Sexual Assault on U-M Campus: Challenges, Policy, & Prevention panel

>> Hello. And welcome. I'm Paula Lantz. I'm the associated Dean for Academic Affairs here at the Ford School of Public Policy and I'd like to welcome all of you here in our physical audience and those who've joined us online to our Policy talks at Ford School event today. And before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge The Gilbert-Omenn and Martha Darling Help Policy Fund for its support of this event and other health related programming we do here at the Ford School. Today's policy talk is focused on a serious and invasive problem in society, including on college campuses, that of sexual assault. National statistics suggests that one out of five college student's experiences some type of sexual assault or misconduct while in school. And sexual assault remains a significantly underreported crime. Today, we're going to explore this issue in the context of our own campus, our own backyard. We've got a packed agenda for our time today, and we have longer bios for the speakers in your program so you can refer to those. But right now, I'd like to briefly introduce our guest and our speakers of our session today. First, we have Professor Bill Axinn, who's a sociologist and the former director of the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. He was the principal investigator on a groundbreaking, critically important survey of students done here at the University of Michigan in 2015 about the extent of sexual violence on our campus. We also have Pamela Heatlie with us today. She's an attorney with especial expertise in title nine, including its provisions regarding sexual assault and misconduct in educational settings. She's the Senior Associate Director of the University of Michigan's Office of Institutional Equity. We also have with us today, Holly Rider-Milkovich, who was until very recently, three weeks ago, right? The director of SAPAC, the sexual assault prevention and awareness center on the University of Michigan's campus. Holly led that important organization for over six years before moving on, very recently, to a Senior Leadership Position with EverFi Incorporated, which is an education technology firm. And then we also have with us today Emma Zorfass who's a Senior wrapping up her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Public Policy here at the Ford School. Emma's been an active student leader around issues of sexual assault on our campus and she's volunteered and worked with SAPAC ever since she first arrived on campus, almost four years ago. So, please, join me in welcoming our panelists.

[ Applause ]

And also, I'd like to introduce a couple of additional guests who are going to ask -- well, between when we hear from our panelists and we kick off our Q and A session, we have a couple of guests who are going to come up to the podium and just offer some reflections. And first, would be Barbara Niess-May, in front here, who's the Executive Director of Save House. Save House is, of course, one of the truly outstanding institutions in our own community. The staff and volunteers at Save House provide support, legal advocacy, emergency shelter and much more to survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault. And also, an honor of the University of Michigan celebrating its bicentennial this year, we fortunate to have someone here with us today who can provide a brief history regarding the issue of sexual assault and misconduct policy on the University of Michigan campus, professor Ann Evans Larimore, is with us, is a professor emerita of geography and woman's studies at the university of Michigan and she was instrumental in getting the University to include sexual harassment as a cause for grievance, in its grievance policy, back in 1972, is that right? So, we'll hear just a little bit of history from Ann. So, [inaudible] are so grateful to all our guest and panelists who are with us today. And we want to hear from all of you as well so it's some cards of and passed and around 4:40 some of our staff will start collecting cards with your questions on them to pose to the panelists and, we have to Ford school MPP students Afton Branche [phonetic] and Claire Taekman [phonetic] who will facilitated our question-and-answer session. For those of you who are joining us online, you can tweet in your questions to #policytalks and we'd love to hear from you as well. So, again, thank you all for coming. We have a packed session, must have hear about and learn and discuss and we'll start off with Professor Bill Axinn.

[ Applause ]

>> William Axinn: Thank you, Paula. Sorry, we're going to talk about an unpleasant topic for a little while and I wanted to draw your attention to that fact before we start. First, precise description that requires use of words regarding specific anatomy and actions; the precision is not in any way intended to be offensive. Second, many in the population have had adverse experiences, if you would like help, we have informational services in the back of the room and a lot of experts in the room today. And last, and I don't think it's least at all, you'll see numbers that clearly demonstrate all of us are bystanders. And as a result, it can be pretty stressful to look at some of these numbers. I'm the data guy but not the happy data guy. I'm going to talk about two topics very quickly. One is the national context of measuring sexual violence and the other is a 2015 University of Michigan campus climate survey on the topic of sexual misconduct. And, I think it's important to talk about National measures a little bit because, even though college students and surveys of college students drew to a lot of attention to this population, hence, each government conducts national surveys of the entire population, they measure sexual assault. There are three examples I want to bring to your attention. One of them is the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey. The second one is the National Center for Health Statistics, National Survey of Family Growth. And the third is the CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. And all of these are important studies of the entire country population. I'll talk a little bit more detail about National Survey of Family Growth, both, because we conduct this at the University of Michigan on behalf of the National Center for Health Statistics and because it's a very important source of data on the topic. There are three main aspect of the National Center for Family Growth that I wanted to mention that make it an important resource for us. First, the National Center for Family Growth measures lifetime histories of relationships, sexual experiences and reproductive health. It's in that context that the National Survey of Family Growth, which is a face-to-face in person interview, switches to audio computer-assisted self interviewing to assure maximum privacy for sensitive topics. This also has an FBI guarantee of confidentiality around responses in the survey in general, including AKIC [phonetic]. And finally, The National Survey of Family Growth uses responsive-survey design to maximize representation of the entire variety of the United States population. What do we know from the National Survey of Family Growth? Two facts -- we know up and down of the survey of family growth but there two facts that I wanted to bring to your attention. The first is high quality survey data on the entire US population indicate that levels of sexual assault in the United States are high. 25% of American women report that they have ever been forced to have intercourse by ages 40 to 44. This is one in four and this is not any form of sexual assault. This is forced to have intercourse. Second topic I wanted to bring to your attention out of national data is that those who attend college experience this at a lower rate than those of the same age who do not attend college. And the lower rates for those who have four or more years of college are actually a bit lower, two and a half to three times lower, than people of the same age who don't go to college. OK. Now I want to switch to what we know about the university of Michigan campus from the 2015 survey. There are sort of three aspects of the methodology I wanted to comment on, one is -- we wanted to strong links to provide maximum confidentiality respondents, this involves using a web tool to give people privacy and giving their answers, administered by a third party, as the university has no direct information about the respondents themselves. -- Includes a special two face designed to contact those who don't respond email. May not respond to email but not everyone and it turns out that contacting them in a second way greatly improves representation. With tools, we achieved a 66 response rate for the campus climate survey which is quite high for campus climate surveys. OK, now the unpleasant findings. First key finding I'll describe is reporting any form of non-consensuals, non-consensual sexual experience. This includes unwanted touching, kissing and fondling as well as unwanted penetration in the previous 12 months. 11.4 % of the University of Michigan's students had this experience in the prior 12 months. To wrap your head among that for a moment, there are something over 47,000 students, this means well over 4,700 had that experience in the prior 12 months. It was much higher for undergraduate females 22.5 % somewhat lower for graduate females, 9.2 %. It happens to males too but at much lower rates 6.8 % for undergraduate males and 1.1 % of graduate males. The most common circumstance the survey revealed was one that may surprise some of you; it is a circumstance in shorthand form was verbal pressure. And I wanted to share the definition with you so that you could see what respondents saw when they were answering the survey. Continually verbally pressuring you after you said you didn't want to; this includes telling lies, threatening to end the relationship, threatening to spread rumors about you, showing displeasure, criticizing you sexuality or attractiveness or getting angry but not using physical force. Intoxication was also a common reason but this was the most common and, interesting, same in the national data. Next key finding I want to point out is the rate of experiencing not consensual penetration, oral, anal or vaginal in the prior 12 months. 9.7 % of female students on our campus, 12 % of the female undergraduates in the prior 12 months, 4.3 % of the female graduate students and a little over 1 % of the male students. We spent a good deal of effort investigating what types of students are at higher risk. This is a multi-variant risk factor estimate of the relative risks of having this experience. Female students were at roughly eight times higher risk than male students. Undergraduates are roughly three times higher risk than graduate students. Lesbian, gay, bisexual students had two and a half times higher risk than heterosexual students. Pertaining sorority members had two and a half times higher risk than non members. Underrepresented minorities had two times the rate of white students. Clubs, sports team's members had two times the rate of those who were not members. And the last unpleasant fact I have for you from the survey may be one of the most unpleasant fact from the survey. 46 % of those reporting sexual misconduct told someone else, anyone else. That is 54 % of those who reported this events in the survey also told us they had never told another living human being, not anyone. Of those who did tell someone, most told a friend or roommate. Only 3.6 % of those who had this experience in the previous 12 months told an official reporting resource of the university or the police or anybody in that capacity. Sorry, that was the -- unpleasant statistics. All of them are available online at this website. The full report is there, the university has made it publicly available since it first came out and you can look at all the results there.

