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Janet Hinson Shope and Richard Pringle, "Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with both of the authors of a book just published by Rutgers University Press in 2026 titled Campus Whisper Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors, which examines the important topic in higher education and about what is known and by whom about sexual assault of students. This book helps us understand this topic by looking at qualitative data and quantitative data and examining what's happening amongst students and what's happening on the administration side really kind of mapping out what's going on well beyond what sort of official statistics might show. In fact examining to some extent why official statistics show and don't show what they do. So we have a whole bunch of things to discuss and of course, who better to tell us about all this work than as I mentioned, the two authors of the book. So I'm pleased to have with me Dr. Janet Hinson Shope and Dr. Richard Pringle. Janet, Rick, thank you both so much for joining me.
- [01:13]
C
Thank you for having us, Miranda.
- [01:16]
B
I'm very pleased that we managed to make this work with the both of you. But before we get too far into the book, could you each please introduce yourselves a little bit and maybe tell us us why you decided to write this book and do it together. Rick, maybe you can start us off.
- [01:29]
A
Of course. So I began my professional career teaching courses in perception and cognitive psychology and also quantitative research methods. When the college that I work at went co Educational in 1987 as a girls school, women's school. Before then I studied with a colleague. The college was transitioning and noted the college's indifference seeming indifference to the introduction of what I'll call status quo gender dynamics within the student community. So that's backdrop that involvement deepened my connections with students lived experiences. For example, in that period I attended my first take back the night rally and speak out. I shifted my research and teaching to what some people call relational psychology and also qualitative methods. And over time I place story narrative in discursive circles at the center of my work. I agreed to help three seniors survey students experiences of sexual assault at college since enrolling. That was back in 2008, 2009. Many students at that time knew the college grossly undercounted sexual assaults on campus. And these students wanted to settle the issue with a survey. The survey confirmed what they knew to be true relationally. I repeated their survey in 2012. In 2015, Janet and I and others at the college, we developed and administered the college's very first campus climate survey, which we administered biennially thereafter. That's the backdrop to our work. At Janet's urging, our own research interests within the larger climate survey mandate shifted from sexual assault prevalence to tellings. The focus of our book, who Tells and Whom Do They Tell and How?
- [03:35]
B
That is a very helpful introduction. Thank you, Rick. What about you, Janet?
- [03:40]
C
I am a sociologist, and I study gender and gender relations. And for a very long time, I taught an intimate partner violence course. I found myself often on the receiving end of tellings. I became a confidant to students. So when Rick asked me to join his research team and work on the survey with his team, I was very excited to do that. And so we spent a lot of time talking about how to measure and capture climate. And it was on a day when I walked into his research team office and we were all talking about Christine Blasey Ford's testimony during the Kavanaugh hearings. And our conversation shifted to tellings. Who tells? Why is it that only certain kinds of tellings matter? That essentially only the tellings that go to authorities are the ones that are deemed legitimate, that have veracity, that conveys something about severity? And so that sort of launched us in a different direction from studying prevalence. There's extensive literature on disclosures, and we were really interested in capturing more than what the disclosure literature conveyed, that disclosures tend to be from the survivor to the confidant. And the confidant is really not examined as a knower in his or their own right. And so we began to think through what are the implications of telling? And that really fundamentally reshaped her questions and directed us to how could so many students know what was happening on campus and so few authorities, administrators know so little?
- [05:58]
B
I mean, that really is the big question here. So let's get more into how you both go about investigating answers to that question. So we've talked a little bit about methods already. Can we discuss further the kinds of qualitative and quantitative methods that are using, as well as key concepts like relational knowing?
- [06:18]
A
Sure, I'll begin there. First of all, we're indebted to those original researchers, three students who had the insight to not only ask about, did have you experienced sexual assault in all of its. Or any of its varieties? But they also asked students if they knew of other students who had been assaulted. So we stuck with that query and we pursued it in more depth. In our surveys, we asked student survivors if they told someone, and if so, who so for example, a friend, a parent and so on. And we asked students if they had ever been the recipient of a telling by another student. And from those yes, no questions we were able to determine that there were many tellings and listenings and determined that they mostly involved friends. We also asked students more open ended questions about those exchanges. And they gave us stories rich in detail about the nature and the complexities of telling and listening. The anks embedded in that, in the many risk and impediments to telling, in the many telling rules that they faced.
