Jill Creighton:     Welcome to season two of the ASCA Viewpoints Podcast, the podcast where we talk about the student conduct profession in higher education. I am Jill Creighton, your Viewpoints host. 

Jill Creighton:     Hey listeners, couple of quick notes before we jump into the bio of today's guest. I wanted to remind everyone that we're dropping episodes on an every other week basis this year instead of an every week basis last year. And that's to help us continue the sustainability and growth in quality of the show. So we're making sure that we're bringing you something that you enjoy listening to. I also wanna note that today's conversation was recorded in the spring of 2018, so you may experience some moments where you might be like, "Wait, didn't that already change or hasn't that already been released or I'm a little bit confused," because the information is no longer accurate. So I just wanted to make sure that I noted that upfront. Most of the dialog, the vast majority of the dialog, is really rich and wonderful. And I'm really excited for you to take a listen to what our guest had to say today. 

Jill Creighton:     So without further ado, today's guest is Dr. Chris Linder. Dr. Linder received a PhD in higher education in student affairs leadership from the University of Northern Colorado. She earned her masters in educational administration with an emphasis in student affairs, and a bachelor of science in business administration from the University of Nebraska. Prior to becoming a faculty member, Chris worked as a student affairs professional for 10 years, both in Greek life and in women's centers. Dr. Linder's research interests include creating and maintaining equitable campus environments, with an explicit focus on race and gender. Specifically, Dr. Linder researches intersectional and power conscious approaches to addressing sexual violence on campus and student activism. Chris' new book, "Sexual Violence on Campus: Power Conscious Approaches to Awareness, Prevention, and Response" was just released this May of 2018 and is available courtesy of Emerald Pres. Hope you enjoy the conversation.

Jill Creighton:     Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Chris Linder. Dr. Chris Linder comes to us as associate professor and PhD program coordinator of college student affairs administration at the University of Georgia. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Linder:       Hi, I'm glad to be here.

Jill Creighton:     So, Chris has two books that might be of interest for the ASCA or student conduct listener. The first one is currently published, and she's the co-author of "Intersections of Identity and Sexual Violence on Campus." And she also has a new book coming out, or actually by the time you listen to this it will already be available, and that is called "Sexual Violence on Campus: Power Conscious Approaches to Awareness, Prevention, and Response" which will be published by Emerald Press in May of 2018. So we're talking today with Dr. Linder specifically about a chapter coming out of that new book called "Responding to Sexual Violence." And in this chapter, Chris really addresses some of the intersectionality concerns that we have when we look at our traditional and "best practice" examples of how we run our sexual violence prevention programs, response, and student conduct systems. So we're gonna dig in with Dr. Linder in all of that, but before we go there, Chris, can you just share with us your journey to your current position?

Chris Linder:       Sure. Like Jill said, I am currently an associate professor at the University of Georgia, and I also serve as the program coordinator for our PhD program. Prior to becoming faculty, I actually worked for 10 years as a student affairs educator, part of that time working in Greek life at the University of Missouri. And then another part of that time, I worked in the campus women's center at Colorado State University. And that's really where I got my foundation related to working with issues of sexual violence on college campuses. That center has one of the oldest 24-hour hotlines for survivors of sexual violence in the country. It was founded long before I worked at the center. But it's something that has been very well established at that institution and it's really where I sort of, like I said, got my foundation in doing sexual violence work.

Chris Linder:       I did work primarily with survivors in that job. We were an advocacy center for survivors of sexual violence, so we worked with them through the conduct processes, police processes, any sorts of systems that they wanted to navigate, we supported them through that process. So as you can imagine, immediately after leaving that position, I was dealing with my own secondary trauma from having worked with survivors for that point for about 10 years in some capacity. And so I really needed a break from looking at and thinking about sexual violence on such a daily basis. And so my first couple of years as a faculty member I actually did not study sexual violence. I focused more heavily on white women's identity development, the experiences of students of color, and student affairs in higher education graduate programs and looking at issues around inclusive pedagogy. 

