Cultivating Partnerships: A Case Study for Moving Beyond Campus-Centric Approaches to Sexual Violence Prevention

Abstract

The prevalence of sexual violence on college campuses and in secondary schools requires institutional action. Yet the responsibility for preventing sexual violence does not rest on college campus communities or secondary schools alone. This study reports on one midwestern university’s efforts to develop partnerships for building institutional capacity to prevent sexual violence within colleges and universities, as well as secondary schools, in collaboration with community sexual violence prevention specialists utilizing the Mentors in Violence Prevention model. Findings from this study offer preliminary evidence that these partnerships are facilitating attitudinal change and increasing perceptions of efficacy in bystander behavior and programming potential. The findings also reveal significant differences between secondary school personnel and university personnel and community stakeholders regarding the attitudinal and self-efficacy dimensions. Such differences support the need for university-secondary school collaborative work and partnerships to increase respective institutional capacities for sexual violence education and prevention.

Over the past decade, colleges and universities have increasingly come under pressure to adequately and efficiently investigate reports of sexual assault on campus or within the campus community. Most recently, efforts to adopt and infuse campus-wide strategies to prevent such assaults from occurring in the first place are now mandated with the passage of the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (Campus SaVE) and the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. While the majority of sexual violence prevention programming has been focused on college and university populations (DeGue et al., 2014), a growing number of educators and prevention specialists advocate for more developmentally appropriate prevention strategies that target students in secondary schools (Banyard, 2014). This article examines one university’s efforts to balance the institutional expectations of preventing sexual violence while recognizing that effective prevention programming will require collaborative initiatives with the broader community of nearby secondary schools and domestic and sexual violence community agencies.