Campus Sexual Assault: College Women Respond is a concise and coherent book on identity and identity management, following their reported sexual assaults at their places of study. Several concepts are presented throughout the publication warrant studying in greater detail and depth, not necessarily in isolation.

Overall, intelligently written and planned, well researched and points to several areas for future research. This book can be used as a guide and tool for designing similar research.

Dr. Germaine’s research focuses on the actual responses of university women following their experiences of sexual assault in the ivory tower. As opposed to the often hypothesised and institutionally prescribed behavioural responses i.e what is the ‘correct’ response a target of sexual violence should give. What should they say, and do. (I am careful here not to use the words victim and/or survivor, this is owing to research methods employed and results that are presented in the book.

I will return to this briefly further in the review.

The findings are presented in vignettes which make the material manageable for the reader. The topics are covered from the perspective of agency.

It is at core a book on identity management.

How should they behave? How do they behave? Technically this touches slightly on the area of victimology. Although this is not really what the book focuses on and in all honesty this would detract attention from the purpose of the book as presented by the author. As the author states this is opposed to presenting a set of behaviours aimed with dealing with the aftermath of sexual violence. She aims to and does in fact coherently present the legitimate reactions of women, as well as their rationale to sexual assault including acquaintance rape on campus, as described by white middle class undergraduate university women. The research is unique in this way.

The book has a lot of merits.

One of these is the author’s central tenet briefly addressed at the beginning which is the notion of ‘scholarship as advocacy’. She admits that her sample is biased, as not only are they based on self-reports but the demographic population is focused on male university students who have offended against middle class women. Whether their socioeconomic strata (i.e class) was a self-report or determined by the researcher is unclear.

The women were assaulted and betrayed by and large by their social support networks, where they were attacked at their chosen place of study, and residence. Places that ordinarily might have been designated as ‘safe’. A wide range of territory has been covered in this book, and it has been presented one at a time in a digestible format for the reader. It could be argued that the findings are within the confines of American college life; one can strongly purport that whilst the events and investigations are based in US educational settings, the main concepts and research methodology (which is tailored to collecting sensitive information) can be extrapolated and applied to European counterparts. For conceptual purposes one could say that the British equivalent is so-called ‘lad culture’ is on a par with American fraternity rape cultures. This is perhaps creating a scapegoat, but it attempts to examine the issue from an institutional standpoint. So in this sense readers from other countries will be able to relate to the material covered. Again, Lauren G. Germaine touches on an important dimension of sexual violence and it’s institutionalisation, she has examined this from an organisational perspective and how this is propagated through the institutional sociocultural infrastructure.

She addresses what is essentially presented as an institutional and organisational problem, and she explicitly mentions that this is ultimately rooted and embedded throughout the organisational ethos in the form of ‘rape culture’, a campus culture fraught with sexual violence, along with a problematic and skewed perception of female sexuality.

Contentious definitional issues are addressed from a legal perspective including prevailing attitudes and ideas regarding what exactly it is that constitutes rape, in the words of the author ‘narrow definitions of rape’, and this encompasses prevailing misperceptions and who the perpetrators are.

This is one of the unique features of the book, but it is not the only one.

There were several novel aspects in this book, not including the research methodology employed. The perspectives from which the subject of sexual violence was covered, the research design and the thoughtful precautions taken to ensure integrity in identity protection of the twenty-six women that were interviewed.

One of the controversial traps that must be averted is the granting of special status to ‘victims’, as far as romanticising the ‘survivor’ is concerned. They do not posses significant insight about life, or suffering because of their ordeal. Nor are they exempt from human flaws. This is addressed in the book briefly when the author touches on the problematic etymology of the term ‘victim’, or victima meaning ‘the sacrificed ones’, and that of the interplay with the ‘perfect victim icon’. In a sense she briefly enters the territory of victimology.

There appears to be an overall and implicit romantic notion that trauma and suffering confer insight on the ‘victim’ about life, wisdom even. This is not the book’s message and it is my own bias, to borrow a quote from Slavoj Zizek ‘…there is no virtue in suffering this perhaps, is the most depressing lesson of horror and suffering: there is nothing to be learned from it.’

 

© 2017 Alexandra Moraitis

 

Alexandra Moraitis is a DPSI (English Law) interpreting and translating candidate with the CIOL. She has a degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from The University of Durham.