Chris Linder:       And then in the fall of 2013, I remember seeing, goodness, it feels like there's a lot of momentum behind addressing sexual violence on college campuses right now. What is going on? And so I got together a group of researchers, other women's center directors, and said, "Let's figure out what's going on. Where did this momentum come from?" And so we did a study about activism in campus sexual violence. From that point I sort of just got back into doing sexual violence work. Shortly after that, Dr. Jessica Harris at UCLA asked if I would be interested in co-editing the book "Intersections of Identify and Sexual Violence." So we did that, and then eventually moved in to doing the work of the chapter that we are talking about today.

Jill Creighton:     Excellent. I think it's always really great to hear the stories of folks that started off as practitioners and then transitioned to the research that supports our work. When you think about your transition from that practitioner lens to the research lens, how has your perspective on the problem of sexual violence in college, in university campuses, as well as society changed?

Chris Linder:       Yeah. I appreciate that question a lot. I actually think about this very often. When I was a practitioner, I know that I was very much in crisis mode because the survivor sitting in front of me was the most urgent and important thing in my world at that time. And so it was very much about managing whatever crisis was right in front of me and helping get students through systems that haven't historically been set up for them as survivors of sexual violence. So that very much informed my lens as a practitioner, and I do remember like I talked about already, experiencing secondary trauma, and also just frankly being exhausted from dealing with day to day crises related to sexual violence. And then specifically also thinking about the ways in which I knew a lot of things about perpetrators on campus that other people may not know, and so that was also challenging to navigate, to put on different hats and be in different spaces and know things about people who were in very public positions, student leaders and/or faculty and staff on campus. And so that was also equally difficult to navigate. 

Chris Linder:       I think about in shifting to a researcher, a couple of things come up for me. One is that I will never forget that crisis life that I led and really do remember and feel in my gut what it's like to be constantly navigating and supporting students who are dealing with a very significant trauma. So I think that's important. And then the other piece is that I feel like as a faculty member, I'm protected in ways that I was not as a staff member related to being able to speak about things. So as a tenured professor, I can be a little more bold in my assertions about how we should be navigating campus sexual violence, where we're failing in campus sexual violence on college campuses, and hopefully that gives permission for practitioners and people who are not as protected as me in terms of job security to also be a little more bold. They can say, "See, this person's saying this." So I don't necessarily feel like a lot of what I'm writing or saying is all that new. I think people have been saying it for a long time, but I do believe that I have some privilege and some power to say some things that other people think and maybe can say in closed spaces and I can say more publicly to hopefully make it something that more people feel like it's okay for them to talk about.

Jill Creighton:     I really appreciate you acknowledging that sitting in that researcher's seat with a tenured position gives you that power and privilege to speak. I think one of the things that we struggle with most in student conduct, and for those of us who do Title IX work, is that we all are student-centered and student-focused, and also we have accountability to our own university administrations. And so while we're looking at trying to well-roundedly support the campus community, as we look at our processes, we're very certain most of the time, particularly in Title IX cases, that at least one person in that process does not come out feeling like they had a fair process, even though it may have been fair, because the outcome wasn't what they wanted it doesn't feel good, or also inflicting potentially some secondary trauma through our processes. 

Chris Linder:       Right. 

Jill Creighton:     I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the professionalization of sexual misconduct processes. You note in your book, and I'm gonna quote here, "The professionalization of the field, example, requiring people to have social work degrees and additional credentials, has resulted in the focus shifting from grassroots community accountability, rooted in women's lived experiences and expertise, to a focus on 'best practices' which frequently cater to one type of victim, namely those with a multitude of dominant identities." And that is a citation from Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, 2006. So thinking about this statement, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the impetus from where this comes from and how you're seeing it play out on college campuses.

Chris Linder:       Yeah. I do think ... in looking at all of the ways that are ... Addressing issues around equity often start from a place of community accountability. So we do a good job ... women's consciousness raising groups of the '70s, there have been ... women of color have been organizing around sexual violence for literally centuries. Most people don't know that Ida B. Wells was actually an organizer around sexual violence as much as she organized around lynching. And she was able to make people see the both/and of those pieces. So what I mean by that was she was very staunchly opposed to black man, and she was very vocal about black men being lynched for raping white women, when the vast majority of those were false accusations. And she also held true to the fact that black women were being raped a lot by white men at the same time. So she was holding those two truths together in ways that we could learn a lot from today. 

