 Hello and welcome. I'm Paula Lance. I'm the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs here at the Ford School of Public Policy and I'd like to welcome all of you here in our physical audience and those who have joined us online to our policy talks at Ford School event today and before we begin I'd like to acknowledge the Gilbert Omen and Martha Darling Health Policy Fund for its support of this event and other health related programming we do here at the Ford School. Today's policy talk is focused on a serious and invasive problem in society including on college campuses that of sexual assault. National statistics suggest that one out of five college students experiences some type of sexual assault or misconduct while in school and sexual assault remains a significantly under reported crime. Today, we're going to explore this issue in the context of our own campus, our own backyard. We've got a packed agenda for our time today and we have longer bios for the speakers in your program so you can refer to those but right now I'd like to briefly introduce our guests and our speakers for our session today. First, we have Professor Bill Axon, who's a sociologist and the former director of the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. He was the principal investigator on a groundbreaking critically important survey of students done here at the University of Michigan in 2015 about the extent of sexual violence on our campus. We also have Pamela Heatley with us today. She's an attorney with special expertise in Title IX including its provisions regarding sexual assault and misconduct in educational settings. She's the senior associate director of the University of Michigan's Office of Institutional Equity. We also have with us today Holly Ryder Milkovich, who was until very recently, three weeks ago, right, the director of SAIPAC, the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center on the University of Michigan's campus. Holly led that important organization for over six years before moving on very recently to a senior leadership position with Everfi Incorporated, which is an education technology firm. And then we also have with us today Emma Zorfus, who's a senior wrapping up her Bachelor of Arts degree in public policy here at the Ford School. Emma's been an active student leader around issues of sexual assault on our campus, and she's volunteered and worked with SAIPAC ever since she first arrived on campus almost four years ago. So please join me in welcoming our panelists. And also I'd like to introduce a couple of additional guests we're going to ask between when we hear from our panelists and we kick off our Q&A session. We have a couple of guests who are going to come up to the podium and just offer some some reflections and first will be Barbara Niece May, in front here, who's the executive director of SAIPHouse. SAIPHouse is of course one of the truly outstanding institutions in our own community. The staff and volunteers at SAIPHouse provide support, legal advocacy, emergency shelter, and much more to survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault. And also in honor of the University of Michigan celebrating its bicentennial this year, we're fortunate to have someone here with us today who can provide a brief history regarding the issue of sexual assault and misconduct policy on the University of Michigan campus. Professor Ann Evans-Lairmore, with us, is a professor emerita of geography and women's studies at the University of Michigan, and she was instrumental in getting the university to include sexual harassment, harassment as a cause for grievance, and it's grievance policy back in 1972. Is that right? So we'll hear just a little bit of history from Ann. So again, we're so grateful to all our guests and panelists who are with us today. And we want to hear from all of you as well. So some cards have been passed out and around 440 are some of our staff will start collecting cards with your questions on them to post to the panelists. And we have two Ford School MPP students, Afton Branch and Claire Taigman, down in front here who will facilitate our question and answer session. For those of you who are joining us online, you can tweet in your questions to hashtag policy talks, and we'd love to hear from you as well. So again, thank you all for coming. We have a packed session, lots to hear about and learn and discuss, and we'll start off with Professor Bill Axon. Thank you Paula. Sorry. We're gonna talk about an unpleasant topic for a little while, and I wanted to draw your attention to that fact before we start. First, precise description requires use of words regarding specific anatomy and actions. The precision is not in any way intended to be offensive. Second, many in the population have had adverse experiences. If you would like help, we have information on those services in the back of the room and a lot of experts in the room today. And last, and I don't think it's least at all, you'll see numbers that clearly demonstrate all of us are bystanders. And as a result, it can be pretty stressful to look at some of these numbers. I'm the data guy, but not the happy data guy. I'm gonna talk about two topics very quickly. One is the national context of measuring sexual violence, and the other is the 2015 University of Michigan campus climate survey on the topic of sexual misconduct. And I think it's important to talk about national measures a little bit because even though college students and surveys of college students drew a lot of attention to this topic, the United States government conducts national surveys of the entire population that measure sexual assault. There are three examples I want to bring to your attention. One of them is the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey. The second one is the National Center for Health Statistics National Survey of Family Growth. And the third is the CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. And all of these are important studies of the entire country population. I'll talk in a little bit more detail about the National Survey of Family Growth, both because we conduct this at the University of Michigan on behalf of the National Center for Health Statistics and because it's a very important source of data on the topic. There are three main aspects of the National Survey of Family Growth that I wanted to mention that make it an important resource for us. First, the National Survey of Family Growth measures lifetime histories of relationships, sexual experiences, and reproductive health. It's in that context that the National Survey of Family Growth, which is a face-to-face in-person interview, switches to audio-computer-assisted self-interviewing to assure maximum privacy for sensitive topics. This also has an FBI guarantee of confidentiality around responses in this survey in general, including A. Cassie. And finally, the National Survey of Family Growth uses responsive survey design to maximize representation of the entire variety of the United States population. What do we know from the National Survey of Family Growth? Two facts. We know a lot from the National Survey of Family Growth. There were two facts that I wanted to bring to your attention. The first is high-quality survey data on the entire U.S. population indicate that levels of sexual assault in the United States are high. 25 percent of American women report that they have ever been forced to have intercourse by ages 40 to 44. This is one in four, and this is not any form of sexual assault. This is forced to have intercourse. Second topic I wanted to bring to your attention out of national data is that those who attend college experience this at a lower rate than those of the same age who do not attend college. And the lower rates for those who have four more years of college are actually quite a bit lower, two-and-a-half to three times lower than people of the same age who don't go to college. Okay, now I want to switch to what we know about the University of Michigan campus from the 2015 survey. There are sort of three aspects of the methodology I wanted to comment on. One is we went to strong links to provide maximum confidentiality respondents. This involves using a web tool to give people privacy and giving their answers administered by a third party so the university has no direct information about the respondents themselves. It includes a special two-phase design to contact those who don't respond to email. Many respond to email, but not everyone, and it turns out that contacting them in a second way greatly improves representation. With these tools we achieved a 67 percent response rate for the campus climate survey, which is quite high for campus climate surveys. Okay, now the unpleasant findings. First key finding I'll describe is reporting any form of non-consensual sexual experience. This includes unwanted touching, kissling, and fondling, as well as unwanted penetration in the previous 12 months. 