- [07:41]
C
So the quantitative data really allowed us to, to get a sense of how widespread this knowledge is within particular pockets of a college community. For example, by the time of graduation, the majority of students, 71% know someone who's been assaulted or have experienced an assault. And as a result of that kind of knowing, they perceive that the college differently and they perceive sexual assault as a problem in a different way. They perceive it more likely to perceive it as a problem. And those students who receive a telling also experience absorbs some of the collateral damage, so they're impacted by the telling. 2 We wanted to include the qualitative methods because we want to invite our readers and audience to know with students. And so the quantitative data allows us to sort of establish the extent of this, the extent of this kind of knowing on campuses. And quite very surprising to us was that we were able to reproduce these findings using the association of American Universities campus climate surveys, which consisted of around 30 universities and over 180,000 students. Institutions very unlike the one we studied. And we found the same kind of patterns, which was surprising to us. They're very different kinds of institutions that suggested to us that, that there were some patterns here. But it's really the qualitative data that allows us the opportunity to invite people in to know with the students in a different kind of way.
- [09:54]
A
So in this over the years, as we refined our survey and our questions, we created what we refer to as relational knowing scales, which tap in, we think, the degree to which students are embedded in whisper networks with one another. For example, one version of the scale consists of those students who don't know any student on campus who's been assaulted versus those who do know at least one student who has, versus those who have received a personal telling from a student survivor. This and other kinds of relational scales we developed became very important to our thinking. We think of them, think of them as being proxy to one's connectedness to the student whisper network of sexual assault, enhance proxy to knowing with or essentially relational knowing. So how do these students know they're being told within the whisper network where one resides on this relational knowing scale, it turns out, is a powerful determinant of various gender entitlement beliefs, for example, that students may hold, for example, just do they think sexual assault is a problem on campus? This scale has a lot to predict about what they would say to that question, but also on how students perceive the college more generally, including the degree to which they also is replicated by the AAU data, as Janet mentioned, but also it taps into the degree to which they experience negative psychological impacts on knowing those further along the scale experience more deleterious impacts. A scale of foregrounds what we call the not knowers or the avoiders and how they experience the community. And it foregrounds also what comes with knowing when the students transition from not knowing to knowing what accompanies that transition.
- [12:07]
B
Yeah, I think those are definitely some things we're going to be talking about more in terms of experiences. But picking up, Janet, on what you were saying in terms of kind of processes and the Rick, what you're mentioning, I suppose in terms of trajectories of kind of a scale and moving along it, is there anything else we want to discuss at this point in terms of what sorts of big picture patterns and trajectories you were seeing?
- [12:33]
A
Well, when we tracked who the survivors tell, for example, and when do they tell them? First of all, they mostly tell friends. By far and away, they tell friends, friends more than anyone else. And then they may also tell family members or they may tell therapists and religious counselors to a lesser degree than family. And lastly, if at all, they may tell formal authorities, they may make a report or tell an administrator or the security or police on campus. So these patterns also follow and ordered temporal patterns. So if they tell other than friends, they're going to tell friends first. If Title 9 officers, that is our assault adjudicators on campus, if they're told at all, they're told after several previous tellings. Over 20% of the survivors in our surveys told a friend within the first hour to kind of characterize how quickly they lean toward friends. And then by the time a year or more than a year has elapsed since the incident, more than 80% of them have told a friend. In contrast, far fewer have told Title IX or an administrator or even family. So occasionally the college officials are told. But if so, those tellings are rendered into propositions pertaining to the to prescribed categories defined by what is a sexual assault or a Misconduct, as the campus might define it. So the flow of tellings that carry relational knowledge moves among select friends. And it's whispered. We're arguing each one of them, each one of those is entrusted with. With the secrecy. And so this whispered network begins to know, and they know deeply because these are relational tellings without information stripped away methodically. And as far as information moving upstream up, up, up to the administrators, it's much less likely. And if it moves at all, it's filtered.
- [14:56]
B
Okay, that's helpful to keep in mind as a big picture pattern. Janet, is there anything you want to add?
