The Obama administration has made preventing sexual violence on campus a priority. The U.S. Department of Education is now investigating 90 — and counting — colleges and universities suspected of insufficiently addressing possible cases of sexual violence. In September, the White House launched the "It's On Us" campaign to raise awareness of the problem with the help of celebrities and student leaders nationwide. In addition, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has awarded a $1.3 million grant to psychologist Robert Prentky, PhD, to lead a three-year Campus Sexual Assault Perpetrator Treatment Pilot Project.
The project is part of a DOJ effort to address what its Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking (SMART) calls "practically nonexistent" sanctions and treatment curricula for campus perpetrators.
Prentky, who directs the training programs in forensic psychology at Fairleigh Dickinson University, will work with co-principal investigator Mary Koss, PhD, of the University of Arizona, and senior investigator Neil Malamuth, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles, to survey 1,000 campuses to see how they handle sexual assault perpetrators.
The team will also survey at least 1,000 male students from five campuses to identify dynamic (changeable) risk factors that lead college-age men to commit sexual assault. They will also survey 1,000 female students about their experiences with sexual violence, asking such questions as how they perceive the risk of sexual violence and why victims may not report such incidents.
Based on the identified risk factor data, Prentky and his team will design a risk-and-needs assessment protocol and an evidence-based treatment model for student sexual offenders that will be tested at seven college campuses. Once the model has been successfully pilot tested, SMART plans to publicly release it so that any school can adopt it.
Prentky emphasizes that it is critical for schools to acknowledge the problem and respond proactively, such as by mandating sexual misconduct awareness training for incoming students and preventing alcohol abuse.
"We will never satisfactorily mitigate the problem of sexual violence just by identifying a handful of students that have been found responsible and sanctioning them with remedial coursework or worse, passing high-risk students on to another campus," he says.
— Stacy Lu