11.4 percent of University of Michigan students had this experience in the prior 12 months. To wrap your heads around that for a moment, there's something over 47,000 students. This means well over 4,700 had that experience in the prior 12 months. It was much higher for undergraduate females, 22.5 percent, somewhat lower for graduate females, 9.2 percent. It happens to males too, but at much lower rates, 6.8 percent of undergraduate males and 1.1 percent of graduate males. The most common circumstance the survey revealed was one that may surprise some of you. It is a circumstance, shorthand for it was verbal pressure. And I wanted to share the definition with you so that you could see what respondents saw when they were answering the survey. Continually verbally pressuring you after you said you didn't want to, this includes telling lies, threatening to end the relationship, threatening to spread rumors about you, showing displeasure, criticizing your sexuality or attractiveness, or getting angry but not using physical force. Intoxication was also a common reason, but this was the most common and interesting same in national data. The next key finding I want to point out is the rate of experiencing non-consensual penetration, oral, anal, or vaginal in the prior 12 months. 9.7 percent of female students on our campus, 12 percent of the female undergraduates in the prior 12 months, 4.3 percent of the female graduate students, and a little over 1 percent of the male students. We spent a good deal of effort investigating what types of students are at higher risk. This is a multivariate risk factor estimate of the relative risks of having this experience. Female students were at roughly 8 times higher risk than male students. Undergraduates at roughly 3 times higher risk than graduate students. Lesbian gay bisexual students at 2.5 times higher risk than heterosexual students. Fraternity and sorority members at 2.5 times higher risk than non-members. Underrepresented minorities at 2 times the rate of white students. Club sports teams members at 2 times the rate of those who are not members. And the last unpleasant fact I have for you from this survey may be one of the most unpleasant facts from this survey. 46 percent of those reporting sexual conduct told someone else, anyone else. That is 54 percent of those who reported these events in the survey also told us they had never told another living human being, not anyone. Of those who did tell someone, most told a friend or roommate, only 3.6 percent of those who had this experience in the previous 12 months told an official reporting resource of the university or the police or anybody in that capacity. Sorry, that was the unpleasant statistics. All of them are available online at this website. The full report is there. The university has made it publicly available since it first came out and you can look at all the results there. So I'm Pam Heatley and I work in the Office for Institutional Equity here at the university. And you heard one of the statistics that Bill presented to us, which is that only 3.6 percent of students who experienced the behaviors that he described within the past 12 months of when the survey was taken had told an official here at the university or told law enforcement. The Office for Institutional Equity does a variety of things here on campus but one of the things that we do is we investigate sexual assault reports. And so for me that's an incredibly concerning statistic and we work very hard to try to create a system where students do feel comfortable coming forward and bringing a report to us. And so that's part of what I'm going to talk about in my time. But one of the first things I want to focus on is a question that we are asked all of the time. Aren't these crimes, why aren't they reported to the police? Yes, much of the behavior that's brought to our office and reported to our office for investigation is a crime. And we encourage students to go to the police and report the behavior to the police and some do and some choose not to. And the opera verb there is choice. They choose not to. We give our students options and they make the choices that they feel are right for them in the moment. They can change their mind as time goes on but we respect their right to make these choices and I'll talk more about that in a moment. But you might say, well if we have law enforcement there, why is the university investigating this? Why do we have these two systems? And part of the reason has to do with, I was so glad to see our professor emeritus introduced who fought to have sexual harassment included in the university's policy. But part of the reason we do this is that we have civil rights laws in this country that make it unlawful to discriminate against individuals on the basis of gender. And one of them is Title IX. Most of you have probably heard that. Now if you're my age, the first thing you might think of when you hear of Title IX is gender equity and athletics. Because for about the first 40 years that Title IX was in existence, the focus of enforcement of the federal government was gender equity and athletics. However, Title IX has always said that it prohibits sex discrimination and universities have had policies prohibiting sex discrimination. And for probably the past two and a half or three decades, we've known that sex discrimination also includes sexual harassment and that the most severe form of sexual harassment is sexual assault. So we had policies covering sexual assault. But what was happening around the country is that although institutions had these policies and they were trying to address sexual assault, they were doing it using a system that was developed to address all forms of misconduct for the most part. Institutions did think of ways to try to make the system work better, maybe separating the parties during a hearing. But in 2011, the federal government through the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights gave us some guidance and said, here are some expectations we have for you as you're addressing sexual assault cases. This didn't come out of a vacuum from the Office for Civil Rights because at the same time there was a significant and now ongoing ground roots movement across the country where survivors were connecting about their experiences, some going through law enforcement, many going through internal administrative procedures at colleges and universities and saying, it was bad. It was awful. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. I felt judged. I didn't feel that I was treated fairly. I didn't feel there were resources and they had a lot to say. And this was a good thing. And fortunately, Office for Civil Rights was listening and we were listening too. In addition to Title IX, there's another law out there in the background operating and it's the Clery Act. Prior to 2013, the Clery Act never addressed how higher education or education in general addressed issues of sexual assault. But in 2013, the Violence Against Women Act was amended and in that reauthorization were amendments to the Clery Act that codified much of the advice that the Office for Civil Rights had been giving higher education about how they should handle sexual assault cases. So even if it weren't part of the university's values to address these issues, we can't under the law say we won't address sexual assault issues. So that is why we're here and addressing them. So our policies. We did have a policy in place in 2011 and we adopted a new policy in August 2011 that brought sexual assault reports over to the Office for Institutional Equity to be addressed. The process was in place for about four and a half years before we started a process of talking to our community to ask, how is this working? Can we do better? What are your thoughts about this? And Holly who's going to speak next was an integral part of that process of going out to the community and listening. I know at least one person in this audience was at one of those forums because I was there as well and listened to what was said. And as a result of that, this past July the university implemented its second version of its policy right here. I actually have to carry it with me because the name is kind of long. It's the University of Michigan Policies and Procedures on Student Sexual and Gender-Based Misconduct and other forms of interpersonal violence. We didn't intentionally make it that long to confuse people, but it is descriptive of what it covers. So what we did with a lot of the information that we had is we thought, can we have this policy and these procedures that really work towards increasing reporting? Making it more likely that we can push that 3.6% needle up and have people bring their concerns to the university so that we can address them. So a couple of things that we did. One is wherever possible we allow claimants to make choices about what happens with the information they share with us. Just because someone contacts the Office for Institutional Equity or their dean or another administrator to raise a concern about sexual assault does not automatically mean that it will be investigated by the Office for Institutional Equity. We will be told about it, but we will then discuss with the claimant and make sure that they're aware of their choices. I'll also say there are a few situations where we do have to move forward as an institution when we're concerned about the safety of the entire campus community or individuals within the campus community. Those situations are rare, but for the most part we want claimants to feel a sense of control in what can feel like a very uncontrollable situation. Another thing that we did, and we're quite progressed in this now because we started this in 2011, is we use an investigation model so that students aren't in a situation that they used to talk about in the past where they have a hearing model and they essentially have to prosecute their own case. They have to convince their witnesses to come and talk on their behalf. They have to ask the questions. With the process we have now, the university does that through the Office for Institutional Equity to try to remove as much of the burden as possible from individuals from coming forward and having the institution address their concerns. We use the preponderance of the evidence standard, which is what I was recommended by the federal government. My guess is we'll get a question about that, so I'll say that to talk about later. However, it's not an easy standard to meet, but it's the standard that's used in virtually all civil courts in this country, including for federal or state civil rights complaints that are brought in court, use the preponderance of the evidence standard. If you're in a criminal court you have a beyond the reasonable doubt, then there's one in the middle that's used for just very few types of situations. We make support available for both parties and the support offered by the university is very knowledgeable about our policies and our procedures so that they can answer students' questions as they're going forward and they can raise issues and make sure that the students are cared for through the process. And then this last one I think is tremendously important and it's something we continue to work on. And any of you, I encourage you, if you've been through an OIE process and you have comments on this, please share them with us. You don't have to do it in this public forum, you can call us, you can email us anonymously, send us a note. But that is that we try to be as transparent as we can. We recognize that our process makes complete sense to us because we work with it every day. We also recognize that for most people it'll be the one and only time they interact with it. So we try to be very open about what's happening as people are coming through our process. The other thing that we do is we're very open about the information we have before we reach a finding in a case. So for example, if I were to interview you as part of a case, I would write up a summary of what we discussed. It wouldn't be everything, it would be the things that were relevant to making a finding as to whether the policy was violated or not. And I would send it to you and I'd say, please look at this and make sure everything in there is correct, that I've included everything. If you think there's something I didn't include that you think I should, please let me know. We would ask you, are there witnesses you want us to interview, documentation you want us to review, and we will. We then interview everybody, then for both the claimant and the respondent, if they wish, we send them everything we have. The claimant statement, the respondent statement, all of the witnesses' statements, any other evidence we've reviewed. But we haven't made a finding yet and we share it with them and we say, please look at all of this and comment on it. Any comments that you have, we'll consider. If there's additional information you think we haven't looked at that we should look at, we'll look at it. The entire point being that by the time we get to the end of the case and we make a finding and the students see the written report, nothing about what we've looked at or assessed should be a surprise. The ultimate point being we want to be fair and we want people to feel fairly treated and that they were respected throughout the process. So then another thing that we do is we try to empower our claimants across campus regardless of whether they choose to come to OIE or not. And we do this in a variety of way. A couple that I want to highlight is that we've taken great care both in the policy that I showed you as well as materials that we produce to try to let people know when they're interacting with somebody in the university community who would have to share information with OIE, which again doesn't necessarily mean an investigation is going to ensue. Or if they're talking to somebody that they can speak with confidentially. And we've created some materials around this and even some signage. And one that I'll show you is this is a new sign that we're going to be introducing at Michigan. And RE stands for responsible employees. Responsible employees is what we call a faculty or a staff member who is obligated to contact the office for institutional equity because we house the Title IX coordinator. If they become aware that a student has disclosed sexual assault or intimate partner violence or stalking or gender based harassment, they have to share it with us. And so we've created a quick visual symbol so that our students can know just passing by. By the way, we recognize that not all of our students will necessarily be able to see this and we've accounted for that. So you might start seeing these around campus over the next couple of months. Another thing that we recognize is our students don't necessarily know what this means yet as well. But Holly's going to be talking about training and Emma's going to be talking about our efforts as well. And we're taking steps to make sure in the future our students will know what this means. The other thing that we've done is created informational materials. So one of them was in a basket out front and I don't know if you saw it. I think I have it right here but it might have slipped out. There it is. It's tiny. But it was a resource card that we created specifically for our faculty and staff members because you never know when someone might disclose an assault to you. And it's very hard to remember. Even if you've come to a session, what are the resources that the university has? What am I supposed to tell the student? Where are the places they can go to talk to people confidentially? It's hard to know what to do. And so we created this card. It's a pretty small print but still legible. And it very quickly on this half tells the faculty or staff member what they're supposed to do. This half is to give to the student that says where you can go confidentially, where you can go to report to police, to the university, and then resources that are available