>>Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

>> Pamela Heatlie: So, I'm Pam Heatlie and I work at the office for Institutional Equity here at the University. And you hear one of the statistics that Bill presented to us which is only 3.6 % of students who experienced the behaviors that he described will look in the past 12 months of when the survey was taken had told an official here at the university or told law enforcement. The Office for Institutional Equity does a variety of things here on campus but one of the things that we do is we investigate sexual assault reports. And so, for me, that's an incredibly concerning statistic. And we work very hard to try to create a system where students do feel comfortable coming forward and bringing up a report to us. And so, part of what I'm going to talk about in my time. But, one of the first things I want to focus on is a question we are asked all of the time. Aren't these crimes? Why don't they report it to the police? Yes, much of the behavior that's brought to our office or reported to our office for investigation is a crime. And we encourage students to go to the police and report the behavior to the police. And some do and some chose not to. In the offer to advert there's choice, they chose not to. Are we giving students options when they make the choices they feel alright for them in the moment? The can change their mind as time goes on but we respect their right to make these choices. And I'll talk about that in a moment. But might say "but we have law enforcement there". Why is the university investigating this? Why do we have these two systems? And part of the reason has to do with -- I was so glad to see our professor emeritus introduced who thought to have sexual harassment included in the university's policy. But part of the reason we do this is that we have civil rights laws in this country that make it unlawful to discriminate individuals on the basis or gender. And one of them is title nine. Most of you probably heard that. Now, if you're my age, the first thing you might think of when you hear of title nine is gender equity in athletics. Because for about the first 40 years that title nine was in existence, the focus of enforcement of the federal government was gender equity in athletics. However, title nine has always said that it prohibits sex discrimination and the universities have had policies prohibiting sex discrimination. And for probably the past two and a half or three decades we've known that sex discrimination also includes sexual harassment and that the most severe form of sexual harassment is sexual assault. So, we had policies covering sexual assault. But, what was happening around the country is that although institutions had these policies, and they were trying to address sexual assault, they were doing it using a system that was developed to address all forms of misconduct for the most part. Institutions did think of ways to try to make the system work better; maybe, separating the parties during a hearing. But, in 2011, the Federal Government through the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights gave us some guidance and said "Here are some expectations we have for you as you're addressing sexual assault cases." This didn't come in out of the vacuum from the Office for Civil Rights because at the same time, there was a significant and now ongoing ground-roots movement across the country where survivors were connecting about their experiences, some going through law enforcement, many going through internal administrative procedures at colleges and universities and saying "It was bad, it was awful, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. I felt judged, I didn't feel I was treated fairly. I didn't feel there were resources" And they had a lot to say. And this was a good thing. Unfortunately, office for Civil Rights was listening and we were listening, too. In addition to tired minds, another law actor in the background operating it's the Cleary Act. Prior to 2013 the Cleary Act never addressed how higher education or education in general addressed issues of sexual assault. But in 2013 the Violence Against Women Act was amended and in-laws are reauthorizing and in the reauthorization were amendments to the Cleary Act that clarified much of the advice that the Office for Civil Rights have been giving higher education about how they should handle sexual assault cases. So, even if it weren't part of the University's values to address these issues, we can't, under the law, say we won't address sexual assault issues. So, that is why we're here and addressing them. So, our policies -- we didn't have a policy in place in 2011 and we adapted a new policy on August 2011 that brought sexual assault reports over to the office for institutional equity to be addressed. The process was in place for about four and a half years before we started the process of talking to our community to ask "how is this working? Can we do better? What are your thoughts about this?" And, Holly who's going to speak next was an integral part of that process in going out to the community and listening. I know at least one person in this audience was one of those forums because I was there as well and listened to what we said. And as a result of that, this past July the University implemented its second version of its policy, I actually have to carry it with me because the name is kind of long, it's the University of Michigan policy and procedures on student's sexual and gender based misconduct and other forms of interpersonal violence. We didn't intentionally make it that long to confuse people but it is descriptive of what it covers. All right. So, what we did with a lot of information that we had is we thought "Can we have this policy and these procedures that really worked towards increasing the reporting; making it more likely that we can push that 3.6 % needle up and have people bring their concerns to the university so that we can address them." So, a couple of things that we did -- One is, whenever possible, we allow claimants to make choices about what happens with the information they share with us. Just because someone contacts the Office for Institutional Equity or their Dean or another administrator to raise a concern about sexual assault, does not automatically mean that it will be investigated by the Office for Institutional Equity. We will be told about it but we will then discuss it with the claimant and make sure they're aware of their choices. I'll also say there are a few situations where we do have to move forward as an institution. We're more concerned about the safety of the entire campus community or individuals within the campus community. Those situations are rare. But for the most part, we want claimants to feel a sense of control and what can for like a very uncontrollable situation. Another thing that we did, and this is -- we've quite progressed in this now because we started this in 2011 -- is we're using investigation model so that students are in the situation that they used to talk in the past when they had the hearing model and they essentially had to prosecute their own case. They had to convince their witnesses to come and talk on their behalf. They had to ask the questions. With the process we have now, the university does that through the Office for Institutional Equity, to