Chris Linder:       And so I think about the way ... So when I think about our history, and how again, women of color, and even more specifically black women, have been leading the way in holding multiple truths around sexual violence, meaning that we can both name that black women are harmed by sexual violence in the same ways that she can name that black men are harmed by being falsely accused of being perpetrators. She was able to create a space for people to think about those truths at the same time. And I think as we've moved away from that grassroots organizing into more professionalization of our work, what happens with professionalization is that we create standards, we create policy, we create these "best practices." And we act like everybody has to do it the same in order for it to be consider a profession. That's the very notion of professionalization. 

Chris Linder:       We're seeing this in student affairs right now, well, we've been seeing it for a couple of decades now, but arguing over whether we're a profession or whether we're educators, and what that means and what does it mean to credential. And I fear that when we credential ourselves, what we end up doing is limiting how innovative we can be, and we really focus on how to do things right rather than how to do things in a way that works for our particular context. And so for me, those are some of the ways that I see that professionalization showing up on our campuses. I think through policy is one of the biggest ways. And cognitively, I understand why policy is important, it is important to have some congruency and some consistency, and many of our policies are created based on what we think of as the typical sexual assault situation, which then leaves out a vast majority, or a large number, of survivors' experiences.

Jill Creighton:     So when you talk about the "typical" experience in regards to sexual violence, what do you think the systems are built around? Or can you flesh that out a little bit more?

Chris Linder:       Yeah, for sure. Just to be very frank about it, all of our systems were created for straight, white, middle class whites, and in the case of sexual violence, women. And so the reason sort of my evidence in supporting this is if we look at the history of our sexual violence laws, originally sexual violence was seen as a property crime, so only a father or a husband of a woman could make a claim of sexual violence, and it was considered a property crime, meaning that it violated property that he owned and made that property less valuable. And also during this time, white people were the only people who could own property, therefore these laws only applied to white families. Clearly this was in the 1700s. We've come a long way since then. 

Chris Linder:       And we still see remnants of this in our culture today. For example, I think about the film "The Hunting Ground" which I thought was a phenomenal film, I thought they did an excellent job, and one of my critiques of the film is that almost all the parents in the film were white men. And so it sort of gave this underlying message that we should care about this because these white men are being harmed. And when we see them in pain, when we see them crying, that makes people say, "Oh my gosh, we have to pay attention to this issue." It probably was not intentionally done by the film makers, and I feel like there's this underlying sentiment of, "We need to care about this because it affects people who have a lot of power in our culture." 

Chris Linder:       And so I just think about the ways that that continues to show up. I think the Brock Turner case, which has been talked about ad nauseum at this point, as another excellent example of how our systems are set up to favor some groups over others. And I don't think that our campus systems are too far away from that. Students who come from middle class families know how to navigate those systems differently than students who come from working class families or families who don't have a college-going history. And so while we're not doing it intentionally, the impact of our systems largely benefit people with access to privilege.

Jill Creighton:     And I wanna revisit something you said at the beginning of this comment, which was traditionally and historically, since only white men were allowed to own property, and since women and girls at that time were considered property, the only people that could file charges were white men, which although this was several hundred years ago, that's baked into our criminal justice system from the start. And so that inequity shows up differently today, but it still shows up.

Chris Linder:       Yes.

Jill Creighton:     So I'm wondering, Chris, if you could talk about how you're seeing that original value, although it has transformed greatly in the last couple hundred years, how that might show up on a college campus today.

Chris Linder:       Yeah. A couple of things. One is that for me a really clear example of this is that the students organizing around sexual violence at the national level, so students with Know Your IX, students with End Rape on Campus, they're very much approaching this work, at least publicly, I'm not sure what they're doing behind the scenes, but their sort of external process is very, very heavily focused on policy. So it's very much about how can we change the policies so our campuses have to hold perpetrators accountable. And for me that's an example of how dominant identity ... So policies have been set up with white people, with middle class people in mind, and so of course these students who are largely white or white-passing, and come from elite colleges, which does not necessarily mean that they themselves come from middle class families, but they do have access to some cultural capital that students at other kinds of institutions don't have access to, by virtue of the fact that they attend elite institutions that the media is paying attention to. And so for me that's an example of how we're still seeing this in our culture is that students are still relying on policy, which largely favor people with dominant identities to address sexual violence. 