for support as well. And then another document that we have that every person who comes forward to the university with a concern is in our community matters for sure. I don't have a stack of these out front but if you'd like one or you'd like to go through it, you can go online to the university's main webpage and just type our community matters. And this brochure will come up. And it has a tremendous amount of helpful information. Very quick information on the back and then other useful information inside. Questions that might prevent people from coming forward. Things like what about my financial aid if I have to drop out of my classes for a little while? What about, what if I'm on a visa? What do I do? Quick information either with those answers or where people can go to get those answers. Again, hopefully with this information people will feel more comfortable coming forward to the university. And I'll also say, oh I also want to give credit to our campus partners. We work closely with SAPAT. We work closely with the Office of the General Counsel, with Human Resources. And I know I'm leading people out but all around campus we work together to produce DPSS, to produce materials like these. And again, if you have ideas, we would love to hear them. So, thank you very much. I'm now going to turn it over to my colleague, Holly Ryder Milkovich, who's going to focus on prevention and education efforts. I am so honored to be here. I have to say I'm a confessed policy wonk. I absolutely love policy. And so when I had the opportunity to speak at the Ford School, I felt a little star-struck, I'll have to tell you. So this is really an honor for me. I am the former director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center. My new role at EverFi allows me to add to my very campus-based specific analysis of this work, a national lend at EverFi. We work with our 1,300 schools and reach 1.3 million students. And so I hope to really blend both my campus-based perspective with that sort of national birth. I'm also really excited that I'm following up both data on this issue and also a lot of information about what we're doing as an institution to meet with or exceed our federal regulations as it relates to federal responsibilities as it relates to both regulation and legislation. Oftentimes, when I'm talking about this issue on campus, there is a false dichotomy that is struck that we can either focus on prevention or we can focus on compliance. And I really encourage us as a community and us nationally to stop dividing those two pieces that we can both be doing excellent work in compliance and excellent work in prevention. And in fact, I would argue that the best way for us to achieve excellent compliance is to do our very best work in prevention. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about today, University of Michigan as a case study for how you build that excellent comprehensive prevention approach. And I'm naming this as a decentralized environment with the recognition that there may be some who are watching, who come from a small school, come from a community college. There are specific challenges that are unique to large institutions like the University of Michigan that has 21 schools and colleges that has over 47,000 students. And yet there are also lessons that every school and college can take away. Okay, so I want for us to think about prevention as a process. So when we think about prevention, oftentimes the first thing that folks think of is what are we delivering to our students, the programming aspect? What are we teaching them? Are we telling them about consent? Are we sharing information about the laws? This important programming piece, it can be the first part of the conversation and sometimes the last part of that conversation. I'd like for us to look at this from a wider lens. We also need to think, yay, about policy. Unfortunately, a neglected area for many schools and colleges who are looking at this issue. But policies undergird the programming that we're doing. It ensures that the work that we are doing with all of our populations on campus around education and prevention have a strong foundation. We also need to make sure that there's critical processes and institutionalization for this work. Those critical processes help us ask questions like how do we measure the effectiveness of the work that we're doing on our campus? How do we know whether or not we're moving the needle on this issue? Who is responsible ultimately for driving and directing our sexual misconduct prevention efforts on campus? And institutionalization. How are we investing in this work as an institution? How many full-time prevention educators do we have in place? How often is our president speaking out on these issues? Certainly an effort like this at the Ford School speaks well to the University of Michigan's institutionalization. But there are other pieces that speak to the University of Michigan's institutionalization of their commitment to this work. I've already mentioned that President Schlissel speaks often and with great eloquence on his commitment to this issue. And that is a courageous leadership on his part, has really supported and helped other college presidents move forward. And it also undergirds what has been a long tradition at the University of Michigan, which is strong funding and support. So the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center has been in place at Michigan for 30 years now. We just celebrated our 30th anniversary. And Emma's going to talk a little bit, I hope, about some of the ways in which we marked that on campus. In those 30 years, we've had core institutional funding and this is really important. And I want to emphasize this for those schools and colleges that may be tuning in who are really seeking to place their programs on solid foundation. Because of the institutional support that we've received for over 30 years on campus, we've been able to, over those 30 years, really develop core practices, been able to build on those core practices, and develop a network of relationships across the board. It's a long-term process and it's not able to happen unless there is a solid foundation. When you have programs that prop up and fall based on funding that may or may not be available in the next five years, it is hard to gain that traction and that's a benefit that we've had on this campus. Okay, so having said that, where we are now, which I'll talk about in a few minutes, has a history from where we came from. So in 2010, what we did as an organization at the Sexual Assault Prevention Awareness Center is take a pause and really do a deep dive and look at the work that we were doing. At that point we were 25, almost 25 years into our history and it was time to look at whether or not we were really adopting and implementing the best practices possible. And so we took that hard look at our work. And this is what we identified. We identified that the best research at the time and the information was scant, agreed. But of that best information, what we identified was that it was important to reach small audiences. You wanted to reach those audiences multiple times with information that complimented and built upon that work. That it was important to promote healthy behavior and healthy sexuality and that by doing so we would increase the positive behavior in our campus and decrease the negative behavior on our campus. We also knew that it was really important that the work be research focused, that it be experiential, that folks had an opportunity to learn skills as a part of the work that we were doing and that we approach students in different ways because of course as we know students learn in different ways and that it be informed by evidence and research and that we ask that hard question how do you know if the work you're doing has impact so that we could change it if that was not the case. So this is what we learned was the best approach that we might take. And we also knew that we had some growing to do because at the time we had around 150 person plus audiences. They were delivered information. The University of Michigan was one of the leaders in requiring all incoming students to receive sexual violence prevention education but we were giving it to them in one dose or if we were providing other information the