try to remove much of the burden as possible from individuals who've come in forward and having the institution address their concerns. We used the preponderance of the evidence standard, which is what I was recommended by the Federal Government. My guess is that there will be a question about that so I'll save that to talk about later. However, it's not an easy standard to me but it's the standard that's used in virtually all civil courts in this country, including for Federal States Civil Rights complaints that are brought in court used the proponents of the evidence standard, right? If you are in a criminal court you have the beyond the reasonable doubt. Then, there is one in the middle that's used for just a very few types of situations. We make support available for both parties and the support offered by the university is very knowledgeable about our policies and our procedures so that they can answer student's questions as they're going forward and they can raise issues and make sure that the students are cared for through the process. And in this last one I think it's tremendously important and it's something we continue to work on and any of you, I encourage you, if you've been through an OAE process and you have comments on this, please, share them with us. You don't have to it in this public form, you can call us, you can email us anonymously send us a note. But that's is why we try to be as transparent as we can. We recognize that our process makes complete sense to us because we work with it every day. But we also recognize that for most people it will be the only one time to interact with it so we try to be very open about what's happening as people are coming through our process. The other thing that we do is we're very open about the information we have before we reach a finding in the case. So, for example, if I were to interview you as part of the case, I would write up a summary about what we discussed. It wouldn't be everything, it would be the things that were relevant to making a finding as to whether the policy was valid or not. And I will send it to you. And I'll say "please, look at this and make sure everything in there is correct, that I've included everything, if you think there something I didn't include if you think I should, please, let me know." We would ask you "other witnesses you want us to interview, documentation you want us to review " and we will. We then interview everybody then for both the claimant and the respondent, if they wish, we send them everything we have, the claimant statement, the respondent statement, all of the witnesses statements, any other evidence we reviewed but we hadn't made a finding yet and we share it with them and say "please, look at all of this and comment on it, any comments that you have we'll consider. If there's additional information you think we haven't looked at and we should look at, we'll look at it." The entire point being that, by the time we get to the end of the case, and we make a finding, and the students see the written report, nothing about what we looked at or assessed should be surprise. The ultimate point being we want to be fair and we want people to feel fairly treated and that they were respected throughout the process. So, then, the other thing we do is we try to empower our claimants across campus, regardless of whether they chose to come to OAE or not. And we do this in a variety of way. A couple that I want to highlight is that we've taken great care of both, in the policy that I showed you, as well as materials that we produce to try to let people know when they're interacting with someone in the university community, who would have to share information with OAE which then doesn't necessarily mean an investigation is going to ensue, or if they're talking with somebody who they can speak with confidentially. And we've created some material around this and even some signage, and one that I'll show you is, this is a new sign that we're going to be introducing at Michigan. And ROE stands for responsible employees, responsible employees is what we call a faculty or staff member who is obligated to contact the Office for Institutional Equity because we house the title and coordinator. If they become aware that a student has disclosed sexual assault or intimate partner violence or stalking or gender based harassment, they have to share it with us. And so, we've created a quick visual symbols so that our students can know just passing by -- by the way, we recognize that not all our students will necessarily be able to see this and we've accounted for that. -- So, you might start seeing this around campus over the next couple of months. Another thing we recognize is our students don't necessarily know what this means yet, as well. But, Holly is going to be talking about training and is going to be talking about our office as well. And we're taking session to make sure in the future our students will know what this means. The other thing that we've done is created informational materials. So, one of them was in a basket out front and I don't know if you saw it, I think I have it right here but it might have slipped out. There it is, it's tiny. But it was a resource card that we created specifically for our faculty and staff members because you never know when someone might disclose an assault to you. And it's very hard to remember, even if you've come to a session, what are the resources that the university has? What am I supposed to tell the student? What are the places they can go to talk to people confidentially? It's hard to know what to do. And so, we created this card, it's pretty small print but still legible. And if very quickly, on this half, tells the faculty staff member what they're supposed to do. This half is to give to the student that says where you can go confidentially; where you can go to report to police, to the university and the resources that are available for support as well. And in another document we that we have that every person who comes forward to the university with this concern is in Our Community Matters for sure. I don't have a set of these out front but if you would like one or you would like to go through it, you can go online, to the university's main web page and just type "our community matters" and this for sure will come up. And it has a tremendous amount of helpful information; very quick information on the back and then other useful information inside; questions that might prevent people from coming forward, things like, "What about my financial aid if I have to drop out of my classes for a little while? What about - what if I'm on a visa? What do I do?" quick information either with those answers or where people can go to get those answers. Again, hopefully, with this information people will feel more comfortable coming forward to the university. And I'll also say -- I also want to give credit to our campus partners, we work closely with SAPAC and we work closely with the Office of the General Council, with Human Resources and, I know I'm leaving people out, but all around campus we work together to produce a TPSS, to produce materials like this. And again, if you have ideas, we would love to hear them. So, thank you very much. Now we're going to turn it over to my colleague Holly Rider-Milkovich who's going to focus on prevention and education efforts.

