Critical and Transformative Methods for Studying Sexual Violence Among College Students

Abstract

Sexual violence (SV) continues to plague college communities across the United States. Despite research from various disciplines about SV among college students, rates of SV among college women remain unchanged since 1957 (Cantor et al., 2020; Kirkpatrick & Kanin, 1957). Further, perpetrators target students with minoritized identities, including queer and trans students, students with disabilities, and Women of Color at even higher rates than their dominant group peers (Cantor et al., 2020). However, most current scholarship about SV among college students does not reflect an understanding of the relationship between power and violence (Linder et al., 2020). In addition, policy and practice replicate the same systems of domination plaguing SV scholarship, creating a cycle of scholarship, policy, and practice that does more harm to students at risk for SV victimization and students who survived SV. In a recent study, we learned that more than 86% of research published between 2006 and 2016 focused on sexual violence among college students using quantitative methods (Linder et al., 2020). Further, upon deeper analysis, while many researchers collected demographic information about their participants (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation), they did not engage in analysis about minoritized students’ experiences with SV. The vast majority of research published between 2006 and 2016 employed positivist or post-positivist paradigms and failed to consider the role of power in SV. As a result of this research, our field has learned some about the experiences of cisgender, heterosexual White women and their experience of SV, and little about everyone else’s experiences. Perhaps unknowingly, many researchers examining SV among college students engage in epistemically oppressive research, in collusion with systems