Frontline Faculty: A Cross-National Study of Faculty Engagement in University Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Prevention

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a significant public health problem in nearly all known societies throughout the world. Sexual assault and sexual coercion remain serious subsets of GBV and are especially prevalent among university-age populations. Surveys in the U.S. indicate 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted while at university, with similar rates reported across 28 European Union states. The 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder of medical student Jyoti Singh mobilized feminist activists across India, including academic feminists, who brought renewed attention to the widespread experience of sexual harassment of Indian women and trans students at universities. Within these global contexts, academic faculty play an essential role in ongoing efforts to identify and prevent GBV on university campuses, as teachers, activists, researchers, and policy advisors, yet research on faculty remains woefully underdeveloped in GBV policy and practice research in educational settings.

This study explores the social-structural factors that shape faculty engagement in gender-based violence prevention at institutions of higher education. Based on a cross-national comparison of six countries (two GDP low-income, two middle-income and two high-income), the paper considers the structural dimensions of communal life (e.g., state policies, university characteristics, mass mobilization histories) associated with intensified (or diminished) faculty engagement on university GBV across these different national contexts. This analytic framework builds on research that finds ‘critical events of rape’ as moments of mass mobilization, associations between women’s socioeconomic status, antiviolence community development, and university rape reporting practice, and the variation in state and federal policy that offer specific protections to university staff and students in sexual assault disclosures. Understanding these structural components provides new insights for faculty activists who remain key actors in university GBV prevention efforts and influential researchers in policy development and implementation around the globe.