- [15:02]
C
I think the patterns were our first clue, Miranda, that there was a structure here, that these tellings, that the patterns suggest that there's more going on. And it was one of our first clues that the structures, which we refer to in the book as the epistemic field, is designed to channel tellings in certain directions. And it really is designed to channel tellings in ways that are least disruptive, I would say, to the powerful, to institutions. And so it's designed to keep folks whispering and not shouting about what's occurring.
- [15:46]
B
Yeah, that's something I want to talk a bit more about these kinds of relational understandings, these norms of about how tellings should work and who is meant to hear what and in what sorts of ways. Can you tell us more about kind of those unspoken rules?
- [16:00]
C
Sure. We tell our deepest secrets to those we trust. I mean, we sort of, as social participants, we understand that. And we expect our friends in particular to sort of take up our good as their own. They will believe what we tell them. They're there for us. And those are sort of the obligations of friendship. We may have experienced someone in our lives who was a friend that when we shared something with them, their response wasn't what we anticipated or expected. So there are informal rules that are part of the telling rules, and then there are more formal or institutionalized rules. So, for example, at colleges and universities, the Title IX process clearly lays out how students, who students are supposed to tell about a Title IX violation. We know that as far as faculty at some colleges and universities, United States, that the institution may view a faculty member as a responsible employee, which means that if a student begins to disclose or share a sexual thought experience with the faculty member, the faculty is supposed to stop them and inform them that anything they're going to say after that point will be reported to. To the Title 9 office. So there are both these informal and very formal telling rules that are designed to really channel knowing in particular kinds of ways. Miranda, may I read one of the passages from Karima?
- [18:00]
B
Sure, go for it.
- [18:01]
C
So one student was very eloquently describes the telling rule that apply to disclosing her experience to her parents. Quote, I knew the rule. I had to tell my mom in person. Because if she knew and couldn't hold me immediately after, her mama bear instincts would cause her to explode. So I asked her to come down for the day. I lived kind of close to the school. School. Something I used to resist resent. But at that moment, I was glad to live close to campus. The rules of the disclosure were hard because there cannot be a right way to tell your mom you were raped. I hugged her hello and desperately searched for a place where we could be alone so I could get the words out. The place ended up being in her car. She must have known something was wrong. Moms always know. I told her. And she was upset, but she kept it together for me. That was another rule. The listener has to keep it together for the teller because the teller is the vulnerable one. My dad was really the tricky one. Less so for my mom. At least she understood the injustice that came with being a woman. The feeling of being scared of a man. But my dad. I didn't even want my dad to know I was a sexual being. So standing there outside my house with my mom, watching him get mad, I was worried the anger was directed toward my sexuality, as if he was angry I grew up, as if staying his little girl would protect me better. I reasonably knew he was mad at the situation, but it was my situation. It was my body making him upset. I found myself in the moment wishing I could be better for my dad. If I were better or smarter or stealthier, I would not have been raped. If I were stronger or more resilient, I would be able to stay on campus. Although we never addressed it again, I know my parents still feel the pain. I know they both physically and emotionally, literally and figuratively relive that talk every day. End quote. I think Karima does a beautiful job, a beautiful way of capturing what are the rules that are operative in that situation.
- [20:39]
B
Yeah, there's some very clear rules that she's talking about there. Rick, anything you want to add?
- [20:44]
A
Well, yeah, she. She so wonderfully and poignantly brings us into the complexities of multiple layers of dilemma. Dilemmas. And I just want to, you know, underscore that just as there are telling rules, you know, she's also pointing to the fact that there are listening rules. You know, how you receive a telling is so important. And of course, we've been receiving these settings for years, and we've now put this book out in the world, and we hope that it's received and listened to with respect as well. But the rules of listening include openness, trust, trust when it's a disclosure like. Like hers, a talent like hers, an understanding that you have a responsibility to guard the secret that it's not your story to tell. Some philosophers refer to what's called virtuous listening, that it's so important to have virtuous listeners that create the kind of what Gilligan would call a resonance where someone can speak and tell what they know to be true. And that exchange instills trust in the talent. It stills instills trust in the relationship. It builds the relationship. It clarifies what's happening or what happened. And it's so important.