first kind of information that we gave students didn't necessarily equate to the second piece. They didn't build on each other. It's not like pop beads. You can't set two things next to each other and have them automatically make sense and unfortunately at the University of Michigan ours didn't at the time. We were really focused on raising awareness and discussing the consequences of sexual violence and I'll say in our defense that that was the approach that nearly every single school and college in the country was taking even though the research at the time said that it was not effective. Our method was didactic and consequence based so we were really about sort of talking at students rather than engaging them. We were not focused on skills building and we were focused on knowledge acquisition and even that unfortunately we weren't necessarily measuring inconsistent ways and we didn't have a strong basis for evidence that was guiding the work that we were doing and so even though we did have that strong institutionalization we had some room to go and so this is what we embarked upon. So we started by creating a program called Relationship Remix and I'm really delighted that the current coordinator of Relationship Remix is in the audience and I'm going to be talking a lot about her work and that of some of our peer educators who have spent their careers here at Michigan delivering this so it's an honor to talk about the work that you do. So we crafted this mission. So what we decided to do was really take that dive, be the leaders institutionally and focus on healthy relationship skills building to reduce gender based violence and this is how our evidence identified that we would go about it to do in the best way possible that we would ask for students to think about decision making from their own value system so that we could really incorporate many students different kinds of perspectives and experiences. We weren't saying what was best for any one person but that each person had the chance to define what was best for them and that when they knew what those values were that they would demonstrate those values in the ways in which they interacted with each other that they would know what a healthy relationship looked like be able to communicate that to others through consent along with other really important relationship skills that are skills that are important for all successful adults we would have them develop sexual health skills because what we knew from our emerging information about our student body is that many students coming out of Michigan schools did not have any healthy sexuality education and so this was their first opportunity to receive that and we would inform them about campus resources and so this is where we are five years later Katrina Dowd who's in the audience actually created this beautiful infographic and after five years we now are at 87% for our first year attendance up from 67% in that first year we delivered in small workshops to incoming first year students a skill based program that reaches over 5,396 students which is extraordinary reach and that happens in 162 workshops so that tells you the kind of commitment that our students bring to this work that we support as a part of our institutionalization effort I once calculated this and this is almost 5,000 hours of peer education work that is devoted each semester by our students we have a really robust program of evaluation and assessment we ask students in pre and post tests six month and 12 month follow up so that we are rigorously holding ourselves accountable to making sure that the work that we're doing has impact and that we understand when that impact falls off and that is all important information to help us make choices going forward this also reflects the kind of cross institutional collaboration that is required for a universal education approach like we have here for a relationship remix so it's not just the sexual assault prevention awareness center who has responsibility and a charge to address sexual misconduct we also work collaboratively in this one program with residents education we also work with our Wolverine wellness team that addresses healthy sexuality and it's one part of a four dose series for our incoming students and so you can see here what that incoming series looks like on the top line you see what we're doing for our incoming first year undergraduate students and transfer students and you can see where we have room to go for our graduate and our professional students they currently are receiving the online course that is developed specifically for graduate and professional students so it's appropriate as an audience and then other students receive information graduate students receive additional kinds of training in less consistent and less formal ways I think that University of Michigan I don't think I know actually that the University of Michigan is joined by every other school and college in the country and not yet having the same kind of rigor for their graduate and professional students as they do for their undergraduate students it is my hope that we will take that you will take and I as a proud alum will watch you take the leadership effort to create more programming okay so I'm going to skip through my favorite section which is the socio-ecological model very briefly this is a model that demonstrates why it's so important that we look at this work not only at the individual level where again some of our programs start and end but how individuals interact with each other what peer influence has how as a community we can address these issues and what the societal focus is schools and colleges should be adapting this socio-ecological model and looking at the ways in which their campuses are intervening and providing interventions and educational efforts and other kinds of efforts across the entire spectrum so these are a few examples of the way the University of Michigan does that and there's a full selection of those examples in the annual security report which you can find at dpss.umich.edu and so last but not least I placed this slide in here and my now colleague Emma said why do you have a sunset this is not a sunset this is a sunrise and it's really a reminder for us that we're in this moment of transition and there is a lot of anxiety about what is going to happen with all of the tremendous progress that has been made with a champion in the White House in the past eight years and I would encourage for us to look at the ways in which schools and colleges have put these efforts in place and really institutionalize them and for us to not allow for the progress that we've made over the last eight years to slip or to stall that we all have a role to play in pushing forward the next horizon of sexual violence prevention so that all students have a safe living learning environment where they have an equal opportunity to grow Hi everyone my name is Emma I'm a senior at the Ford School and I'm also a SAIPAC volunteer since my freshman year here and an employee of SAIPAC since my sophomore year and my current role is co-coordinator for one of the three student volunteer groups at SAIPAC so SAIPAC's comprehensive prevention plan encompasses primary, secondary and tertiary prevention and each of the three volunteer groups focuses on one of those modes of prevention so primary prevention focuses on education on sexual assault sexual harassment, stalking, intimate partner violence as well as healthy relationships so primary prevention's goal is to provide education before sexual assault has the chance to occur so that everyone on our campus knows about it and knows the harms of it and someday in the future it won't be a problem anymore so secondary prevention is led by the bystander intervention and community engagement program which I am one of the co-coords for so secondary prevention acknowledges that despite very strong primary prevention efforts on our campus sexual violence remains a really significant and pervasive issue so with BICE we empower communities with the tools and skills to prevent harm that at the moment that it may be happening and the bulk of our work are workshops with other communities on campus as well as some awareness and visibility events the third mode of prevention is tertiary which is led by the networking, publicity and activism