puts responsibility of solving the issue on those who have been harmed before — i.e. survivor groups on and off campus. Illner makes a similar argument by demonstrating that off-loading government responsibilities onto local groups and nonprofits after a disaster is no longer exceptional either but now the official response.

Using the example of Occupy Sandy when over 60,000 volunteers, mobilized to help provide services and assist those affected by the hurricane in 2013, ended up being the stand-in for any state-level intervention. Shortly thereafter, the Obama administration presented a fiscal budget which cut one billion dollars from FEMA’s annual budget and quoted the “superiority” of community-run disaster relief.

The dependence on those impacted by the disaster to dig themselves out and offer their own relief is all too similar to how universities have taken an indifferent stance toward campus violence, or at best, as put by Dr. Veronica Shepp and colleagues, offered “surface-level diversity initiatives and empty proclamations all the while failing to structurally address the harms in which the university itself is implicated.”(9)

In shifting away from the liberal “vulnerability approach” and towards a social reproduction explanation, we can start to view campus sexual assault as neither a growing problem set against a peaceful background of studying, nor a matter of an inflated sense of victimization.

Instead we can see campus sexual assault as one of many capitalistic antagonisms found in the higher education system which benefits off of systemically marginalizing women, queer people, and people of color — at best, disrupting and, at worst, terminating their education.

The exceptionalization of violence fails to consider that the majority of perpetrators are themselves survivors of sexual abuse. It fails to consider that rapists are not sexual deviants but rather conformists to a violent rape culture.

It fails to consider that not only offenders and victims/survivors are harmed by violence, but entire communities. It fails to consider that many survivors don’t want punishment, they want validation, repair and the hope that it won’t happen to others.

The category of exception can mean unlawful actions from the top down as well. As we have covered, categorizing violence as exceptional means that the law can be enforced to maintain the status quo, which presumes a climate of safety in general. But it can also be used to justify the use of state violence to return the exceptional to the normal, to the supposedly safe state of things.

The latter is what German philosopher Carl Schmitt meant by the “state of exception,” which is when a governing body acts above the law in order to restore the status quo or for the “common good.” This is precisely what we have been seeing in the treatment of student protests on campus recently.

In the spring of 2024, local police enforcement started arresting and brutalizing students on campuses protesting the genocide in Palestine. The suppression of support for Palestine did not end there as many faculty members, like Dr. Rupa Marya, were also met with punishment and even being fired for being critical of Zionism and the on-going genocide.

More recently, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil has been detained by ICE due to the Trump administration’s promise to detain and deport student activists. A week and a half later, Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri was detained by ICE as well.

Although the threat of deportation is unique to the Trump administration’s treatment of protesters, as opposed to Biden’s, debating which brutality is “worse” in the time of genocide is cynical and should be rejected as quickly as the brutality itself.

What needs focus is how the “exception” functions with respect to the expected “normalcy” of campus life: Here, the protesters are considered extraordinary and disturb the image of the peaceful campus, and thus the state can step in and justify its own exceptional use of force.

Whereas supporting Palestine is considered a political threat which must be treated with extralegal measures, sexual violence on campus is the exception begetting normal lawful punishment. Despite the obfuscation by being set at different poles, these differing exceptions fit together in the site of the college campus as inherently one of violence: that is, violence is immanent to the “normalcy” of the college campus.

The promise of Title IX regulations that effectively address such concerns is a bit of a pipe dream, considering the numerous setbacks we’ve already witnessed just this past year.

Whatever may be implemented or blocked, it is evident that the popularized liberal claim of the “safe space” tends to function in the opposite way than expected: By placing all blame on a specific few, psychologically irredeemable offenders rather than on systems of oppression, the institution (and the state) can avoid responsibility in every possible way.

The novel safe space of the last seven years or so, however, must be re-read against this background: Safe spaces on campuses have been demanded because safety, not violence, is the exception.

The Solution of Abolition

So where do we go from here? We first ground ourselves in an Abolition Feminist approach from thinkers like Ruth Wilson Gilmore who shares that “Abolition [of carceral responses to violence] is about presence not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.”

Beyond ridding campuses of increasingly court-aligned reporting and investigation processes, we believe in building paths to healing for survivors, implementing comprehensive prevention education, taking accountability and transforming out of the ways our communities have facilitated violence perpetration, and resisting oppressive practices within the university structure.