Chris Linder:       And for me, a concern around that is that when we're largely relying on policy after sexual violence happens to stop sexual violence, I think we're missing out on addressing it before it happens. So I would never advocate that we need to stop responding. As long as sexual violence is happening, we have to respond and we have to do so from an equitable lens. And I think that our response often overtakes true prevention work, and for me, true prevention work is intervening with perpetrators and potential perpetrators rather than waiting until after they engage in sexual violence to just kick them off our campuses. 

Jill Creighton:     I think this is an incredibly complex issue, and so I'm gonna ask you a fairly broad question. But I think we're doing a lot better as a student conduct community at acknowledging that our systems, since they're mirrored off of United States court systems, are inherently advantaging white males students that are cisgendered typically, and because we know these systems empirically are disproportionately negatively affecting black and brown men, I know in student conduct we have this conversation a lot with how do we ensure that we're not replicating the system, how are we making sure that our systems are equitable. And a lot of that starts with the individual conduct officer doing some work on their own social identities and implicit biases. But, other than that type of work, how would you suggest that we begin to break down our systems of privilege and kind of de-colonize our processes?

Chris Linder:       Yeah. So a couple of things. One is exactly what you said, people have to do their own individual work, and that includes the people hearing the cases, it includes the people writing the policies, it includes the people at our legal counsel's offices, all of us have to be engaged in the process of doing our own work of even just recognizing what our biases are and what our socialization has been, and sort of taking away the shame associated with that and just stating it as fact. We've all been socialized in a culture that upholds patriarchy and white supremacy among a number of other systems of oppression. And that doesn't inherently make us bad people, that makes us people who have to do some work to unlearn some of the socialization that we've all sort of taken in. So I think that's a big piece of it.

Chris Linder:       I think the other piece is knowing our history. So the more that people can read and understand about the history of the legal system, and really think about, even if you don't agree with every single thing a critical scholar says about our legal system, even just considering another perspective I think helps us to think about the world differently. So, there are a couple of good articles I think out there about the history of Title IX and how we got to where we are. They're both law reviews, but I'm not a lawyer and I found them accessible and I understood them. One's by Silva, and it's 2015. I can send you the exact citation for that later, and it's also cited in this chapter. And the other one is by Tammy, and I think it's also 2015. But I can send you the exact citation again later. But both of those articles sort of give us a history of ... So, that's not even going that far back. That's only going back to 1972. 

Chris Linder:       But thinking about where did Title IX come from and how did this law that was supposed to be about equity and access to opportunities on campuses and in education broadly, how did it morph into now you can't say Title IX on a college campus without everybody thinking you're talking about sexual violence only. Whereas Title IX used to be synonymous with sports, now it's synonymous with sexual violence. And neither one of those is totally accurate. And so I think people knowing their history as another really important component of breaking down those systems.

Chris Linder:       And then the last thing I would say is just interrupting our notions of what is the right way to do something. So, recently Mary Cox, who's been doing this work for a very, very long time, wrote an article actually advocating for us to reconsider restorative justice as an appropriate response to sexual violence. Now I know this is controversial among feminists, it's controversial among a lot of people. I think it's important for us to take a step back and think about it though. So I would not advocate for mediation because mediation implies an equal relationship, but I do think restorative justice may be worth looking into. And here's why I think that. I think that for specifically minoritized communities, so I'm thinking specifically of queer and trans students on our campuses, students of color on our campuses, those communities are already small and isolated on our campuses, and so those students don't have the luxury of just ousting a member of their community because they committed sexual violence, in most cases. 

Chris Linder:       So I've sat with many survivors who have said to me, "I don't want him to get in trouble, I just want him to stop raping people." And so for me, things like restorative justice and/or community accountability could be helpful in that regard. I think that colleges and universities are in a unique position to actually be able to design some interventions to work with perpetrators rather than just kicking them off our campuses, recognizing that they may go into other communities, even though they may not be campus communities, they may go into other communities and continue the behavior because the behavior hasn't been interrupted or stopped. 

Chris Linder:       So for me, those are three specific things. The first one being doing your own work, the second one being learning the history of our field and policy and how it plays out, and then the third one being taking a step back and reconsidering some of the things that we've said are completely off limits to addressing sexual violence on our campuses.

