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Chapter 17 - Critical and Intersectional Understandings of Campus Sexual Assault as a Social Problem

from Part II - Problems Related to Crime and Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2018

A. Javier Treviño
Affiliation:
Wheaton College, Massachusetts
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Summary

Sexual violence on college and university campuses raises multidimensional issues for public health, public safety, criminal justice, and civil rights. This chapter will examine the factors that complicate both measuring and effectively addressing campus sexual assault as a social problem, by outlining the challenges presented by defining (1) the terms used to measure prevalence rates, (2) the extremely low rates at which instances of campus sexual violence are reported to authorities, (3) the particular aspects of college and university contexts that are specifically associated with sexual assault risks, and (4) the sociohistorical legacies of contestation that inform broader contemporary understandings of sexual violence at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social identity dynamics.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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