SEXUAL CITIZENS

A serious study of the causes of campus sexual assaults along with proposals for tackling this very real problem.

Hirsch (Sociomedical Sciences/Columbia Univ.; A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families, 2003, etc.) and Khan (Chair, Sociology/Columbia Univ.; Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School, 2011, etc.) draw on the findings of the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, a five-year research project of which Hirsch is co-director and chief investigator. In their academic analysis, these two scholars use a wide variety of specialized terminology, including “sexual projects,” “sexual citizenship,” and “sexual geographies,” concepts they explain at some length in the introduction. In a nutshell, the first concerns the reasons a person might seek sexual experiences, “citizenship” refers to a sense of right to sexual agency, and “geographies” to the social power of environments. As well as examining the causes of sexual assaults, the authors present numerous portraits of campus sexual experiences, consensual and nonconsensual, among Columbia undergraduates. These portraits are based on SHIFT’s extensive interviews with students, focus groups, and hours of observations, and they often include lengthy excerpts of the student’s remarks. In the concluding chapter, the authors offer ideas about improving sex education and creating campuses that support social cohesion and address issues of power, inequality, and mental health. They also advocate taxing the pornography and liquor industries in order to support funding for sex education, and they explore the economic consequences of assault. “If preventing sexual assault’s emotional and social harms is insufficient to justify more attention to prevention,” they write, “we can also point to sexual assault’s vast economic impact”—in 2017, experts estimated “the economic cost of rape” at more than $3 trillion. The authors assert that their intended readership is parents and young people heading off to college, but their presentation of SHIFT’s findings and their discussion of methodologies seem more appropriate for an academic journal.

A broad encapsulation of a significant sociological study that will likely overwhelm general readers but should interest fellow scholars.