- [22:13]
B
I'm glad you mentioned the rules of listening there, Rick, as well, because those ideas that there are ways of telling and ways of listening aren't just when one is telling friends or family. Right. They also apply to. Janet, when you were mentioning earlier, the kind of more formal, institutional ways of reporting. How do these norms of telling or listening translate or not with how the institution kind of wants to receive this information?
- [22:43]
C
Well, the emphasis there, I would say, is or not. Because I think students are really taken aback when they encounter a process with very different norms and a very different set of telling rules. So the kind of deep listening and openness and presence, affective, embodied presence, is very different when a student transitions from a telling to. To what we call a telling on. So when one tells on someone else, it's a very different set of norms. And those norms are transactional. As for Title 9, in the United States, they're designed to be impartial and adversarial, and that one person's definition of what occurred ultimately is deemed more or less credible than the other. It is a process where that story is reduced to bits of information that are the bits of information that are designed to answer the questions of the process, not the bits of information that the student feels is most important to them to share. So it's a very different set of norms.
- [24:21]
A
Yeah. I will just add to that. Sure. That the reporting process is almost designed to select particular elements, to look for those elements in the larger story, and to match them against prescribed categories or definitions where the rest of the story, it's richness that one of the example which we just heard is discarded. So reports, official reports, render the survivor story into propositions. You Know, which by our way of thinking, from our framework, it's the opposite of knowing with or real knowing. So the effective components are set aside the moral urgency in what we would call a story's representativeness of the community's womb. Those things are stripped away and the
- [25:18]
B
result is, I mean, some very different kind of knowledge really of what's going on. I mean, you both talk about this in the book as knowledge gaps. You've given us some statistics earlier in terms of kind of how much the whisper network might mean students are aware of this. Like, can you tell us more about the result of these very different norms?
- [25:39]
C
So there are two kinds of gaps that we explore in the book. They're the vertical gaps which refer to the way that knowledge within the student community in the under commons, very little of that knowledge actually makes its way to, to college administrators or officials. So very few assaults are reported to Title IX or to a college administrator. And so the institution remains relatively clueless about what's happening on campus and the collective wounds held by the community. So there is a gap between what students know is happening within the student community and what the college administration knows is happening because of the gap. Then there are these lateral gaps among students. There are communities of students where some students who don't know anyone who has experienced a sexual assault and they have not experienced one either. And then we have communities of students who haven't experienced assault but have received a disclosure or tallying, sometimes from two or three students. And then we have students who have experienced an assault and may have also received a tallying. So there are lateral gaps within the student community. And then there are vertical gaps between students and what is labeled as official knowledge because this knowledge only becomes official once it makes its way to a college official or administrator.
- [27:34]
A
And then I would say too, there are gradations of knowing as well. You know, there's cases where the information flow is totally blocked, but then there are ways in which it can sort of trickle or ways that it can just move very, very, very fast and completely. So we talked about in turn create gaps in awareness of the community's woundedness, in its own complicity in this woundedness, so the community can't see itself. So students within the whisper network are most aware of these high level gaps, the obliviousness of the community to this issue that they see more clearly. The avoiders and the college officials, they're not aware of it.
- [28:25]
B
I want to talk about that group you just mentioned there, Rick. We've talked about college officials, but these avoiders who are the avoiders? Why are they avoiders? What does it mean for them and everyone else that there are avoiders?