[ Applause ]

>> Holly Rider-Milkovich: I'm so honored to be here and I have to say, I'm a confessed policy wonk, I absolutely love policy, and so, when I had the opportunity to speak of the Ford School I felt a little star struck, I have to tell you. So, this is really an honor for me. I am the former director of the sexual assault prevention awareness center. My new role at EverFi allows me to add to my varied campus based a specific analysis of this work, a national end. At EverFi we work with our 1300 schools and reach 1.3 million students and so I hope to really blend both my campus space perspective with that of national birth. I'm also really excited that I'm following up both data on this issue and also a lot of information about what we're doing as an institution to meet or exceed with our federal regulations as it relates to federal responsibilities as it relates to both regulation and legislation. Often times, when I'm talking about this issue on campus there's a false dichotomy that it's struck that we can either focus on prevention or we can focus on compliance. And I really encourage us as a community and us nationally to stop dividing those two pieces that we can both be doing excellent work in compliance and excellent work in prevention. And in fact, I would argue that the best way for us to achieve excellent compliance is to do our very best work in prevention. So, I'm going to talk about a little bit about today University of Michigan as a case study for how you build that excellent comprehensive prevention approach. And I [inaudible] this as a decentralized environment with the recognition that there may be some who are watching, who are, come from a small school, come community college, there are specific challenges that unity to large institutions like the University of Michigan that has 21 schools and colleges that has over 47,000 students. And yet, there are also lessons that every school and college can take away. OK. So, I want to first to think about prevention as a process. So, when we think about prevention, often times the first thing that folks think of is what are we delivering to our students, the programming aspect? What are we teaching them? Are we telling them about consent? Are sharing information about the laws? This important programming piece it can be the first part of the conversation and sometimes the last part of that conversation. I'd like for us to look at this from a wider lens. We also need to think "yeah" about policy, unfortunately, a neglected area for many schools and colleges who are looking at this issue. But policies undergird the programming that we're doing. It ensures that the work that we are doing with all of our populations on campus around education and prevention have a strong foundation. We also need to make sure that there's critical processes and institutionalization for this work. Those critical processes help us ask questions like what is -- how do we measure the effectiveness of the work that we're doing on our campus? How do we know whether we're not moving the needle on this issue? Who is responsible ultimately for driving and directing or sexual misconduct prevention efforts on campus? And institutionalization, how are we investing in this work as an institution? How many full-time prevention educators do we have in place? How often is our president speaking out on these issues? And, certainly an effort like this at the Ford School speaks well to the University of Michigan's institutionalization but there are other pieces that speak to the University of Michigan's institutionalization of their commitment to this work. I've already mentioned about President Schultz speaks often and with great eloquence on his commitment to this issue and that is a courageous leadership on his part has really supported and helped other college presidents move forward. And it also undergirds what has been a long tradition at the University of Michigan, which is strong funding and support. So, the sexual assault prevention and awareness center has been in place at Michigan for 30 years now. We just celebrated our 30th anniversary and I was going to talk a little bit, I hope, about some of the ways in which we marked that on campus. In those 30 years, we've had core institutional funding, and this is really important. And I want to emphasize this for those schools and colleges that may be tuning in who are really seeking to place their programs on solid foundation. Because of the additional support that we've received for over 30 years on campus, we've been able to, over those 30 years, really develop core practices, been able to build on those core practices and develop a network of relationships across the board. It's a long-term process and it's not able to happen unless there is a solid foundation. When you have programs that pop up and fall based on funding that may or may not be available the next five years, it's hard to gain that traction and that's a benefit that we've had on this campus. OK. So, having said that, where we are now, which I'll talk about in a few minutes, has a history from where we came from. So, in 2010, what we did as an organization at the sexual assault prevention awareness center is take a pause and really do a deep dive and look at the work that we were doing. At that point, we were 25 almost 25 years into our history and it was time to look at whether or not we were really adopting and implementing the best practices possible. And so, we took that hard look at our work and this is what we identified, we identified that the best research at the time and the information was scant, agreed, but, of that vast information, what we identified was that it was important to reach small audiences, you wanted to reach those audiences multiple times with information that complemented and built upon that work that it was important to promote healthy behavior and healthy see sexuality and that, by doing so, we will increase the positive behavior and on our campus and decrease the negative behavior on our campus. We also knew that it was really important that our work that, that the work be research focused, that it be experiential, that folks have the opportunity to learn skills and as part of the work that we're doing. And that we approach students in different ways, because, of course, as we know, students learn in different ways. And that it'd be informed by evidence and researched and that we ask that hard question -- How do you know if the work you're doing has impact? So that we could change it if that was not the case. So, this is what we learned, was the best approach that we might take and we also knew that we had some growing to do because at the time we had around a 150 person plus audiences, they were delivered information, the University of Michigan was one of the leaders and requiring all incoming students to receive sexual violence prevention education. But we were giving it to them in one dose or, if we were providing other information, the