Jill Creighton:     And to your point about restorative justice, listeners, if you want to go back into the podcast archives, season one, episode 25, with Dr. David Carp, we do a whole episode on how restorative justice can work on college campuses for addressing issues of sexual violence. I know that one of the biggest concerns with those particular processes is prosecutorial immunity, and that's something that you'd have to address with individual DAs in you individual cities and towns. But it is worth a listen, and Dr. Carp talks a lot about how we could implement those things. But I wanna also go back, Chris, to what you just were talking about in terms of how the history affects our current practice. As I was reading through the chapter in your new book, I do wanna read an excerpt here about some of the history which I think is really critical, especially when we're talking about native people and native students. We had a really wonderful keynote speaker here at the University of Oregon not too long ago for Take Back the Night. Her name is Cee Cee Wright, and she's a citizen of the Klamath Tribe here in Oregon. And her work really focuses on how colonization by settlers is in fact a form of violence. And that really goes back to a lot of ways that tribal laws are enforced and how they do and do not intersect with the US government. 

Jill Creighton:     So I wanna read this excerpt here, which is, "In addition to the sexist interpretation of the law, enactors of the criminal justice system also perpetrated racism, specifically people interpreting enacting the law did not consider the rape of non-white women a crime and frequently held black men accountable for rape even when they did not commit it. White men raped and enslaved women, primarily black and some indigenous women, at extremely high rates as a form of economic exploitation and terrorization to control them. Because the children of enslaved women became the property of the slave owner, owners frequently raped and enslaved women as a way to increase their labor supply and therefore economic power. Further, colonizers used rape as a tool of terrorization directed at indigenous communities, which continues to this day. Native American women experience higher rates of sexual violence than any other racial group, and are the only group of women who experience higher rates of interracial rape rather than intraracial rape. Despite these experiences, black and indigenous women could not access the criminal justice system set up to serve white, owning class people." And you go on in your book to talk about how currently in present day, we still struggle with native laws not applying to white men who rape native women on tribal lands.

Jill Creighton:     And so I think this is a really important point, and also kind of an area of our prevention and response practices on our campuses that we're not talking about. So how would you ... how do you kind of think about this excerpt in context of how we can change our practice?

Chris Linder:       I think it's really complicated because those laws that I was referring to, and there's another Law Review piece by Sarah Deer who has done a ton of writing about rape in indigenous communities, and she has a book called "The Beginning and the End of Rape" which I highly recommend, and then this Law Review piece that I cite in the book where she talks about the Major Crimes Act and how people who are not members of reservations can't be prosecuted in tribal courts. And so therefore it becomes the federal government's responsibility to prosecute people who commit crimes on tribal lands that are not members of the tribe, but how they frequently opt not to do that, and how the numbers are even higher for sex crimes than for other crimes. So, federal government opts not to address sex crimes on tribal lands more often than they fail to address other kinds of crimes on tribal lands. That article I think is really good.

Chris Linder:       I think it's challenging to make the connection to college campuses because it's a very specific problem that has to do with tribal sovereignty. And so I think that makes it complicated to think about how it's showing up on our campuses. With the exception of, I think the one way that we can think about it on our campuses is to think about the ways that indigenous or native students on our campus know this history related ... or many of them know and understand the significance of this history in their own communities, and when we as educators on historically and predominantly white campuses don't understand or acknowledge that history, that gives those students no reason to trust us as people who could advocate for them, because if we don't understand their unique situations, there's not really good reason for us to trust us. So I think that's one of the ways to think about it.

Chris Linder:       And then I also ... maybe now that I'm talking, maybe there's another way also. I think there are some parallels here to thinking about the ways in which campuses ... we sort of have our own system that's independent of the criminal justice system, and it fits within the criminal justice system, and that varies dramatically depending on the campus policy, depending on where the campus is located. There are lots of factors that influence that. But I wonder what the similarities are between college and university campuses and the criminal justice system working in tandem with each other, how that's similar or different to the federal government working with tribal governments, and how those systems sort of work in tandem with each other and what we could possibly learn from each other around that.

Jill Creighton:     So I also wanna back up for a second and just acknowledge, I believe, Chris, earlier in the episode today, you mentioned that you identify as a white woman, is that correct?

Chris Linder:       Yes. I don't know if I mentioned that, but yes.

Jill Creighton:     Sorry, I thought I heard you say that earlier. 