program so tertiary prevention acknowledges that despite very strong primary and secondary prevention efforts sexual assault has happened on our campus there are survivors on our campus so tertiary prevention aims to provide safe and supportive environments for survivors as well as to promote healing to minimize the long term effects of trauma from sexual violence and to promote accountability for perpetrators so a lot of the work that the MPs have done for the event such as Speak Out which is a public forum for survivors so bystander intervention community engagement is the program that I work for at Saipak we have 60 student volunteers which is the biggest it has ever been and we work to empower individuals with bystander intervention training so that they can take an active role in making their community safer and in translation the larger campus community safer we also have had a goal of mainstream conversation of surrounding sexual assault and this can include groups of students of color, groups of students with different sexual identities and any other factor that might make them feel left out of the mainstream conversation so this is a list of some of the communities that we're working with this year and a huge bulk of our work with these communities are dialogue based community workshops which include a brief overview of the data that Bill discussed earlier and then we move into bystander intervention strategies and scenarios and this part is tailored very specifically for each organization that we work for bystander intervention and how people will feel comfortable and safe and intervening really is dependent on their social identity so how bystander intervention will look for a given group will be different from all knowledge because we're absolutely not we may not be a member of that community so we're not experts in that community so it's a really a mutual learning experience for both SAIPAC volunteers and the group that we're working with and we strategize with that other groups leaders to talk about what they see as problems what their goals are and what they hope to get out of a workshop with SAIPAC we're working to put on a panel focused on gender discrimination and bias in the STEM fields we're working to engage the engineering school and reach students who might not ordinarily come to other SAIPAC events on central campus we also host visibility and awareness events this past November we hosted Better Bystander Month which aims to engage the larger campus community in a conversation a positive and empowering conversation but one thing that we're currently working on is how to reach upperclassmen so as Holly discussed we have leading programming for incoming freshmen Haven before you even step on campus relationship remix in the first couple weeks of freshman year and change it up just a couple months into freshman year but our experiences and our perceptions around these issues change really dramatically over our four years here I know that I sat through and I've led that workshop for three years and I'm involved in the planning process and the content development so these issues are not a one time conversation and they grow and change with us during our four years here so we're working on new ways that we can reach students later on in their careers at U of M which does come with some more difficulties because they no longer live in the same place in residential halls but many people are involved in at least one community on campus whether that be Greek life or an academic org or a multicultural org or an interest or hobby organization so our new initiative hones in on that community membership as a way to reach students later on in their careers here so the central student government initiative requires that each student organization requesting more than a thousand of CSG funds sends at least two of their leaders to a bystander intervention workshop and community engagement program as well as Wolverine Wellness so this is a pilot program the very first year we're hosting eight workshops and each workshop has about 40 participants and with two leaders from each org that means about 20 different organizations in the room which means we're reaching a huge range of communities that we've never worked with before and that does come with some caveats because those participants didn't exactly volunteer to be there because they have to be and that sometimes means that they're less engaged and they ultimately might get less out of the workshop but in the same vein we're reaching people who we probably wouldn't have reached otherwise our other work is with organizations who are requesting a workshop with us who are proactively trying to educate their members so if we only worked with them we'd only be talking to the people who want to talk about it so there are drawbacks in this workshop but we're really excited to see where this pilot program goes in the next few years we've also been expanding our work to talk about other issues besides sexual violence we experienced a really large increase in the number of workshops requested that many of them asking to focus on racial discrimination and injustice and this came in the wake of several race-based and hateful incidents on campus so the program should do something larger, more community-based and something that could be a learning experience for other people at the university so we hosted a student panel titled Racism and Safety at Michigan which featured minority student leaders on campus discussing the current racial climate on campus, safety as well as effective bystander intervention strategies and what they want to see from their allies on campus about the connection between sexual violence and other forms of violence sexism, racism, xenophobia, et cetera they all happen in the same space and they're interconnected so it makes sense to talk about them all together so we've also been working to expand our work past U of M and through the state so this past April we hosted the activating our campus conference for the very first time it was an unprecedented gathering of anti-violence activists across Michigan we had over 100 students in attendance this was an idea that originally started in the peer educator program at SAIPAC and eventually became to be a project throughout the three volunteer groups throughout this day we shared the histories of our programs as well as our plans for the future and networked with each other on how to continue to stay in touch our keynote speaker was an amazing SAIPAC alum who had a wide and deep in the scope of our knowledge surrounding sexual violence issues we also had several students student leaders from other organizations at U of M attend so that they too could be exposed to this information and bring it back to their organization so I could probably talk about this for hours but that's all I have for today thank you so much Emma thank you that was terrific and thanks to all of our panelists Barbara and Lee Smay who is the executive director of SAIPHouse thank you very much for this opportunity and I would like to acknowledge one of our retired board members Kathleen Donahoe is in the audience so thank you for your service at SAIPHouse Center we appreciate it so just to give you a little bit more information about SAIPHouse SAIPHouse is an organization right here in our community that supports over 5000 survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence every year and we have several programs and people are often surprised to hear that number they start to say oh well are you sure that's just Washtenaw County while we do have some reciprocity throughout the state and throughout the country it's less than one percent so yes that really is Washtenaw County and we do see students we're also in a very unique position here in this community because we serve five institutions of higher learning in this country to be nestled in this community and then also to have others that are nearby such as Michigan State University and Wayne State University so I was especially delighted to have been invited to offer some remarks so I was making notes and then I quickly prioritized so I'm looking for my numbers with my progressive lenses so excuse me so one thing I want to share I've had an over 20 year history over 20 years ago actually in another state and I remember watching the