NEW YORK (NY)
The New Yorker
February 12 & 19, 2018 Issue
By Jia Tolentino
A team of researchers at Columbia believes that small changes to college life could make campuses safer.
If I were asked by a survey to describe my experience with sexual assault in college, I would pinpoint two incidents, both of which occurred at or after parties in my freshman year. In the first case, the guy went after me with sniper accuracy, magnanimously giving me a drink he’d poured upstairs. In the second case, I’m sure the guy had no idea that he was doing something wrong. I had joined a sorority, and all my social circles were as sloppy, intense, and tribal as the Greek system—the groups that made these incidents possible are the same ones that made my life at the time so good. In college, everything is Janus-faced: what you interpret as refuge can lead to danger, and vice versa. One of the most highly valorized social activities, blacking out and hooking up, holds the potential for trauma within it like a seed.
I got to thinking about this—and picturing my college self as a sort of avatar in an extended risk simulation—after talking with Jennifer Hirsch and Claude Ann Mellins, at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, in Washington Heights, on a biting, windy day last December. Hirsch, an anthropologist, and Mellins, a clinical psychologist, are Columbia professors. Both women are in their fifties, have shoulder-length brown hair, and grew up in Jewish families in Manhattan. They share a sharp, maternal pragmatism—between them, they have five sons, ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-three. For the past three years, they have been leading a $2.2-million research project on the sexual behavior of Columbia undergraduates. The project is called shift, which stands for the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation.
The problem of campus sexual assault can seem unfathomable and intractable. We generally think of it as a matter of individual misbehavior, which, various studies have shown, most prevention programs do little to change. But Hirsch and Mellins think about sexual assault socio-ecologically: as a matter of how people act within a particular environment. They are doggedly optimistic that there is, if not a single fix, a series of new solutions.
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