The most obvious answer to this question would be that the student has been actively intimidated by the faculty member, most probably with the threat of receiving a low grade or evaluation. This sort of scenario does occur: either sleep with me or fail the class. If the student is already worried about the difficulty of the class and her performance in it, this incentive could be strong. [Read more…]
Why Don’t Students Report Professors’ Sexual Harassment or Assault? (Part 2)
This post pairs with the post of the same date on my other blog, “The Immaculate Page.”
One reason of many that students don’t report professorial misconduct is that they don’t know much about policies in place at their institution that pertain to their situation. As noted in my blog post on language, the policy regarding “amorous relationships” between faculty or staff and students at my college, Davidson, is deeply buried in both tortuous wording and an unnecessarily complicated numbering / lettering system that borrows the worst practices from dense legal protocols. [Read more…]
Why Don’t Students Report Professors’ Sexual Harassment or Assault?
Student-on-student sexual assault has been much in the news lately, and one recurring theme has been its under-reporting. Blowing the whistle on a peer is scary for a number of reasons, including the fear of having to continue seeing the abuser on campus, the threat of retribution, and the possibility that the accused won’t be found culpable, leaving the person who reported the assault swinging in the wind—embarrassed and possibly vulnerable to bullying or repeat assault. [Read more…]
Sexual Harassment: A Spectrum
Faculty-student amorous entanglement is, to this day, prevalent on college and university campuses. Discuss the matter for five minutes with just about anybody who has any stake in campus culture, however, and you’ll see that what people consider to be “harassment” varies widely. In part, the definition of harassment traces back to the consent question (covered in the four previous posts above, from 9 Sept. to 13 Oct.). The hard-core view of what constitutes a professor’s harassment of a student would be any amorous relationship at all; that’s because of the power-differential between professors and students. How can a student be thought to “consent” to a sexual involvement, the reasoning goes, if the student lacks the power of a professor? In that light, any sexual relationship between a faculty member and a student, no matter how “consensual” or “mutual” it’s believed to be, is actually coercive. [Read more…]