Chris Linder:       No, that's good. Thank you for pointing it out.

Jill Creighton:     But I wanna just notice that because you're doing some wonderful work from an ally-ship lens about how to support women of color communities through issues of sexual violence. But I also am aware that you're talking about women of color coalitions have been working together for centuries to support one another. Are there any present day women of color activists that you think we should be highlighting right now or paying attention to their work more closely than we have?

Chris Linder:       Yes, yes, yes. Sarah Deer is one of them, Lauren Chief Elk, who's active on Twitter, is another person. Lauren Chief Elk has an excellent piece critiquing bystander intervention programs that I think is really important for us to pay attention to as we think about doing education around bystanders. Basically she's critiquing that it recreates patriarchy by setting it up as though women need saving, and usually the saving is done by other men. And then of course there are racialized elements, and even homophobic elements of bystander intervention, depending on how it's taught, so for us to be mindful of that. The women of color ... So it's called Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. I highly recommend that organization. They do some really powerful work. In fact, they're the ones ... I went to a training that they facilitated probably 15 years ago, and it was really a turning point for me in my own development. The book "Color of Violence" came out originally in 2006. It came out again in 2016. Again, that was another one of those books ... it was edited by the Incite Collective. It's another one of those books that really changed the way that I think about the world and really interrupted my understanding of white feminism and sort of dominant ways of thinking about violence. So I think those are really important ones.

Chris Linder:       In the acknowledgments of my book, I talk about the significance of reading and paying attention to non-academic work, which is very, very frequently done by women of color, queer and trans women in blogs, podcasts, a whole number of non-academic sources. And so I do think it's important to pay attention to what folks are doing there. I think the Crunk Feminist Collective is another blog I would recommend that people check out related to this work. Latin Girl Dangerous is another blog that does a good job addressing violence and the intersections of violence and mental health. So yes, there are a number of people that we should all be paying more attention to that actually have very little to do with higher education, but we could all learn a lot from.

Jill Creighton:     I think that's always interesting how in our profession we are so very focused on the four years of our students' lives that happen on our campus communities.

Chris Linder:       Yeah.

Jill Creighton:     And then realizing ... for example, I am partner to a person to a person who works in the private sector, who without the connection to me in the higher education context would never be talking about these issues, ever, other than maybe an HR seminar that no one wants to be at about sexual harassment. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how practitioners can do this interruption work not only on their campuses but in their general communities or with friends and family that are not in the higher ed context?

Chris Linder:       Yeah, that's so important. I mean, I think part of it is just showing up fully and authentically and sort of challenging those notions of ... So one of the ones I feel like I hear so frequently outside of ... I hear it inside institutions of higher education too, but I hear it a lot outside is this notion that if college students would just stop drinking so much there wouldn't be so much sexual violence. And my response to that is that college students drink a lot. It's correlated with everything college students do. So, I don't think that ... the root of sexual violence is power, and if we took away the alcohol, sexual violence would still exist because we're not addressing the root of the issue which is power. Now, that's hard to talk about over Thanksgiving dinner or any other casual places where we might find ourselves with family and friends. But I do think there are ways to interrupt that notion by just saying something like, "Alcohol doesn't cause sexual violence. Other people cause sexual violence. And many times students are drinking as a coping mechanism after an experience with sexual violence, often it doesn't even happen." Just sort of interrupting and making people think differently.

Chris Linder:       Sometimes I think when we get into these conversations with our friends and family, we want them to come where we believe over night, and that's simply not going to happen. And so we need to be comfortable with just putting another perspective out there for people to consider and not shoving it down someone's throat, but actually engaging in a conversation, seeing what we can learn from what they have to say about a topic, and then just actually engaging in a dialog about it rather than putting our fist on the table and saying, "I'm right and you're wrong because I work in higher education so I know everything." But rather actually listening because there could be something that we in higher education could learn from folks outside of higher ed because they're not so in it every single day. They may see things differently than we do. So I think that part is really important.

