Asking the Hard Questions: Researching Campus Sexual Assault

Content note: This episode includes a discussion of sexual assault and gender-based violence. It also contains some explicit language.

How do you study something as sensitive as sexual assault, and do it ethically? In Episode 23, Stacey and William talk with Dr. Alison Cares, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida who researches gender-based violence on college campuses. Alison explains how she recruits survivors through surveys, flyers and Reddit threads. She describes how informed consent and empowerment models protect participants, and why IRBs and grant reviewers sometimes underestimate how resilient survivors are. She also explains why campus climate surveys can produce very different numbers, like Cornell’s widely reported 35%, depending on how assault is defined and over what period. The conversation then turns to prevention: what bystander intervention can and can’t do, why community-level change matters, and why teaching consent has to start early.

Mentioned in this episode:

Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus by Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan (W. W. Norton, 2021)

A summary of this episode can be found here.

The podcast music was written and produced by Stacey Merola. The podcast artwork was created by Zoe Targino.