Date of Defense

4-20-2018

Date of Graduation

4-2018

Department

Gender and Women's Studies

First Advisor

Amber Mosley

Second Advisor

Felicia Crawford

Third Advisor

Angie Moe

Abstract

Sexual violence is a pervasive issue on college campuses across the U.S. In order to address this issue, the U.S. federal government has implemented certain acts and guidance to prevent violence and promote campus safety. One of the most controversial pieces of guidance is the responsible employee policy. In theory, this reporting system would allow students to have better access to victim support services and allow campuses to have more accurate data as to the reality of sexual violence happening on their campuses. In practice, however, this has not been the case for many individual institutional policies. Instead, many institutional employees have disagreed with and undermined the implementation of such policies. Although this policy should be taken with a critical eye, the overwhelming lack of support for it is detrimental to the policy’s full potential and institutional prevention work. This document explores six categories of barriers that prevent higher education employee support of the responsible employee policy itself and even the training and education surrounding it. After evaluation of data and literature on this topic, along with the use of Western Michigan University as a case study, this document concludes with recommendations on generating better employee buy-in to the policy.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Open Access

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