Frameworks of Sexual Assault: Socialization, Institutionalization, Mitigation

 

By: Isabel Dianatnejad

Edited By: Rose Kores

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On April 21, 1975, Lin Farley testified before the New York City Commission on Human Rights at a hearing on women in the workplace, bringing the term sexual harassment into public discourse. Her testimony grew out of consciousness-raising sessions she began while teaching at Cornell University in 1974, where women recognized that their experiences of workplace intimidation reflected a shared power structure rather than isolated personal calamities. Women described abandoning professional opportunities, leaving their jobs, and withdrawing from education after enduring harassment. Three years after her testimony, Farley published Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job (1978), where she consolidated her findings on the relationship between male sexual aggression and women’s economic dependence.¹ Nearly fifty years later, her work continues to be significant because it demonstrates the manner in which collective recognition can transform experiences once treated as private suffering into a public and political problem.

Power Dynamics Forged Through Social Relations

​ Women are conditioned to preempt male aggression to prevent violence, only to face scrutiny for their choices when violence occurs. From childhood, girls are taught that unwanted attention signifies affection, that male persistence is romantic, and that refusing unwanted advances risks appearing unkind or unreasonable. When violence occurs, the questions frequently shift toward behavior: why they trusted someone, entered a particular setting, delayed reporting, or failed to anticipate danger. The responsibility for preventing violence consequently falls upon women, while the social expectations that normalize male entitlement remain insufficiently challenged.

Sexual violence must therefore be understood as more than an individual act of aggression. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975) by Susan Brownmiller conceptualizes rape as a means of intimidation with consequences that extend past individual survivors to women as a class, restricting their movements and participation in public life.² Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) examines the cultural representations through which women become objects of male possession and sexual domination.³ Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved (1981) challenges simplistic accounts of female passivity through research on primate behavior and female social strategies.⁴ In Audre Lorde’s collection of essays published as Sister Outsider (1984), one piece, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” analyzes the existence of “womanhating as a resource of the powerless” as a precursor to “sexualized aggression”, believing the only way to abolish rape is the revolt of women and the consciousness of responsibility among men.⁵

The consequences extend into women’s material conditions. They may abandon employment and their education, withdraw from social networks, or avoid public spaces because the threat of sexual violence makes participation costly. These decisions can restrict income, professional advancement, educational attainment, and independence even when no formal complaint is ever filed. Women are expected to anticipate male behavior, reorganize their lives around potential danger, and absorb the consequences when their precautions fail. As feminist researchers and theorists have posited, policymaking would be most effective if it primarily examined how contemporary families, peer groups, schools, and workplaces establish expectations of male authority and shape the consequences of challenging it.

There are substantial difficulties in measuring sexual violence because shame, stigma, victim-blaming, and fear of retaliation can discourage disclosure. Women may experience conduct they recognize as unwanted without identifying it as assault, while others may understand that they have been violated but are silenced out of fear of losing employment, housing, education, or social support if they report it.⁶ Geppert, Shah, and Hirsch’s 2024 systematic review of 68 studies examines associations between sexual and gender-based violence and academic results, including attendance, academic performance, motivation, engagement, satisfaction, and retention. One 1998 analysis described students feeling “hardly able to move, much less open a book.”⁷ One cross-sectional study from 2020 found that 47% of students began experiencing inadequate study skills, and 66% could no longer concentrate.⁷ In one 2014 study, the percent of students with GPAs less than 2.5 nearly doubled for those who reported sexual assault.⁷ One Swiss survey of over 6,000 school students found that 22% of girls and 8% of boys have experienced sexual assault but only 3-5% reported the abuse.⁸ 

Students may continue attending classes while struggling to concentrate, avoiding particular settings, withdrawing from peers, or changing their fields of study. Others may interrupt or abandon their education entirely, losing the time and financial resources they have invested in their studies, as well as future professional opportunities. These consequences can influence subsequent employment and economic independence. Universities should therefore treat the preservation of educational opportunity as part of their responsibilities toward students affected by sexual violence.

These constraints reveal the limits of formal equality. Women may possess the legal right to work, study, travel, and participate in public life, yet the threat of sexual violence still shapes the practical terms of that participation. A woman who avoids a professional opportunity because it requires unsafe travel loses more than a single opportunity; she may also lose income, experience, and access to future advancement. A student who withdraws from a course to avoid an alleged perpetrator may face academic consequences long after the incident. These findings show that sexual violence operates through both direct coercion and the restrictions women impose upon themselves to navigate environments in which safety cannot be ensured. This resulting reduction in autonomy has real consequences for women everywhere, even when it never appears in an institutional record.​

Higher Education and the Police

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2004 sexual violence prevention pamphlet distinguishes primary prevention, which seeks to prevent violence before it occurs, from interventions addressing its immediate aftermath and longer-term consequences.⁹ This framework provides an important foundation, but the distribution of institutional resources and accountability mechanisms call for more examination. Universities, employers, and public agencies often establish reporting procedures, investigative processes, and disciplinary mechanisms after misconduct occurs. These functions are necessary, yet their existence does not establish whether institutions have reduced the conditions that fuel sexual violence. An institution may satisfy formal compliance requirements while leaving intact the organizational culture, power imbalances, and financial dependencies that perpetuate women’s vulnerability to harm.

