This article presents emancipatory feminist teaching methods to empower adult women who are survivors of sexual assault in higher education settings. It delves into the work of leading scholars such as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Ira Shor, as well as feminist pedagogy and relevant literature on sexual assault survivorship in higher education.…

Politically expedient approaches to difficult knowledge about sexual violence have included educational practices that create conditions for 'safe' spaces, such as announcing content in advance, trigger warnings and other pedagogical practices that make care allowable and smooth out the sharp edges of violence that can knowingly invoke trauma.…

Universities in the United States have undertaken the goal of addressing gender-based violence (GBV) on campus. Legal reforms have provided guidance on how this should be done, including the adoption of Title IX and the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter. This guidance focuses on limiting liability concerns through mandatory/responsible…

Rape culture has roots in our gendered history of the United States which manifests itself on college campuses as well. Attending college has been found to be the riskiest time for women in terms of sexual assault, as up to 1 in 4 women may experience some type of sexual assault or attempt during their collegiate years. This study explored how one…

This article derives from part of a larger study on sexual violence prevention in teacher education that analyses the narratives of fifteen teacher candidates in an Ontario university. It begins by providing a rationale for the research, which engages emerging teachers as key stakeholders in prevention education. Narrative inquiry was conducted to…

Rape culture and sexual violence have especially entered popular discourse in recent years, largely due to the significant activism of Tarana Burke's #MeToo movement. As such, because educators are increasingly taking up these topics, approaches to such intense subject matter in literacy learning need to be creatively and critically (re)considered…

Drawing on data from a larger feminist study that explored how secondary English teacher candidates responded to a sexual trauma text set and pedagogy for teaching such narratives with Canadian adolescents, this paper examines how caretaker discourses emerged in response to these stories and learning. This especially manifested as emerging teacher…

As a literature professor whose own research is at the intersection of literary and gender and women studies, in each of her courses, Diana Aramburu devotes a few weeks solely to the topic of gender violence and femicide. In this article, she documents her own teaching practices around these topics, and assesses the results of these practices by…

Over the last decade, there has been growing awareness about issues of sexual consent. This has resulted in a global shift towards prioritising education and campaigns which address consent and sexual violence. Yet much discourse about consent continues to reinforce legalistic and binary notions of consent/rape which do not map onto young people's…

In the midst of unprecedented attention to gender based violence (GBV), prompted in part by the #MeToo movement, "Collaborating for Change: Transforming Cultures to End Gender-Based Violence in Higher Education" provides a groundbreaking analysis of higher education culture and how it can be transformed to eradicate GBV. This book builds…

Data collected over the past 30+ years consistently show one in five women are sexually assaulted on college campuses (Mccauley & Casler, 2015), and that the occurrence may be even higher due to serious underreporting on campuses (Palmer & Alda, 2016). To better combat sexual assault on campus, universities are charged through federal law…

This conceptual paper explores the ways in which higher education has become an instrument of the state in advancing state goals for addressing violence against women and how bureaucracies to enforce these state goals have coopted the time and resources of higher education practitioners. This cooptation has meant that the broader feminist goal of…

When establishing the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, President Obama reminded universities of their obligation to report accurate rape statistics to the Department of Education. Research has not determined, on a national scale, what factors explain variation in (under)reporting. Using data from 413 top…

The present qualitative narrative inquiry explored Black women's experiences with sexual assault in higher education, focusing specifically on where they found support and their perceptions of campus and community connectedness. The theoretical frameworks used in this study include Black feminist theory, campus connectedness, and community…

President Obama created a White House Task Force in January 2014 that revealed many colleges were not complying with several federal mandates regarding safety of students/employees when reporting sexual assaults on campus. This doctoral comparative case study analysis looked at the statistics of sexual violence on college campuses, the mandates…