first kind of information that we gave students didn't necessarily equate to the second piece, they didn't build on each other. It's not like pop beads, you can't set two things next to each other and have them automatically makes sense. And, unfortunately, at the University of Michigan, ours didn't at the time. We're really focused on raising awareness and discussing the consequences of sexual violence and I'll say on our defense that that was the approach that nearly every single School and College in the country was taking, even though, we -- the research at the time said that it was not effective. Our method was didactic and consequence based so we were really about talking at students rather than engaging them. We were not focused on skills building and we were focused on knowledge acquisition and even then, unfortunately, we weren't necessarily measuring inconsistent ways. And we didn't have a strong basis of evidence that was guiding the work that we were doing. And so, even though we did have that strong institutionalization, we had some room to go. And so, this is what we embarked upon. So, we started by creating a program called relationship remix and I'm really delighted that the current coordinator relationship of remix is in the audience and I'm going to be talking a lot about her work and that of some of our peer educators who have spent their careers here at Michigan delivering this, so it's an honor to talk about the work that you do. So, we crafted this mission so what we've decided to do was really take that dive, be the leaders institutionally, and focus on healthy relationship skill building to reduce gender-based violence. And this is how our evidence identified that we would go about it to do it in the best way possible, that we would ask the students to think about decision making from their own value system so that we could really incorporate many students, different kinds of perspectives, and experiences. We weren't saying what was best for anyone person but that each person had a chance to define what's best for them. And that then knew what those values where they would demonstrate those values in the ways in which they interacted with each other that they would know what a healthy relationship look like, be able to communicate that others through consent along with other really important relationship skills that are skills that are important for all successful adults. We would help them develop Sexual Health skills because what we knew from our emerging information about our student body is that many students coming out of Michigan schools did not have any healthy sexuality education and so this was their first opportunity receive that, and we would inform them about campus resources. And so, this is where we are, five years later. Katrina Dowd [phonetic] who's in the audience, actually created this beautiful infographic, and after five years, we you are heir to an 87 % for first-year attendance up from 67 % in that first year. We delivered in small or workshops to incoming first-year students a skill-based program that reaches over 5,396 students which is extraordinary reach. And that happens in 162 works, so that tells you the kind of commitment that our students bring to this work, and that we support as a part of our institutionalization effort. I once calculated this is almost 5,000 hours of peer education work that is devoted each semester by our students. We have a really robust program of evaluation and assessment, we ask students in pre and post-test six month and 12-month follow-up so that we are rigorously holding yourself accountable to making sure that the work that we're doing has impact, and that we understand when that impact falls off and that is all important information to help us make choices going forward. This also reflects the kind of cross institutional collaboration that is required for universal education approach, like we have here for a relationship remix, so it's not just the sexual assault prevention awareness center who has responsibility in a charge to address sexual misconduct, we also a work collaboratively in this one program with residents education, we also work with our Wolverine Wellness team that addresses healthy sexuality. And it's one part of a four dose series for incoming students, and so, you can see here, what that incoming series looks like on the top line you see what we're doing for incoming first-year undergraduate students and transfer students. And you can see where we have room to go for our graduate and our professional student. They currently are receiving the online course that is developed specifically for graduate and professional students, so is appropriate as an audience, and then other students receive the information, graduate students receive additional kinds of training in the less consistent and less formal ways I think that University of Michigan -- I don't think I know actually -- that the University of Michigan is joined by every other school in college in the country and not yet having the same kind of rigor for their graduate students as they do for their undergraduate students. It is my hope that we will take -- that you will take -- and I as [inaudible] up, will watch you take the leadership effort to create more programming. OK, so I'm going to skip through my favorite section which is the socioecological model. Very briefly, this is a model that demonstrates why it's so important that we look at this work not only at the individual level were again some of our programs start and end but how individuals interact with each other, what peer influence has, how as a community we can address these issues of that the societal focus is. Schools and colleges should be adopting this socioecological model and looking at the ways in which their campuses are intervening in providing interventions and educational efforts and other kinds of effort across the entire spectrum. So these are a few examples of the way the University of Michigan does that, and there's a full of selection of those examples in the annual security report which you can find it dpss.mich.edu. And so last but not least, I placed the slide in here in now colleague, Emma, said "why is the, why you have a sunset?" And I said "this is not a sunset this is a sunrise" and it's really a reminder for us that I we're in this moment of transition and there is a lot of anxiety about what is going to happen with all of the tremendous progress that has been made with a champion in the White House in the past eight years. And I would encourage for us to look at the ways in which schools and colleges have put these efforts in place and really institutionalize them, and for us to not allow for the progress that we've made over the last eight years to slip or to stall, that we all have a role to play in pushing forward the next horizon of sexual violence prevention so that all students have a safe living learning environment where they have an equal opportunity to grow.

