UC Santa Cruz

Campus sexual violence in the United States has been elevated as a matter of national concern over the past decade through student activism, Title IX legal regulation, and the #MeToo movement. This attention has mandated the creation of institutional structures for addressing sexual violence, but also highlighted the limitations of university responses and the ongoing pervasiveness of sexual violence and sexual harassment. This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of how student-survivors’ experiences shape and are shaped by institutional practices of remedy, support, and education at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

At the heart of this dissertation is a concern with world-making: how survivors navigate through their experiences of sexual violation on campus. This work is the result of five years of participatory ethnographic research at UCSC. Methodologically, it draws on interviews with survivors, qualitative surveys, policy analysis, and participant-observation as a CARE advocate and educator to study survivor narratives and university practices for addressing and preventing harm. Conceptually, this work extends feminist, medical, and legal anthropologies of “scripting” to understand how sexual violence is given meaning as a category of experience on campus and how survivors are guided into particular pathways for recovery and justice. To situate this inquiry, this study examines survivors’ experiences through various campus terrains: Title IX cases (Chapter One), institutional support offices (Interludes), discourses of trauma and consent (Chapter Two), storytelling and activism (Chapter Three), and teaching practices (Chapter Four). The chapters illuminate that dominant scripts can exclude survivors’ lived experiences and intersectional identities, which limits their abilities to seek accountability, healing, and support.

Ultimately, this dissertation upholds that supporting survivors and preventing violence are crucial to enhance equity and belonging on campus. It argues that we must broaden our capacities to hear survivors’ stories if we are to build safer, more supportive, and more equitable campuses. The pages that follow seek to make visible the everyday practices of care, survival, and intervention enacted by students, staff, and faculty. Yet, universities can do more; the Conclusion offers recommendations and best practices for moving “Beyond Compliance” to address and prevent sexual violence.