- [28:39]
A
Yes, avoiders figures really largely in this work, we think of the group of students who have avoided somehow or another knowing anyone who has been assaulted within the local community. And they haven't themselves been assaulted. So they somehow just avoided this thing that's on campus. And it could be by privilege or lack of experience. It could be an active avoidance, you know, so it could be needing to not move, for example, or needing to know, or not needing to know. These, these limit their ability to interpret their community, to emphasize, empathize with others, and to make their community to be a more hospitable place, a more just place for everyone. So relationally, knowing about sexual assault within your community changes you, even changes your relationship with the community. So the avoiders haven't had that experience. As community members, we would argue that we share an ethical obligation to seek knowledge that goes beyond their own experience. So we feel there's an ethical obligation to not be an avoider and certainly not be deliberately avoided. You need to seek out knowledge as to who they are, the avoiders. In our study, they are the folks who didn't know anyone who's been assaulted and have not themselves been assaulted. And the percentage of those folks within a particular class cohort, let's say the first year students of color, the percentage of those folks in that class. When we measure things, which is usually in the spring semester, the percentage of avoiders within that cohort diminishes with time at the college, as the students with time are more likely to enter networks and learn of assaults, and unfortunately is more likely to have encountered a sexual assault themselves. But the whisper networks become more evident to them. They may or may not belong to
- [30:53]
C
them,
- [30:55]
A
but the whispers that they enter into those tellings, they're relational, they're story and self narrative laden. But of course, the college as a whole, its administrators and officers are avoiders also. We didn't study them directly as avoiders, but they don't hear the relational stories. So the epistemic field, we're concluding, is managed in such a way as to block knowing with survivors at the college.
- [31:28]
C
I think one way for colleges to continue avoidance is by not asking specific questions. So when we do climate surveys or there are reports that are required reports in the United States that ask about sexual violence or rape on campus, the kinds of questions that are asked and the kinds of questions that are not asked also are a way of avoiding some of the of relational knowing, because the questions are not asked about students who have received a telling, who may hold this knowledge. There really is no place in this current system for a friend to be recognized as a knower and, you know, pricker. And some of the other philosophers would describe that as an epistemic injustice.
- [32:36]
A
There's kind of a. Kind of an interesting footnote, and it's kind of a silver lining. If you look at the avoiders as they're just unaware of what's going on in the community, okay. And they come in and they're very numerous as first year students, but by the time they're seniors, that's declined quite a bit. But women are more likely to not be avoiders than men. Right. So even in that first year class, when we ask these questions in the spring semester, women, those who identify as women or non binary, are less likely to be an avoider than men. But the interesting thing is, across those four years, men also are, over time, become less likely to be avoiders pretty much at the same rate as women do. And so this idea that men are one thing and women are another, no, they're lockstep in their likelihood to move into whisper networks and to learn more richly about what's going on in the community. And we think of that as a beautiful kind of a side story, that this process of avoiding and coming into knowing is something everyone experiences or can experience.
- [34:00]
B
Yeah, that's definitely worth adding to the conversation. Thinking then about these ideas of kind of holding the knowledge, Having been the recipient of a telling. Janet, you mentioned kind of there's no place for the friend, really. Can we talk a little bit more perhaps about the impact of. Of knowing people that know people? What are some of those impacts? We've sort of been hinting at it throughout the conversation, but maybe we can talk about it in a bit more detail now.
- [34:28]
C
Sure. So students who receive a telling are more likely than students who do not hold this knowledge to view sexual assault assault differently, to be more likely to see sexual assault as a problem on campus. They also have less sanguine views of the institution. So they're less likely to see the college as responding as proactively as I show to sexual assault, for example. They also experience some personal, individual impacts. We find that they also register some psychological and emotional distress and to a lesser extent, but still present some academic and behavioral changes as well. So that's one side of looking at the impacts. But the other side, and the one that I think for us shows us the transformative potential of relational Knowledge is that these students are also more likely to. Score much higher on empathy scales. They're more likely to want, want to take action in some sort of way. They are more likely to reject gender based entitlement such as rape myths. And so on the one hand, although they experience some of the secondary trauma, collateral damage that's associated with holding this kind of knowledge, they are also motivated to act in response to the knowledge and also to really be empathetic to their peers.
