HANOVER, N.H. — On an average day, 192 college women are raped or sexually assaulted.
That sobering fact is what brought speaker Jean Kilbourne and about 300 others to Dartmouth College for a week-long summit on sexual assault issues.
Kilbourne, who has spent much of her career studying the way women are portrayed in advertising and mass media, was asked Monday how she could remain optimistic after four decades of researching an “over-sexualized culture” that she says is getting worse.
There have been some successes, she said. “And” — she gestured to her colleagues on stage — “we hang out together,” she added with a smile.
The summit is part of an effort by 63 colleges and universities, national experts on sexual assault prevention and education, nonprofits and advocacy organizations, and the federal government to educate colleges and communities on sexual assault prevention, education and response.
The summit, which runs through Thursday, was organized for members of different fields to “join forces, to meld their creativity and experiences in the service of finding viable solutions” in order to prevent sexual assault on college campuses, researcher and forensic consultant David Lisak told Dartmouth Now, the college magazine.
The first three days are open to all registrants and are scheduled with speakers, a Q&A, presentations, and smaller meetings and lectures. The final two days are reserved for “working groups,” which will prioritize work to be completed on campuses in the next year.
The Dartmouth summit comes in the wake of increased scrutiny on sexual violence on college campuses. The Obama administration formed a task force in January and launched a nationwide probe.
In late April, the White House released a list of 55 colleges and universities under investigation for their handling of sexual assault complaints. Dartmouth was on that list, as was Princeton, Harvard, Swarthmore and the universities of Michigan and Florida.
In response, the Washington Post reported, Dartmouth College President Philip J. Hanlon pledged to make an effort to limit “extreme behavior” on campus, including excessive drinking and sexual assaults, which he said has become a blemish on the reputation of the Ivy League college.
Dartmouth launched a Center for Community Action and Prevention and implemented a new disciplinary policy, which went into effect in June. In compliance with the Violence Against Women Act, the policy requires the college to report incidents of domestic violence, dating violence and stalking to local law enforcement, and enact certain disciplinary measures, including mandatory expulsion in some cases of sexual assault.
A 2011 letter to educators from the U.S. Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights reported that one in five women are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault in college.
Lisak pointed to the national focus on sexual assault as a defining moment for colleges and universities.
“Our challenge is to begin a process that makes urgently needed changes a reality,” he said. “We can define ourselves as the corporate world does, focused on self-protection, self-aggrandizement and self-protection. Or we will define ourselves as worthy of the label ‘higher education.’”
Lisak suggested a number of top-down approaches for schools, including conferences organized by a university president, guaranteed sufficient funding for assault and prevention teams on campus, and annual trainings and discussions that include every student on campus; he also urged the acknowledgement that educational institutions have failed in addressing the problem.
In a panel discussion, Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, and Anurima Bhargava, chief of the educational opportunities section of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, fielded questions on the impact of Title IX and their aspirations in implementing change on a national level.
“I was encouraged by the variety and kinds of ideas I heard, and the energy that people had around this and around the national movement,” Lhamon said of the response the federal government had received from its work on sexual assault.
Lhamon and Bhargava, as well as several of Monday’s speakers, called the summit an accomplishment in and of itself.
Lhamon said the stories from survivors across the country require a response. The stories, she said, are “a reminder we can’t walk away from.”