Chris Linder:       And then I think along with that comes listening to our students and having them give us some insight. One of the things ... So I just did a workshop a few weeks ago with a group of undergraduate students, and I came out with, "I'm here to talk about intersectionality and power." And they're like, "Yeah? What else you got?" They were already there. There was no need to start with ... I'm not saying that's true for all students, but this particular group of students were so unimpressed with my little workshop around intersectionality because they already got it. That was their lived experience. It was largely a room full of queer and trans students who were like, "Yeah, we get this. We live this every day." And so that was an important aha moment for me to have around how important it is for us to step back and listen to our students, especially their experiences. And then also push and challenge. I do struggle with how much our student activists today are heavily focused on policy and response to sexual violence. And I'm worried about what it's doing to our prevention work. And so I think there's a little bit of both/and of listening to students and then also sharing our perspectives for them to consider. Again, not to convince them of anything but just to engage in a dialog and shared thinking about this problem.

Jill Creighton:     And where do you think that student activists today could focus their energy in addition to policy and process response?

Chris Linder:       Yeah, thank you for saying in addition. I appreciate that. It's so interesting to me how in this work we have perpetrators virtually invisible other than in conduct processes. Perpetrators are invisible in bystander intervention. Perpetrators are invisible in orientation. Perpetrators are ... when you go to a college campus, people can spout off statistics about one in four women blah blah, one in five women ... they're very clear on that. But people are really not aware of the fact that in reality, one out of 10 men on our campuses is a perpetrator of sexual violence. That shifts the framework completely. If we can think about, "Holy crap. There are people sitting next to me who have caused harm to another person and I'm not even considering that. I'm thinking of perpetrators of being that "creepy guy off campus" that is following me around or whatever." We're not thinking about the ways that it's showing up on our campuses. So again, I'm not advocating for us to not think about response. I do wish, however, we would talk more frequently about perpetrators and the role of perpetrators and shift our framework a little bit from only teaching people how not to get raped to teaching people how not to rape and teaching people how their behaviors are actually causing harm to other people.

Jill Creighton:     I really appreciate that shift in how do we work to prevent perpetration rather than how do I keep myself safe from potential violence. I think that we're seeing that trend kind of groundswell in turn, but I'm curious to know if there are any campuses that you're aware of that are doing really great work in that area.

Chris Linder:       No. I get this question a lot. I'm not familiar with any. I would love to know if people are doing work around perpetration. I think it's scary for campuses to do this because of liability. If we know we have a perpetrator on our campus and then they go out and perpetrate again, then we are responsible for allowing them to stay on our campuses. So I think we're in a ... it's really hard, I don't think we've figured it out. But I hope that we collectively can come together and figure out what this might look like. This is an area I want to pursue next in my own work is figuring out what might perpetrator intervention programs look like. We have very little scholarship on perpetration on college campuses. Most of the research on perpetration is done on prison populations, which primarily are child molesters and stranger perpetrators, which have a very different pattern than campus perpetrators. 

Chris Linder:       And so I think we need to know more about campus perpetrators. And we also need to be open to the fact that sometimes in fact these perpetrators actually don't know what they're doing, which is really hard for us, especially feminist people, to get our minds around. We are not comfortable saying ... because in some ways that makes us feel like we're letting people off the hook by saying they don't know what they're doing it. But the reality is they've been so heavily socialized as ... in many cases there's such heavy heterosexual male socialization that they genuinely don't actually know that what they're doing is wrong. And those are the students I think we can intervene with and make a huge difference. And that's not bystander intervention. That is direct intervention with people who have the potential to engage in really harmful behaviors by not interrupting the ways that they've been socialized in the peer cultures which they exist in. 

Jill Creighton:     I think that's a great next step for the student affairs profession. Within the student conduct slice of the profession, do you have any advice or thoughts on where you think we should be going?

Chris Linder:       With conduct?

Jill Creighton:     Yeah.

Chris Linder:       I do think ... so actually, yes. I think that we could develop ... So some campuses ... So for example, when I worked at Colorado State University, they had a program there that was around alcohol and drug rehabilitation. And they were one of the first campuses to actually start a program for college students in recovery. Now, many campuses have moved towards doing this now, but I wonder about if there's a way to start a similar program for perpetrators in recovery. So, if you've been identified as someone who has either engaged in perpetration or there have been some behaviors that are pushing it and people have called you out on that, and this could be either voluntary or it could be something that is sort of a sanction, I wonder about if we could develop some education program, if there's some intervention programs through conduct offices. Again, that could be sanctioned or it could be voluntary. But again, I don't know. I'm just starting to dabble in this area, so I know there are people out there who know way more about it than I do. But that's sort of what I'm thinking could be next for conduct offices.

