How Hollywood and Campus Justice Are Failing College Students

Sexual assault on America’s college campuses has been front page news lately, including a Rolling Stone feature about an alleged rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on the University of Virginia’s campus in 2012. Although Rolling Stone has since acknowledged and apologized for possible errors in the story, it doesn’t change the fact that horrific acts of rape and sexual assault are happening—and that college campuses are failing to deal appropriately with victims and cases that come to them. Students who have been assaulted by other college-aged men often still struggle to find any semblance of justice in the on-campus adjudication of their cases. Institutions frequently promote a culture of silence instead of protecting victims and expelling those who commit sexual assault. So in light of this national conversation, it’s hard not to wonder what’s feeding that “campus culture.”

Media depictions of American campus culture typically center on drug and alcohol use and abuse, academic apathy, and acts of sexual violence, often (or usually) against women. Kevin Carey, director of New America’s Education Policy Program, observed this in a recent EdCentral post on the dangers of the movie Animal House, saying:

Animal House and its brethren have taught millions of students how to think about college: Professors are fools, women are objects, and administrators are evil incarnate. Drink as much as you want and nothing bad will happen.

It may be easy for me, as a student myself, to say that frat-boy media programming that is targeted at our age group—think National Lampoon’s Van Wilder and the Harold & Kumar series—perpetuates this culture, but scientific research also supports the claim. A 2011 study by Louise Wasylkiw and Michael Currie found that university students who viewed a clip of a “university comedy film” like Animal House had a more positive attitude towards substance abuse than students who watched an unrelated film, like Planet Earth. The researchers also believed that if students viewed more of these movies over time, the impact on their attitude would be more lasting and harder to change. As Carey said in his post, the litany of such films has only grown longer over the last few years—so that media narrative is long from disappearing.

But it’s not just Hollywood that is failing college students and victims of sexual violence alike. The way colleges address these issues also allows this campus culture to thrive. For starters, colleges have been made responsible for the investigation and administration of on-campus trials after reports of sexual violence. And those investigations are often flawed, led by people who are not law-enforcement officials and are not trained to conduct these types of investigations. Punishments meted out by colleges are often a mild reprimand for a serious crime. According to Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld in The New York Times, “college punishments – sensitivity training, a one-semester suspension – are slaps on the wrist.” This practice of light punishment for serious crimes also held true at Miami University. The Columbus Dispatch reported that the university punished a male student who assaulted one woman (and stole another’s pizza) by placing him on probation and forcing him to write an essay. Off campus, under Ohio state law, that student could have been imprisoned from six months to six years for the assault alone if convicted.

Congress passed the Clery Act to tighten requirements for universities to report incidents of sexual assault and other safety issues on their campuses to their students and to the federal government. But there is little evidence to suggest that crimes like sexual violence have decreased as a result. Even a White House effort to crack down on colleges found to be in violation of federal requirements so that they better respond to campus assaults has seen mixed results. To make impactful change, then, what really needs to happen is a culture shift in the media, and in the campus adjudication system.

To make impactful change, what really needs to happen is a culture shift in the media, and in the campus adjudication system.

Initiatives like “It’s on Us” from the White House are a step in the right direction. That campaign goes directly to the source—the students—and engages with them alongside a White House-appointed task force established to develop best practices for dealing with sexual violence on college campuses. The Step UP! bystander intervention program, which was recently adopted at my university, also engages with students to educate them about the role they can play in preventing crimes like rape.

Although compliance investigations are a good start, dealing with the problem of sexual violence on campus requires a two-step approach. Policymakers should consider whether it’s appropriate for campuses to be adjudicating criminal cases at all. And students need to be educated and held accountable for crimes that affect their entire community. Initiatives like “It’s on Us” illustrate that problems of rape and sexual violence are embedded on campuses across the country—and send students the powerful message that they, too, have a role to play in preventing their all-too-frequent occurrence.