Campus Sexual Harassment, Other Violence, and Racism, Oh my! Evidence From Black Women Undergraduates for a Culturally Competent University Approach to Title IX

• Author: Jennifer M. Gómez
• DOI: 10.1177/15570851211062574
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Feminist Criminology

2022, Vol. 17(3) 368–383

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/15570851211062574

journals.sagepub.com/home/fcx

Campus Sexual Harassment,

Other Violence, and Racism,

Oh my! Evidence From Black

Women Undergraduates for

a Culturally Competent

University Approach to Title

IX

Jennifer M. Gómez

1,2



Abstract

Relevant for Title IX federal legislation, the purpose of the current study is to examine

cultural betrayal (within-group perpetrator) and sexual harassment (SH) with other vi-

olence and racial discrimination on Black women undergraduates’mental health. In a 60-

minute online study (N= 162), over 50% experienced campus SH and other violence and/

or racial discrimination, with multi-victimization being related to anxiety and other mental

health outcomes. Cultural betrayal SH did not predict mental health when controlling for

between-group SH. Implications include the 2019 Critical-Interdisciplinary Sexual Violence

Research Summit’s comprehensive research agenda: Intersectional Approaches, Perpe-

tration, Communications, Beyond Policy, and Sexual Violence and Equity.

Keywords

campus sexual violence, title IX, cultural betrayal trauma theory, institutional courage,

Black women undergraduates

1

Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

2

Center for Institutional Courage, Palo Alto, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jennifer M. Gómez, Wayne State University Department of Psychology, Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute for

Child & Family Development, 71 East Ferry St Detroit, MI, USA.

Email: jennifer.gomez@wayne.edu

Title IX, Campus Sexual Harassment, Other Violence, and

Racial Discrimination

As violence perpetrated against members of universities, campus sexual violence is a

long-standing public health crisis (e.g., Fedina et al., 2018;Howard et al., 2018).

Enforced by the U.S. Department of Education’sOff‌ice for Civil Rights, Title IX (1972)

protects people from sex discrimination within educational programs and activities at

institutions that receive federal f‌inancial assistance (U.S. Department of Education,

2021b). Specif‌ically, Title IX states: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis

of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benef‌its of, or be subjected to

discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal f‌inancial

assistance.”(U.S. Department of Education, 2021b). Within the scope of Title IX, the

White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault was formed in

January 2014 (Obama, 2014), with the explicit goal of “[leading] an interagency effort

to address campus rape and sexual assault, including coordinating Federal enforce ment

efforts by executive departments and agencies and helping institutions meet their

obligations under Federal law”(p. 1). The U.S. Department of Education is currently at

a juncture of further specifying guidance on Title IX as it relates to campus sexual

violence (Gómez, 2021d;Howard et al., 2021;McDaniel & Gómez, 2021;U.S.

Department of Education, 2021a). Though research often examines contact sexual

violence (e.g., rape on college campuses; e.g., Gómez et al., 2015), so-called yellow

zone incidents, such as non-contact campus sexual harassment (SH), are relatively

common, though understudied, underreported, minimized, and potentially damaging

and traumatic to victims (Belknap & Sharma, 2014;Pinchevsky et al., 2019). Spe-

cif‌ically, almost 50% of students experience campus SH, with perpetrators putting

women at increased risk for victimization (Wood et al., 2021). Therefore, non-contact

campus SH, and not just contact campus sexual violence, needs to be specif‌ically

studied.

Additionally, campus SH occurs alongside other forms of violence (Rennison &

Addington, 2018), thus, examining campus SH in isolation provides information on

only a fraction of students’experiences. Crenshaw’s (1991) structural intersectionality

identif‌ies how Black women experience both structural racism and sexism, which then

manifests into direct harms, such as anti-Black racism and violence against under-

graduates (Blosser, 2020;Le et al., 2020). Therefore, understanding the impact of

campus SH against Black women undergraduates requires conjunctively examining

other forms of violence, such as physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, sex

traff‌icking, and police violence, and racial discrimination as well.

Cultural Betrayal Trauma Theory

With intersectionality (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991) as one of its bases, cultural betrayal

trauma theory (CBTT; e.g., Gómez, 2019e) is a Black feminist framework that in-

corporates the larger context of inequality, such as anti-Black racism, into the study of

Gómez 369