Jill Creighton:     I look forward to reading your research whenever that comes out.

Chris Linder:       That's a long time away, yeah.

Jill Creighton:     We will wait with baited breath then. But Chris, I really appreciate all of your thoughts today. Is there anything else that we didn't get to that you are interested in sharing?

Chris Linder:       Not that I can think of. This was really fun. I appreciate you taking the time to do this and for having such cool questions to engage around.

Jill Creighton:     I appreciate that. We try to keep it interesting for the listeners. And we like to assume that our audience is an incredibly well-educated, very thoughtful audience. And I think they've risen to the occasion with us, which I appreciate, or at least maybe I'm just over self-aggrandizing. That's also possible. But in any case, Chris, we like to ask all of our listeners what you're currently reading. Or sorry, all of our guests, not our listeners.

Chris Linder:       Yeah. I am constantly reading about sexual violence. In fact, my partner gives me a hard time, "Which sexual violence book are you gonna read next?" So I have to be careful and give myself a break from those sometimes. But I'm getting ready to start ... actually I haven't started it yet, but there's a new book out called "Written on the Body" which are letters from trans survivors of sexual violence. So that is on my list. And actually right now I'm reading for my summer classes, so I don't have anything super exciting. But I would say my two favorite books so far of 2018 are Brittney Cooper's "Eloquent Rage." I absolutely loved that book. Even though it wasn't even written for me as a white feminist, I still felt empowered reading that book and just felt so grateful for her voice and her strength. 

Chris Linder:       And then the other book I also really loved was called "When They Call You a Terrorist." It's the Black Lives Matter memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. I found that book to be ... in fact, I'm assigning it in my sexual violence class this summer, because I found that book to be quite helpful in my thinking about what community really should and could look like, and how the world might be different if we actually relied on each other and took care of each other rather than relying on systems to take care of problems like mental health, crime, those pieces. If we actually engaged in community with each other, what the world might look like. And so I just found that to be an incredibly powerful book.

Jill Creighton:     And listeners, I never do this, but I'm also gonna make a book recommendation based on today's episode, which is "The Roundhouse" by Louise Erdich. And it's a novel, not any sort of research, but it's a novel about the story of an indigenous woman who experiences sexual assault in North Dakota. It's a very intense read, but as we continue the conversation about sexual violence and indigenous women, it's definitely something to pick up, but definitely not a light one.

Jill Creighton:     Chris, again, thank you so much for being on the show today. If folks would like to get ahold of you after they listen, how can they do that?

Chris Linder:       Twitter would probably be the best way. It's @proflinder on Twitter. I'm actually in the process of moving jobs. I'm currently at the University of Georgia, but in the fall I will be at the University of Utah, and I don't have my new email address yet. So Twitter is probably the best bet. And then we can connect there and move it to email once I know what my new email will be.

Jill Creighton:     Excellent. And it's @proflinder you said?

Chris Linder:       Yes.

Jill Creighton:     Excellent. And listeners, if you'd like to reach the podcast, you can email us at ASCApodcast@gmail.com. That's A S C A P O D C A S T@gmail.com. Or you can find us on Twitter @ASCApodcast. Thanks so much, Chris, for sharing your viewpoint today.

Chris Linder:       Thank you.

Jill Creighton:     Next time, in two weeks, on the ASCA Viewpoints Podcast, we welcome Dr. Kevin Kruger. You may know Dr. Kruger as the president and CEO of NASPA, Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. Kevin and I will be talking about today's college student from a traditional age perspective and current events in higher ed and how they might apply to your student conduct rules. We hope you come back and join us. 

Jill Creighton:     This episode was produced and hosted by Jill Creighton, that's me, produced, edited, and mixed by Colleen [Mader 00:46:32]. Special thanks to New York University's Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards, and to the University of Oregon's Dean of Students Team for allowing us the time and space to create this project. If you're enjoying the podcast, we ask that you please like, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps others discover us, and helps us become more visible in the general podcasting community. If you have suggestions for future guests, or would like to be featured on the podcast yourself, please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter @ASCApodcast, or by email at ASCApodcast@gmail.com.