Primary Areas of Research Interest within the Center

Sexual empowerment to harness and cultivate strength

Literature in the area of sexual health is, in large part, driven by deficit-based approaches to understanding cultures surrounding sexuality. These approaches don’t allow for assessing, answering, or appreciating why and how individuals are driven to seek out connections with their peers and the real benefits that individuals perceive in sexual expression. In contrast, a strengths-based approach is a holistic perspective that involves acknowledging and supporting the power within individuals to seek out and harness their own sexual desires and interests.

Restorative justice approaches to social injustice

Restorative justice seeks to transform the environment that fosters the social conditions that support violence. For example, restorative justice focuses beyond complainant and respondent. With this lens, sexual violence is perceived from a community-level perspective not only an individual-level perspective. In the context of the University environment, we will work to seek out approaches to building opportunities for understanding community accountability.

Communication and policy concerns relating to consent

Establishing social norms and policies around consent involves a deep understanding of communication patterns, power imbalance, cultural expectations, gender roles, and legalistic concerns. Considerable research has focused on explicit, implicit, and nuanced approaches to engaging in consenting behaviors, yet concerns regarding communication or consent or non-consent remain. Recently, this research has been extended to understanding consent and the potential for technology-facilitated sexual violence; a burgeoning area of research given the strong impact of technology on interpersonal communication.

Spatial geography and the “built environment”

The spatial geography of a typical residential college campus involves students living in close quarters in spaces where they will likely experience a relative lack of supervision compared to their prior residential environment. Dorms rooms are typically tightly configured and mostly accommodate beds and desks with limited room for ‘living space’ (e.g., coffee tables, dining tables, chairs). These layouts cause students to socialize in spaces typically reserved for sleeping and intimacy, regardless of the intended activity.

Impact of alcohol access, consumption, and patterns of use

Alcohol is frequently noted as a contributing factor in campus sexual violence. Efforts to address the role of alcohol in sex related decision making have ranged from zero tolerance policies, to harm reduction policies, to tolerance and support of alcohol use in moderation. Multiple factors intersect that lead to problematic alcohol related outcomes in college campus environments. These factors collide, potentially leaving students unprepared to address concerns and consequences of alcohol related challenges.

Interventions to address sexual violence

Interventions to address campus-based sexual violence have focused on individual level (e.g., bystander interventions), community level (e.g., use of social media to impact social norms, university leadership promoting a culture of safety), policy level (e.g., alcohol use policies, reporting and adjudication of sexual violence), and structural level (e.g., altering student residence environment).

Diversity and inclusivity in sexual violence and empowerment initiatives

Literature on sexual violence and empowerment has historically included samples that are predominantly White, heterosexual, and cisgender. This lack of inclusiveness in regard to race/ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation gravely limits our ability to effectively reach individuals of varied lived experiences and to accurately assess, understand, and address systemic barriers (including barriers driven by social injustice) that continue to create real harms for populations possibly in greatest need of support services.

Research with perpetrators of sexual violence

Eliminating sexual violence requires changing the behaviors of individuals who engage in the perpetration of violence (see also the restorative justice section). To change these behaviors, we need to understand the causes of such behavior. Yet, there exists a relative dearth of research on understanding perpetrators of sexual violence relative to survivors (e.g.,PsycInfo, PubMed, Google all produce higher numbers of returns for survivors of sexual violence)