hunting ground and soon after that reading the book Missoula and still being surprised I didn't think I could be surprised anymore in this work and I was totally shocked and I'm still totally shocked by how things continue to happen on college campuses now I'm fortunate to be married to somebody who listens to what's going on on college campuses in relation to sports but what has shifted in the last several years is the level of accountability that the sport casters and people in an alumni are having for the universities they attended to hold people accountable and that is not different for the University of Michigan as an example I'm the program committee chair Ann Arbor Rotary which for some of you may not know is one of the biggest Rotaries in the world and we meet at the Michigan Union and some of my older gentlemen on my committee said we've been hearing about sexual assault on campus and we want a program on that and so quite fortunately Sue Snyder and Holly agreed to present with me on this issue right here at the Ann Arbor Rotary people care about this topic and they want things to happen progressive on this topic I too love policy I was very sorry Holly that you could not continue with the ecological approach because that is very important but I won't continue to bore you or even try to find your slide to take a reprise on that the other part of that though is that it's not the same at other universities some people think this happens everywhere and it absolutely does with the people at the University of Michigan is very different than the other universities and the perspectives and the beliefs now if I were to sit with all the university presidents that I interact with of the university I interact with and ask them if they thought sexual assault and domestic violence were wrong they would all raise their hand but the extent to which they feel as though that they need to be responding to the survivors and preventing what's happening on campus varies greatly and so that's something one thing also is that I was impressed with that I have always thought has been missing in the dialogue and I didn't realize them until your presentation is the intersection of oppression on these issues and paying attention to those that's something that we do at Safehouse Center quite actively and feel strongly about and believe that that's key in addressing these issues but in closing one thing I want to share that happens is that as policy is made we're fortunate to have the intended results but we must be very careful about the unintended results and paying attention to those and hearing from people who are affected by them Paula thank you for inviting me this afternoon and I'll be around for questions later thank you Thank you Barbara I'd like to now invite our panelists to come up and get settled at the table but while they're getting ready we want to come and give us a little bit of historical perspective and then we're moving we're trying to get into the Q&A so we'll get there pretty quickly for those of you who are with us online again if you have a question you want to get into the dialogue or just we can present them to the panelists afterwards as well please do that by tweeting at hashtag policy talks Well thank you very much for allowing me to be part of this program and I'm Ann Evans Laramore I'm Professor Emerita of Geography and Women's Studies and I would like to share some UM history with you at the University of Michigan the very first attention to sexual misconduct was when in 1972-73 the Rackham School of Graduate Studies created its very first grievance policy and included the term sexual harassment as a cause for grievance I initiated this inclusion supported by Associate Dean Alfred Sussman and Dean Donald Stokes and there have always been sympathetic men in this effort of course this would not have been possible without a context of misconduct then I was the first woman ever elected to the Rackham Board of Governors in 1971 so there was when this misconduct happened there was a woman there during my time on the board I was also able to help the Women's Studies program get established since then and I look around and I think some of you may not have been even alive in 1971-72 but since then two separate UM campaigns have addressed personal violence on this campus the first had as its slogan tell someone the second and recent one had as its slogan expect, respect and President Mary Sue Coleman was very much associated with that since 1972-73 the University of Michigan has become a smoke free campus but not without a national cultural campaign to turn American society from one that welcomed cigarette smoking to one that does not tolerate it now American University need to lead a national campaign against sexual assault a male paradigm a male world view needs to be flipped to banish sexual assault on campuses it needs to be a collaborative multi-year effort by universities and colleges across the country it needs to change American society and from what the panelists have said it can start here with this panel discussion thank you so we're going to be reading the questions my name is Claire Taigman I'm a senior in the BA program here at the Public Policy School and I'm a volunteer with SAPAC's Pre-Education Program and I actually run SAPAC's peer-led support group I'm Afton Branch I'm an MPP student here at the Ford School and I'm the co-chair of the Women and Gender and Public Policy Student Group thank you for your remarks today and we're excited to get started with the questions so the first question is from Twitter and the person asks has the investigation model for sexual misconduct improved the process how was improvement measured for example have students reported positive or different experiences since adopting this model so that's a great question and I'm going to invite the other panelists to weigh in on this as well it's hard to say because we've had the model now for a few years but I think we're only now just getting to the point where it's been in place long enough to begin asking the hard questions that Holly was talking about which is is this making a difference one measure that we do have that's meaningful is that the year over year with one blip the number of reports coming through where people are coming forward and requesting contacting the office for institutional equity sometimes requesting an investigation sometimes not keeps increasing so that's a good sign whether that answers that question or not I don't know because of course we have so many different efforts going on on campus so it's not exactly a direct answer but a beginning to an answer of a great question so lots of campuses adopt lots of different kinds of models all campuses are guided by the office for civil rights to have an investigative model but some campuses also pair that with a hearing approach our experience here at the University of Michigan has been that students have been more interested and more willing to participate in our process because they know that they're not going to be in a room where there is a person whom they have told the institution has harmed them where they may be in a room where somebody has accused them of committing harm so I think that there are some important protections that are available to students in an investigative model I'll also note that we've had many students identify that having the University take on that awesome burden of investigating the harm that they have reported has happened to them has been a real load off of their shoulders and one of the reasons why they were ever interested in participating in the University process and I also think that there is room for improvement in all processes certainly students continue to experience harm we there is a body of research that talks about the ways that students are can also experience harm through institutional processes in general I don't think that the University of Michigan is immune from that though I do know that we put a lot of effort into trying to reduce those harms you know but I think it would be disingenuous to say that that is not sometimes an outcome for some students so the next question is from the audience there are a couple people who are sort of wondering if you could expand on why certain communities at Michigan such as underrepresented minorities LGBT students experience