[ Applause ]

>> Anna: Hi, everyone. My name is Anna, I am a senior at the Ford School and I am also a SAPAC volunteer since my freshman year here and I'm an employee of SAPAC since my sophomore year. And my current role is a co-coordinator for one of these three student volunteering groups at SAPAC. So, SAPAC's comprehensive prevention plan encompasses primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. And each of the three volunteer group focuses on one of those modes of prevention. So, primary prevention focuses on education on sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, intimate partner violence as well as healthy relationship. So, primary prevention's goal is to provide education before sexual assaults has the chance to occur so that everyone on our campus knows about it and knows the harms of it, and, someday in the future, it won't be a problem anymore. Secondary prevention is led by the bystander intervention and community engagement program, which I am one of the co-chords for. So, secondary prevention acknowledges that, despite very strong primary prevention efforts on our campus, sexual violence remains a really significant and pervasive issue. So, with vice, we empower our communities with the tools and skills to prevent harm that at the moment that it may be happening. And, the bulk of our work are workshops with other communities on campus as well as some awareness and visibility events. The third mode of prevention is tertiary which is led by the networking publicity and activism program at SAPAC. So, tertiary prevention acknowledges that, despite very strong primary and secondary prevention efforts, sexual assault has happened on our campus, there are survivors on our campus. So, tertiary prevention aims to provide safe and supportive environment for survivors as well to promote healing to minimize the long-term effects of trauma from sexual violence and to promote accountability for perpetrators. So lot of the work that the MPS do center on big visibility awareness events such as a Speak Out which is a public forum for survivors. So, bystander intervention community engagement is the program that I work for SAPAC. We have 60 student volunteers which is the biggest it has ever been, and we work to empower individuals with bystander intervention training so that they can take an active role in making their communities safer and in translation the larger campus communities safer. We also had a goal for the last few years of engaging communities that are typically left out of the mainstream conversation of surrounding sexual assault. And this can include groups of students of color, groups of students with different sexual identities, and any other factors that might make them feel left out of the mainstream conversation. So, this is a list of some of the communities that were working with this year. And a huge bulk of our work with these communities are dialog based community workshops, which include a brief overview of sexual misconduct, of consent, as well as the campus climate data that Bill discussed earlier And the we move into bystander intervention strategies and scenarios and this part is tailored very specifically for each organization that we work for. Bystander intervention and help people will feel comfortable and safe than interviewing really is dependent on their social identity. So, how bystander intervention will look for a given group will be different. And we also never want to come into a community as the bearers of all knowledge because we're absolutely not. We may not be a remember in that community so we're not experts in that community. So, it's really a mutual learning experience both SAPAC students and the group that we're working with. And we strategize with the other groups' leader to talk about what they see as problems, what they what their goals are, and what they hope to get out of a workshop with SAPAC. We also host on some of those types of the collaborations, right now we're working to put on a total focused on gender discrimination and bias in the stem fields, were working to engage the engineering school and reach students who might not, ordinarily come to other say Pac events on central campus. We also host visibility and awareness events. This past November we hosted better bystander month which aimed to engage the larger Campus Community, in a conversation, a positive and empowering conversation about consent and violence prevention. So, one thing that we are currently working on is how to reach upperclassmen. So, as Holly discussed, we have leading programming for incoming freshmen, haven before you even step on campus, relationship remix in the first couple weeks of freshman year, and changed it up just a couple months into freshman year. But our experiences and our perceptions around these issues changed really dramatically over four years here. I know that I stopped the relationship remix my freshman year, and didn't really want to be there but now I have led that workshop for three years and am involved in the planning process and the concept development. So, these issues are not a one-time conversation and they grow and change with us on during our four years here. So, we're working on new ways that we can reach students later on in their careers at U of M which thus comes with some more difficulties because they no longer live in the same place and residents halls. But many people are involved in at least one community on campus, whether that be Greek Live or an academic or a multicultural org or an interest for hobby organization. So, our new initiative hones in on that Community membership as a way to reach students later on in their careers year. So, the central Student Government initiative requires that each student organization, requesting more than 1,000 dollars of CSC funds, sends at least two of their leaders to a bystander intervention Workshop which is facilitated by the bystander intervention and Community engagement program as well as Wolverine Wellness. So, this is a pilot program of the very first year we're hosting eight workshops and each workshop has about 40 participants and with two leaders from each org that means about 20 different organizations in the room, which means we're reaching a huge range of communities that we've never worked with before. And that does come with some caveats because those participant students didn't exactly volunteer to be there, they there because they have to be and that sometimes means that they are less engaged and they ultimately might get left out of the workshop. But in the same vain, we're reaching people who we probably wouldn't have reads otherwise. Our other work is with organizations who are, you know, requesting workshop with us who are proactively trying to educate their members. So, if we only worked with them we'd only be talking to the people who want to talk about it. So, there are drawbacks and benefits to this kind of compulsory workshop but we're really excited to see where this pilot program goes in the next few years. We've also been extending her work to talk about other issues besides sexual violence, we've experienced a really large increase in the number of workshops requested that -- many of them asking a focus on racial discrimination and Injustice -- and this came in the wake of several race based hateful incidents on campus. So, we've been working with these communities individually to provide them with workshops but we also wanted to do something larger more community-based and something that could be a learning experience for other people at the University. So, we hosted a student panel titled the racism and safety at Michigan which featured minority student leaders on campus discussing the current racial climate on campus, safety, as well as effective bystander intervention strategies, and what they want to see from their allies on campus. We also wanted to start talking more explicitly about the connection between sexual violence and other forms of violence; sexism, racism xenophobia etcetera, they all happen in the same space and they're interconnected so it makes sense to talk about them all together. So, we've also been working to expand our work on [inaudible] and through the state so this past April we hosted activating our campus conference for the very first time. It was an unprecedented gathering of anti-violence activist from 14 colleges and universities across Michigan. We had over a hundred students in attendance, this was an idea that originally started in the peer educator program at SAPAC and eventually became to be a project throughout the three voluntary groups. Throughout the state we shared the histories of our programs as well as our plans for the future, and networked with each other on how to continue to stay in touch. Our keynote speaker was an amazing SAPAC along and we intended workshops to widen and deepen the scope of our knowledge surrounding sexual violence issues. We also had several students leaders from other organizations at U of M attend, so that, they too, could be exposed to this information and bring it back to their organization. So, I could probably talk about this for hours but that's all I have for today. Thank you so much.

[ Applause ]

>> Anna, thank you, that was terrific, and thanks to all our panelists. Now, we are going to hear a few reflections and remarks from Barbara Niess-May, who is the executive director of Safe House.