- [36:38]
A
And of course, of course, you know, they're, they're hearing this from a friend so that, that empathic resonance, you know, to the telling in this generality and something they take into the world and their attitudes about going forward comes out of that relational telling. And clearly that's largely what's missing when the stories move upstream in the way that they do. It's also, you know, this, we were just referring to the impacts, you know, so what comes with knowing insofar as our quantitative measurements and scales could reveal. But really we have these rich stories, you know, where we ask students who told and students who were the confidants about those experiences, you know, and from those story, that's our qualitative framework, we know even more about the tellings and the impact they can have. So variety of impacts for the teller and the listener. For example, when survivors tell, many of them speak about what we refer to as releasing some of the weight of the assault. There's something that happens in the telling, and I'm presuming virtuos listening on the other side here, there's something that can happen in there where the assault, the experience feels a little less heavy to the teller. On the other hand, many of them talk about when they tell. It makes the experience real. They sometimes use that language, it made it feel real. So that makes minimizing what happened much harder for them. So which is, which is reassuming another kind of weight maybe, and also clarifies what happened. When confidants listen and they tell us about that they feel entrusted, they feel validated as a friend. They understand this is a place that, wherein they're supposed to, and they do assume a great deal of responsibility. They may not know the term virtuous listening, but they listen. And through the quantitative and the qualitative, it's clear that they feel and carry the weight of the assault. Occasionally the confidants, the confidence, understand that their job is to listen and to keep the secret. And they'll, they'll say oh again and again in our data it's not my story to tell. So they, they have a blockage, you know, an internal rule that they don't go out and tell someone else that story. But occasionally they do. And it's interesting who they go to. They almost always go to a member outside the community, and it's often because they need themselves to have a conversation with someone who could help them process what they heard. They're carrying the weight, and maybe telling someone can help them release the weight, but they're mindful that they need to do that in a different community where it doesn't or minimizes the degree to which they betrayed their responsibility to keep it secret.
- [40:03]
B
Yeah, there's lots of relations going on here in Norms about how talking about this, listening to this works. You also, though, talk about in the book silent holders. So who is, who is doing that and why?
- [40:20]
C
So first I want to say that survivors, and I just also want to say not everyone identifies as survivors that have experienced sexual assault. But that's a term that we're using. But we recognize that. But oftentimes survivors are described as silent only because they haven't told a formal authority. We are referring to silence holders as those students who've experienced a sexual assault but have told no one, at least up until the time of the survey. And they are very, very strategic about their silence. They're not naive about how institutions work or about how friends can respond. So they're very aware of the perils of telling, and they don't perceive institutions as being trustworthy. There is, within the whisper network, there are stories that circulate widely about how the institution responded in the past to students who reported sexual assaults. So that's very alive and circulating around. So the students are aware of that knowledge. And so they are not naive. They're very aware of the. The risk associated with telling. The silence holders are also aware that silence holding is a strategy that allows them to control the meaning of the experience of what happened. Because as we talk about in the book, part of the telling to a friend involves this collaborative meaning making that occurs in the telling. And so by keeping this experience to oneself, one also maintains some control over the meaning of what happened, even while that exacts a heavy toll for the student. Students are also silent because they realize that there are relational fallouts from telling. And so their silence is also a strategy to protect networks. And so it is both an individual strategy and a relational strategy that they enact.
- [43:01]
B
Okay, that's helpful to understand. Rick, is there anything you want to add on this?
- [43:05]
A
Just to kind of open that even further. You know, I would say from what we've seen, is that they believe in silence. They trust it, or at least they trust it over the alternatives. And while they may be confident, and many of them are, by the way, they're in the network to that degree, they're less likely than other secret keepers, other confidants to follow up with the survivors or to recommend that the survivors seek help from other resources. So again, it's as if they, they believe silence is a way forward or can be. And you know, to go further from the qualitative data, many are hyper aware of the perils of telling. Some seem resigned to misogyny and male entitlement. You know, that one of them says in particular, what are you going to do? Some blame themselves, you know, I should have known better. Again, that's a direct quote. Or they're hypersensitive to the ambiguities. For example, they didn't say no, but they didn't say yes, you know, but something was wrong in that interaction. So they sort of are inclined to take their responsibility for the uncertainties. In some cases friends are involved, you know, and so in that case the survivor is often wanting to be protective or protective of the network itself. You know, so there are all these reasons why, you know, saying nothing serves the goal of, as a strategy, but serves the goal of, of the lesser of evils. There,
- [44:50]
B
there's lots that's being weighed up here throughout kind of all the different aspects we've been discussing. Em, I wonder if we zoom out then from each of these individual pieces of the book we've been talking about. What do you both most hope readers will take away from all of this?