sexual violence at higher rates than other students yeah so I'll start a response that is definitely not an answer and the reason is because our team was responsible for documenting those differences not not at all I was going to say either charged with or probably capable of deducing why they exist I will inform the answer by telling you that in at least two of those cases underrepresented minorities and LGBT identifying individuals there is data from outside this university from other universities and from the population at large that show the same pattern so as with Ann's comments were great I do think a big part of this issue is a general social issue in the United States of America and those differences I suspect are also a general social issue in the United States of America but I don't have the answer I welcome anybody else who may I don't have the entire answer for sure one thing that I'd like to add is the role that alcohol can play as Bill said like the number one circumstance that sexual assault was under was verbal pressure and the second or very high up reason was substance consumption of substance consumption alcohol was the number one tool so alcohol is by no means the reason that sexual assault happens in communities facilitated so communities that partake in drinking can be at a higher risk for sexual assault I should comment that verbal pressure and intoxication often both happened and so it's not as though it was one or the other they were both very common reasons and they often co-occur all right so this question is from a concerned father whose daughter has been sexually assaulted and in his opinion he views this as a men's problem not a women's problem he asks what can be done to change the callous sense of entitlement and disrespect for women I see across poor many young men on campus I think this is you know I think this is such an important question and one of the reasons why as an institution we switched to really focus on real healthy relationships and promoting positive behaviors and positive pro-social norms here at the institution as the bedrock of the prevention work that we're doing I think that our work is just a part of the story students are deeply encultured in what can be a misogynist sexist culture by the time they reach our campus they're you know not sort of born a new out of a bubble of misogynism and so it's a tough uphill battle and the way in which parents and anyone who has a young person in their life can really support this work is to start talking early about their expectations that those young people will treat all persons with respect to start those conversations at a much earlier age by the time students reach college campus they really need to start those conversations much much earlier yeah I'd just like to add that one main component of the dialogue based workshops that we do is co-facilitators which means that we work with the community to you know find people who are able to connect with their community members and you know present the information from a more peer to peer level and that helping present the information and showing how harmful these things can be so the information is coming from within and can be more more effective in working with communities that may feel entitled like that I wanted to comment because I thought Ann also made a great point that there's a big part of this that is a men's issue it's not obviously it's a both men and women's issue and all the men I have two sons and two daughters and this issue has really heightened my awareness of the sons and all the work we need to do with them and I thought Holly comments about starting earlier very true the data also clear these incidents start at a very young age and I think the peer to peer comment was also super important I was just going to add something similar to this online Holly's right we need to start educating sooner we can change culture through what we do here on a college campus because the students that we educate go on to have families and raise their children but we can do it much faster if you work with your school boards about what kind of education is being provided in your school and of course individual conversations you have with your children so I think this next question sort of goes is about harmful behaviors and attitudes and someone was wondering what resources are available to come to combat those harmful behaviors and attitudes after a perpetrator has been through the legal process or maybe even if they haven't been through the legal process so my understanding is correctly for the the respondent to help work with the respondent so Holly might actually have a better response to this than I do we do have a process here at the institution where our sanctioning model focuses on the student holistically there are some instances when the appropriate sanction is removal from the university community if that person ever reenters however our sanctioning boards think very thoughtfully about what type of education to wrap around that reentry I don't think we have one single response respondent but it's a thoughtful process because I will tell you in the eyes of the law and I think in the eyes of our institutional values what you're supposed to do in your response is to take action that's reasonably calculated to prevent a recurrence so I like this question because it's thoughtful and that's why our response in every instance where we have someone who's found responsible for violating our policy is to take an action that's reasonably calculated to stop so that can be a variety of things but it's very individual to the particular act and actor at issue I guess I would just add that this is a place where there's a lot more work that is needed we as a nation don't have a good body of information that helps us understand what specific kind of efforts are most likely to change the education field in general has asked until very recently I'm really encouraged by the fact that the Department of Justice has actually sponsored a number of different studies that is looking specifically at this issue and I think it'll be really helpful when their work comes out but we're a few years out from that I think that one of the places that we can look is to look to other professions who have done work in what I would say is tertiary prevention which is seeking to prevent someone who has committed harm from committing that harm again there are other bodies of work that as an education community we can look to on this issue certainly persons who are working with juveniles who have committed harm and have been processed through the criminal justice system this is one place that we can look as a field for some work that is happening but I think this is a place where we need a lot more work done one of the things that we're pretty clear on is that even if you expel a student all you've done is actually say that they can't come on to university campus they can't enroll in our programs we don't have any way of saying you can't be involved in our student communities you can't be in our environment creating the best citizens and young persons that we possibly can to be these global citizens of the world and if that's the case then I think that we do have a responsibility to put effort into finding ways that individuals who experience harm if possible can reenter our community can be a positive proactive force for change and to have a transition and a better focus for their lives going forward thank you so we have one last question thanks to everyone who submitted questions so how might masters or doctoral students design or co-design these type of prevention services a lot of the sessions you talked about were for undergrads and so a lot of us want to know how should we tailor this to our group we the bystander intervention and community engagement program has recently started working with graduate students our group is largely undergraduate students so I understand how that connection wasn't always made but yeah we're willing and open to tailoring every part of our offerings for graduate students and have been working with a few select small groups including the Latina and Latina Psychological Student Association and the Biological Anthropology graduate students please join me now in thanking our panelists for their wonderful remarks and insights today.