>> Barbara Niess-May: Thank you very much for this opportunity and I would like to acknowledge one of our retard Ford members Kathleen Donahue [phonetic] who is in the audience. So, thank you for your service and Safe House in that we appreciate it. So, just to give you a little bit more information about Safe House, Save House is an organization right here in our community that supports over 5,000 survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence every year through our shelter and non residential programs. And people are often surprised to hear that number, they start to say "oh, well, are you sure that's just Washtenaw County?" Well, we do have some reciprocity throughout the state and throughout the country. It's less than 1 %. So, yes, that really is Washtenaw County and we do see -- we're also in a very unique position here in this community because we serve five institutions of Higher Learning and that is an anomaly, as I understand throughout the country, or to be nestled in this community and then also to have others that are nearby such as Michigan State University and Wayne State University. So, I was especially delighted to be invited to offer some remarks. So, I was making notes and then quickly prioritized them so I'm looking for my numbers with my progressive lenses, so excuse me. So, one thing I want to share -- I've had over 20 year history in this work. I started well over 20 years ago, actually, in another state. And, I remember watching the hunting ground and soon after that reading the book Missoula and still being surprised. I didn't think I could be surprised anymore in this work and I was totally shocked and I'm still totally shocked by how things continue to happen on college campuses. Now, I'm fortunately married to somebody who listens to a lot of sports, and I hear a lot about what's going on college campuses in relation to sports. But what has shifted in the last several years that the level of accountability that the sport casters and people in alumni are having for the Universities they attended, to hold people accountable. And that is not different for the University of Michigan. As an example, I'm the program committee chair for the Ann Arbor rotary which, for some of you may not know, is that one of the biggest rotaries in the world and we meet at the Michigan Union and some of my older gentleman on my committee said "we've been hearing about sexual assault on campus and we want a program on that." And so, quite fortunately, Sue Snyder and Holly agree present with me on this issue at right here at the in Arbor rotary. People care about this topic, and they want things to happen, and they are so relieved to know that the University of Michigan is being so progressive on this topic. I, too, love policy, I was very sorry Holly that you could not continue with the ecological approach because that is very important but I won't continue to bore you or even try to find your slide to take a reprise on that. The other part of that, though, is that it's not the same at other universities. Some people think this happens everywhere and it absolutely does not. The dialogues that I have with the people at the University of Michigan is very different than the other universities, and the perspectives in the believes. Now, if I were to sit with all the university presidents that I interact with, of the universities I interact with, and ask them if they thought sexual assault and domestic violence were wrong, they would all raise their hand. But the extent to which they feel as though that they need to be responding to the survivors and preventing what's happening on campus varies greatly. And, so, that's something that we always need to keep in mind. One thing I'm also is that I'm most impressed with that I have always thought has been missing in the dialog, and I didn't realize until your presentation, is the intersection of oppression on these issues, and pay attention to those. Something that we do at Save House Center quite actively and feel strongly about and believe that that's in addressing these issues, but in closing, one thing I want to share that happens, I think no matter where you are, is that as policy is made we're fortunate to have the intended results. But we must be very careful about the unintended results. And paying attention to those in hearing from people who are affected by them. Holly, thank you for inviting me this afternoon and I'll be around for questions later. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you, Barbara. I'd like to, now, invite our panelists to come up and get settled at the table but while they're getting ready, I would like to invite Professor Ann Larimore to come and give us a little bit of historical perspective. And then move it, we'll try to get to Q and A. so we'll get there pretty quickly. For those of you who are with us online, again if you have a question you want to get into the dialogue or just we can present them to the panelists afterwards as well, please, do that by you twitting at #policytalks.

>> Ann Evans Larimore: Well, thank you very much for allowing me to be part of this program. And I'm Ann Evans Larimore [phonetic], I'm professor emeritus of geography and women studies and I would like to share some UM history with you. At the University of Michigan the very first attention to sexual misconduct was when, in 1972-73, the Raccoon School of Graduate Studies created its very first grievance policy, and included the term sexual harassment as a cause for grievance. I initiated this inclusion supported by associate Dean Alfred Sussman [phonetic] and team Donald Stokes, and they've always been sympathetic men in this effort. Of course, this would not have been possible without a context of misconduct. Then, I was the first woman ever elected to the rack and Board of Governors in 1971. So, there was -- when this misconduct happened there was a woman there. During my time on the board I was also able to help the women's studies program get established since then -- and I look around and I think some of you may not even hived in 1971-72. But since then two separate UM campaigns have addressed personal violence on this campus. The first had as its slogan Tell Someone. The second and recent one has had as its slogan Expect Respect and President Mary Sue Coleman was very much associated with that. Since 1972-73, the University of Michigan has become a smoke-free campus but not without a national cultural campaign to turn American society from one that welcomed cigarette smoking to one that does not tolerated. Now American universities need to lead a national campaign against sexual assault. A male paradigm, a male worldview needs to be flipped to vanish sexual assault on campuses. It needs to be a collaboratively, collaborative multi- year effort by universities and colleges across the country. It needs to change American society and from what the panelists have said, it can start here with this panel discussion. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Claire Taekman: So, we will be reading the questions. My name Claire Taekman. I'm a senior in the BA program here at the public policy school and I'm a volunteer with SAPAC's for education program and I actually run SAPAC's Cleary support group.

>> Afton Branche: I'm Afton Branche. I'm an MPP student here at the Ford School and I'm the co-chair of the women and gender public policies student group. Thank you for remarks today. We're excited to get started with the questions. So, the first question is from Twitter and the persons asks "has the investigation model for sexual misconduct improved the process? How is this improvement measured? For example, have students reported positive or different experiences since adopting this model?

>> So, that's a great question and I'm going to invite the other panelists to weigh in on this as well. It's hard to say because we've had the model now for a few years but I think we only now just getting to the point where it's been in place long enough to begin asking the hard questions, that Holly was talking about, which is, Is this making a difference? One measure that we do have and is meaningful is that the year-over-year with one blip, the number of reports coming through where people are coming forward and requesting contacting the Office for Institutional Equity, sometimes requesting an investigation, sometimes not, keeps increasing. So, that's a good sign whether that answers that question or not, I don't know because, of course, we have so many different efforts going on campus. It's not exactly direct answer but a beginning to answer of a great question.

>> So, lots of campuses adopt a lot of different kinds of models. All campuses are guided by the Office for Civil Rights to have an investigative model but some campuses also pair that with a hearing approach. Our experience here at the University of Michigan has been that students have been more interested and more willing to participate in our process because they know that they're not going to be in a room, where there is a person, whom they have told the institution has harmed them. Where they may be in a room where somebody has accused them of committing harm. So, I think that there are some important protections that are available to students in an investigative model. I also know that your we've had many students identify that, having the university take on that awesome burden of investigating the harm that they have reported, has happened to them, has been a real load off of their shoulders, one of the reasons why they were ever interested in participating in the University process. And I also think that there is room for improvement in all processes. Certainly, students continue to experience harm, there's a body of research that talks about the ways that students are -- can also experience harm through institutional processes in general. I don't think that the University of Michigan is immune from that. But I do know that we put a lot of effort into trying to reduce those harms, you know, but I think it would be disingenuous to say that that is not sometimes an outcome for some students.

>> So, the next question is from the audience. There are a couple of people who were sort of wondering if he could expand on why, on certain Michigan such as underrepresented minorities, LGBT, LGB students, [inaudible] experience sexual violence at higher rates than other students.

