Going Upstream: Policy as Sexual Violence Prevention and Response.

For decades, college and university administrators responded to the changing legislative tides on sexual violence in their efforts to draft, revise, and implement institutional policies related to sexual violence. In recent years, the legislative landscape includes not only the Clery Act and Title IX, but the new Violence Against Women Act Section 304, the Obama Administration’s White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault guidance, model policies, and even some state laws. Despite these well-intended policies, the problem of sexual violence persists. Good practice requires practitioners to move beyond compliance (Jessup-Anger & Edwards, 2015), to identify and create policies that can be part of a comprehensive sexual violence prevention and response. In this chapter, we argue that use of policy as accountability produces institutional overemphasis on compliance, situating institutional agents as managers of risk, resulting in the problem of sexual violence remaining unchanged. We believe policy has much greater potential as a social justice tool for prevention. We aim to contextualize policy to not only comply with legislated expectations for how to respond to sexual violence, but also to prevent it.