In our 2023 piece, McDaniel and Gómez outlined four layers of carceral practices on campuses (surveillance, policing, mandated reporting, and investigations that mirror the criminal legal system) with 14 non-carceral alternatives that campuses could implement such as bystander intervention initiatives, student-led crisis support, and transformative justice practices.

We would add to this several political solutions outside the Title IX regulations as paths forward. For example, canceling student debt would not only alleviate financial concerns of students moving on to their careers, but also eliminate the control that debt has over student lives.

Student debt in particular has a way of forcing students’ hands in what they study, under whom they study, and where they go to school. It can be especially controlling in keeping students enrolled in programs and schools where they may have experienced a sexual assault.

To prevent the need for student loans in the first place, reduced costs for college could make higher education more accessible. University divestment from fossil fuels, war manufacturers, and companies with human rights abuses, could be replaced by investment back into communities: libraries, community mental health and wellbeing programs, and health inequity research.

Two years ago, we saw a wave of graduate student strikes across the country. Last year bore witness to student-based protests against several different universities’ connections to Israel. Both the responses from the universities themselves and police forces have expressed overt shows of the violence immanent to these higher education institutions.

Perhaps this is why graduate students do not simply strike for higher wages but for much more.

Looking at the example of University of Michigan graduate students in the summer of 2023, their bargaining platform reads less like a contract and more of a modern treatise on human rights: improved reproductive rights, access to transgender healthcare, and financial support for the additional financial burdens faced by international students.(10)

These graduate students are not only taking these rights more seriously than perhaps any modern state does today but also taking the promise of the university more seriously than any college actually does.

While such reforms to the system of higher education are promising to advance equal access to higher education, we still wonder: can an educational system set up for the few ever produce just access to education for the many?

Similarly, McDaniel and Gómez (2023) asked if a “new model of the educational system is altogether needed?” — as described above, centered around a pedagogy in which educators collaborate with learners to practice the art of the subject in ways that are effective for them rather than the traditional lecture.

It would be one in which students are guided through learning at their own pace and in a way that emphasizes knowledge as liberation instead of knowledge for production or success. One that would be owned by the local community, educators and learners rather than by wealthy board members with their financial and political agendas.

In hopes that such a future is not so far off, we recognize that reimagining what a higher education institution looks like, how it functions, and what global causes it funds is a necessary first step — and often the most difficult — to change the violent landscape that the college experience means for so many.

Notes

1. “Happy 52nd Anniversary to Title IX! Here’s What You Need to Know about Biden’s New Title IX Rule,” National Women’s Law Center blog, updated September 9, 2024, https://nwlc.org/happy-52nd-anniversary-to-title-ix-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-bidens-new-title-ix-rule/; “As the NCAA Debates New Rules, Trans Athletes Are Left Out of the Conversation,” Liam Beran, The Nation, June 20, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/transgender-student-athletes-ncaa-representation/
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2. “The Case for Safe Spaces,” Anne-Laure White, Dissent, April 25, 2016, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/free-speech-campus-defense-safe-spaces/
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3. “Mitch Albom: Is ‘safe space’ concept being abused on campus,” Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press, August 21, 2016, https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2016/08/20/mitch-albom-college-campus-safety/89055680/
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4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lloyd-safespaces-commentary-idUSKCN1MF23E/
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5. “Commentary: In ‘safe spaces,’ hidden dangers,” John Lloyd, Reuters, October 8, 2018, https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/institutionalbetrayal/
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6. Veronica Shepp, Erin O’Callaghan and Anne Kirkner, “The Carceral Logics of Title IX,” Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, v. 16, no. 1, 4-24.
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7. “Title IX Policies Mirror the Prison System and Harm Student Survivors,” M. Colleen McDaniel and Jennifer M. Gómez, Spark Magazine, November 14,2023, https://medium.com/spark/moving-from-carceral-title-ix-policies-to-survivor-centered-anti-violence-approaches-9ad07fb3c4d3\
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8. McDaniel, M. C., & Rodriguez, D. N. (2017). “Undergraduate Men’s Self-Reports of Sexual Assault and Perceptions of College Campus Acquaintance Rape,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 36(3-4), 1772-1790. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260517743552 (Original work published 2021)
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9. Shepp, V., O’Callaghan, E., & Kirkner, A. (2023). “The Carceral Logic of Title IX.” Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, 16(1), 4-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/26379112.2023.2168683
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10. “GEO Bargaining Platform,” https://www.geo3550.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Bargaining-Platform-Guide.pdf
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May-June 2025, ATC 236