Dr. Nicole Bedera

The tricky thing is that you'd be hard pressed to find a university that's doing well.

And I'm just going to say that from the outset.

But there are spaces on campus that are safer or riskier.

Some of these things you can look at at the institution level, but a lot of them, it's more about where you're going to spend your time on a college campus.

The characteristics of unsafe spaces

are the ones that are male-dominated, competitive, and hierarchical, where there are power disparities between the people within them and that men are privileged above everyone else.

I think the first organization that comes to mind is a fraternity or a football team, and those are really good examples of places where we know that the violence perpetration rate is higher than other places on campus.

But it's also going to be places that have what sociologists call a glass escalator effect.

So these can be spaces where there are a lot of women present, but men dominate the top of the hierarchy.

So places like theater departments, music departments, anywhere that you do have those three characteristics, that there's that competitive component, that there is a hierarchy, and that men are at the top of that hierarchy.

One of the examples that I like to give is a marching band.

Because if you think of a band, it tends to be one of the spaces on campus where there's actually a mix of people of different genders, one of the few that isn't really gender segregated.

But if you look inside a band, the instruments have gender stereotypes and gender segregation within the different sections of the band.

It is competitive where there's a first chair and a last chair.

And there's a hierarchy related to not just your musical ability, but also who might be considered to be a section leader, who might be the best one, who is advanced into different high status roles that don't have anything to do with the music, but have everything to do with the organizations around the music, who's favored by faculty, things like that, who gets a solo, even if they're not first chair.

It's those types of characteristics that sociologists have known for a long time are related to high rates of sexual violence perpetration.

And those are the main things you want to look for when you're trying to think of, is this a place that's safe or not?

Or if you are within an organization already, how can we make our organization safer?

Really, you're asking, how can we make it less competitive?

How can we have fewer power disparities?