- [45:06]
A
Yeah, that's a kind of an unfolding kind of way to look at the work. And I'd say first of all for myself, for both of us, I'm sure it'd be nice if friends, you know, that people begin to understand that friends everywhere, they're always the first responders and they're the first responders within the student community and probably within any community. They're deeply affected by knowing with. And so this, this, you know, rings of spreading harm that ripples through the community. It's invisible, but it needs to be seen. Meanwhile, it's also recognized that it's important, it's necessary that people tell one another in this way and that this spreads through a community. It's a way of folding the strategy and onto the community shoulders and often individual shoulders. It's not simply it's shouldn't simply fall on one person's shoulders, but nor should it fall exclusively on that person's friend.
- [46:15]
C
I think we also hope that others will recognize the need to develop resources to camp sexual assault that address its community harm and recognizes the limits to Title ix. Title IX wasn't designed to address community harm nor was it designed to be a repository of relational knowledge. So if we rely on Title IX exclusively for our understanding of sexual assault, we're really supporting avoidance that allows institutions to avoid knowing with which we think allows institutions to issue some of their ethical obligations to know with their students. I think we also need to think about ways to allow knowledge to flow more freely and so that it's not channeled into places that limit the possibility of knowing or limit knowing to only a specific, specific kind of knowledge, such as procedural knowledge. How do I report a sexual assault? What are the steps to take? Or propositional knowledge. That's knowledge about. For example, 1 in 4, 1 in 5 students experience sexual assault. So we need to create ways for knowledge to flow more freely and more kinds of, of different types of knowledge to flow more freely so that the community can be more self aware and more responsive to knowing with sexual assault is more than an individual issue. It has a community impact and it affects the community. There's a collective wound that exists, exist as a result of sexual assault.
- [48:22]
B
Well, I think that is a good way to end our discussion about the book, making a very clear case for why this sort of investigation is important. So if I could just ask you each to maybe tell us a little tiny bit about what you might be working on either individually or together now that this book is out in the world.
- [48:40]
C
Well, I think we are. The book came out in March and so we are hoping to find ways to share the importance of understanding this relational knowing and its impact on the community. We're interested in rethinking with others how there might be different responses that go beyond some simply Title IX or Clery reports. I think we're. There are various subgroups of students that we would like to do some more research, a little more depth. For example, trans and non binary students show up as knowing, upholding a possession a great deal of relational knowledge and would like to explore that in some more depth. I'm interested in networks, different kinds of networks. With the many, many articles that have been written about Jeffrey Epstein, thinking about and seeing avoiders in different forms. How the needing not to know became a way for people to avoid certain kinds of knowledge. And so the ways in which these networks possess some knowledge and also allow people to sidestep claims of knowing things is of interest to me.
- [50:28]
B
Well, that's quite a lot to be keeping you busy. Janet. Rick, anything you'd like to add?
- [50:33]
A
Well, I mean, we believe in this work, you know, and that we think it's a different way of seeing sexual, the broader culture, sexual assault problem and related problems. You know, if you see, if you look at it at the community level, you know, it behooves all of us to be aware of what's going on on the community and to assume it has an ethical responsibility. That's a kind of education that's kind of minimized, I think, culturally. But if this, if the community is going to take this up in here, I can say the college community or any college community, there's got to be. And if this message that we're giving ever sending out is worthwhile in addressing the problem, it'll only be helpful if we experience something that Medina refers to as echoability. You know, there's got to be an audience out there and readers out there who help echo the message of the book. And so I would say the immediate thing that I feel I'm working on and, and we're both working on the know is, is this. Will people hear this? You know, it's back to how to hear a story and having heard the story, what now, you know, how do we ensure that they hear the story and, and take it up as their own? And if they were to take it up as their own, it seems to be what they would recognize immediately is that so much avoidance, so much misunderstanding, so much inability to see the community harm is wrapped up in structure. And the structure is there for a reason. And the reason that does not serve everybody equally well.
- [52:31]
B
For anyone who wants to learn more about all the things we've been discussing, of course they, at this point, they've listened to the whole discussion. But there is more. There is the whole book that has loads of detail topics titled Campus Whisper Networks Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors, published by Rutgers University Press in 2026. Janet, Rick, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [52:53]
C
Thank you, Miranda.
- [52:54]
A
It's been a pleasure. Miranda, thank you.
- [52:56]
C
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