>> Yeah. So, I'll start a response that is definitely not an answer and the reason is because our team was responsible for documenting those differences. Not at all -- I was going to say, either charged with -- are probably capable of deducing why they exist. I will inform the answer by telling you that, in at least, two of those cases, under over there minorities and LGBT identifying individuals, there's data from outside this University, from other universities, and from all the population at large that show the same pattern. So, as with Ann's comments were great, I do think a big part of this issue is a general social issue in the United States of America. And those differences, I suspect, are also a general social issue in the United States of America. But I don't have the answer. I welcome anybody else who may.

[ Laughter ]

>> I don't have the entire answer for sure. One thing that I'd like to add is the role that alcohol can play, as Bill said, like, the number one a circumstance that sexual assaults was under was verbal pressure. And the second or very high up reason was substance consumption. Of substance consumption, alcohol was the number one tool. So, alcohol was by no means the reason that sexual assaults happens but it is often used if [inaudible]. So, communities that partake in drinking can be at higher risk for sexual assault.

>> Yeah, I should comment that verbal pressure and intoxication often both happened and so it's not as though it was one or the other. They were both very common reasons and they often co-occur.

>> All right. So, this question is from a concerned father whose daughter has been sexually assaulted. In his opinion, he views it as a men's problem not a woman's problem. He asks what can be done to change the coward sense of entitlement disrespect for women I see across, on many young men, on campus.

>> I think this is -- you know -- I think this is such an important question and one of the reasons why as an institution we switch to really focus on a respectful healthy relationships and promoting positive behaviors and positive pro social norms, here at the institution, as the bedrock of the prevention work that we're doing. I think that our work is just a part of the story. Students are deeply uncultured, and what can be have misogynist, sexist culture. By the time they reach our campus, they're, you know, not sort of born and new out of a bubble when they arrive at the University of Michigan. And so it's a tough uphill battle, and the way in which parents and anyone who has a young person in their life can really support this work is just start talking earlier about their expectations that, those young people will treat all persons with respect, to start those conversations at a much earlier age. By the time students reach college, campus many have already experienced harm or perpetrated harm. And so, we really needed to start those conversations much, much earlier.

>> Yeah. I just like to add that one main component of the dialogue-based workshops that we do is called associate theater, which means that we work with the community to find people who are able to connect with their community members, and, you know, present the information for more peer-to-peer level. And that someone from their community is helping present the information and showing how harmful these things can be. So, the information is coming from within and can be more effective in working with communities that may feel entitled like that.

>> I wanted to comment because I thought Anna has made a great point to this. A big part of this is a men's issue. Is not obviously, it's for both men and women's issue and all the programs are designed that way. But dad to dad to the person who wrote this in. I have two sons and two daughters and this issue has really heighten my awareness of the sons, and all the work we need to do with them. And I thought, Holly, your comments about starting early are very true. The data also clears this incidents start at very young age. And, I think the peer-to-peer comment was also super important.

>> I was just going to add something similar which is for all of the parents in the audience and the audience online -- Holly right -- we need to start educating sooner. We can change culture through what we do here on a college campus because students that we educate go on to have families and raise their children. We can do it much faster if you work with your school boards about what kind of education is being provided in your school. And, of course, individual conversations you have with your children.

>> I think this next question, sort of, goes by after that one. We've talked about how sexual assault was about harmful behavior and attitude -- someone who's been wondering what resources are available to combat those harmful behaviors and attitudes after a perpetrator has been through the legal process or maybe even if they haven't been through the legal process.

>> So, if my understanding is correctly for the respondent? To help work with the respondent? So, Holly might actually have a better response to this than I do. We do have a process here at the institution where our sanctioning model focuses on the student holistically. There are some instances when the appropriate sanction is removal from the university community. If that person ever re-enters, however, our sanctioning boards think very thoughtfully about what type of education to wrap around that reentry. I don't think we have one single response that fits all respondents. But it's a thought process because, I will tell you, in the eyes of the law, and, I think, in the eyes of our institutional values, what you're supposed to do in your response is to take action is reasonably calculated to prevent a recurrence. So, I like this question because it's thoughtful and that's why our response in every instance, where we had some of the respondents responsible for violating our policy is to take in action that's reasonable calculated to stop a recurrence. So, that could be a variety of things but it's very individual to the particular act and actor at issue.

>> I guess I would just add that this is a place where there's a lot more work that is needed. We, as a nation, don't have a good body of information that helps us understand what specific kind of efforts are most likely to change the behavior of a person who has already committed harms. This is not a question that the education field, in general, has asked until very recently. I'm really encouraged by the fact that the Department of Justice has actually sponsored a number of different studies that is looking specifically at this issue and, I think, it will be really helpful when their work comes out. But we're a few years out from that. I think that one of the places that we can look is to look other professions who have done work in, what I will say, is tertiary prevention, which is seeking to prevent someone who has committed harm from committing that harm again. There are other bodies of work that, as an indication community, we can we can look to on this issue. Certainly, persons who are working with juveniles who have committed harm and have been process through the criminal justice system. This is one place that that we can look as a field, for some work that is happening. But I think of this is a place where we need a lot more work done. One of the things that we're pretty clear on is that even if you expel a student all you've done is actually say that they can't come onto University campus, they can't enroll on our program. We don't have any way of saying you can't be involved in our student communities, you can't be in our environment and fundamentally we're, I think, really all about creating the best citizens and young persons that we possibly. We need these global citizens of the world. And if that's the case , then I think we do have a responsibility to put effort into finding ways that individuals who experience harm, if possible, can we enter community, can be a positive proactive force for change into have a transition and a better focus for their lives going forward.

>> Thank you. So, we have one last question. Thanks to everyone who submitted questions. So, how might masters or doctoral students design o co-design these types of prevention services, a lot of sessions you talked about were for undergrads and so, a lot of us want to know how should we tailor this to our group.

>> We, the bystander intervention and community engagement program has recently started working with graduate students. It is, we've always been open to it but we, our group is largely undergraduate students so I understand how that connection wasn't always made. But, yeah, we're willing and open to tailoring every part of our offerings for graduate students and have been working with a few select, small groups, including the Latin and Latino psychological student association and the biological-anthropology graduate students.

>> Please, join me now on thanking our panelist and our special guests for their wonderful remark [inaudible] today.

[ Applause ]