An institution can receive, investigate, adjudicate, and close a complaint, allowing it to document completion of a bureaucratic process. Prevention demands sustained investment in education, staff training, independent oversight, and the evaluation of whether existing institutional practices actually reduce harm. When performance is measured primarily through completed investigations and documented compliance, preventive work may receive less attention than procedures that yield easily counted outcomes. Administrative completion becomes a substitute for demonstrating real change. Policy must therefore assess institutional performance according to whether women can safely participate in education and employment, whether recurring misconduct is addressed, and whether reporting produces credible accountability.

Without systematic records, it is difficult to measure the methods and frequency with which universities respond to sexual assault. Universities should document the types of sanctions imposed following substantiated violations, including educational assignments, probation, suspension, and expulsion, while distinguishing allegations from findings of responsibility. Aggregate reporting should also identify relevant differences in outcomes across offense categories and institutional processes, subject to appropriate privacy protections and safeguards against re-identification. Without this data, students, researchers, policymakers, and the public have limited ability to evaluate whether disciplinary practices are consistent, proportionate, or effective.

The absence of publicly available aggregate data can make it difficult to evaluate institutional practices, even when the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is invoked to justify withholding individual records. Universities should publish de-identified statistics on reported allegations, adjudicated findings, sanction categories, and the implementation of disciplinary outcomes, with appropriate safeguards for small populations and sensitive cases. Institutions should explain their data definitions, reporting periods, and privacy-protection methods so outcomes can be compared meaningfully across time and, where appropriate, across institutions. Additionally, institutions should be accountable for how they investigate allegations, how they reach findings, and what consequences follow.

The “blue wall of silence,” an informal code through which police officers refrain from reporting or testifying against colleagues accused of misconduct, illustrates how institutional loyalty can obstruct accountability and discourage disclosure. Officers who break this code may face ostracism, professional retaliation, or other forms of punishment, creating incentives to protect colleagues rather than expose wrongdoing. Similar mechanisms of socialization can operate within university Greek life, where group loyalty, shared identities, and the threat of social exclusion may discourage members from reporting misconduct by fellow members.¹⁰ In both settings, informal expectations of solidarity can compete with formal obligations to report wrongdoing, allowing institutional or group reputation to take precedence over the safety of those harmed. Addressing underreporting therefore requires protecting whistleblowers, challenging cultures of complicity, and ensuring that individuals can report misconduct without jeopardizing their professional or social standing.

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Negative Externalities: Fiscal and Physical Costs of Violence

Both an individual’s health and economic status is jeopardized when confronting abuse. A woman may remain in an unsafe workplace because she cannot afford to lose her wages or continue living with an abusive partner because she lacks alternative housing. A student may avoid reporting an assault because the accused controls her access to a social network, or because a disruption in enrollment could threaten her scholarship or housing. In each case, formal rights exist alongside constraints that make exercising them costly. Economic insecurity does not cause perpetrators to commit violence, nor does financial independence guarantee safety; rather, economic resources affect the alternatives available to women resisting coercion. 

Effective policy would also prioritize the socioeconomic position of sexual assault victims. Despite an economic impact of nearly $1 trillion ($~920 billion) USD and occurring 2.5 times as often as cardiovascular disease ($~530 billion), cancer ($~230 billion), diabetes ($~240 billion), and HIV/AIDS ($~50 billion) combined, government funding towards sexual assault is minuscule, with a 0.09% public spending-to-economic-burden ratio for violence in general as opposed to a 7.72% ratio for HIV/AIDS.⁷ Workplace harassment also illustrates how economic dependence is able to amplify male power. Employment provides not only income but also professional advancement, social networks, and future opportunities, all of which supervisors or colleagues may influence. When a person with authority uses that position to demand sexual attention, refusal can appear to threaten several resources simultaneously.¹ A worker with savings, secure housing, and alternative employment may have more options for leaving an unsafe workplace than someone whose wages barely cover rent and food. This disparity concerns the cost of resistance, not the legitimacy of the right to refuse. Therefore, prohibitions on harassment must include credible protections against retaliation and access to the resources workers need to exercise those protections.

The health-related consequences of sexual violence include, but are not limited to, physical, reproductive, and psychological effects, including chronic pain, sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).⁶ In fact, multiple studies find a lifetime prevalence of PTSD in 30-94% of survivors who have experienced sexual abuse, and 50% of women still suffer disabling symptoms of stress even with counseling.⁶ These consequences may interact with employment disruption, social withdrawal, and increased need for medical care, rendering recovery more difficult when support is inaccessible. A survivor who loses income may struggle to obtain treatment, while interrupted education or employment may further restrict victims’ future resources. The costs are distributed across survivors, families, health services, educational institutions, employers, and public agencies, yet those responsible for failing to prevent violence may bear only a fraction of the consequences. This disparity underscores the need to examine whether institutional funding and accountability structures adequately incentivize effective prevention and support.

Survivor services must consequently be treated as a legislative obligation rather than an optional provision. Access to health care, counseling, stable housing, employment protections, academic accommodations, and legal help can determine whether a woman can leave a dangerous environment and recover her independence. When these services operate through disconnected systems, survivors are required to navigate different eligibility requirements and repeatedly explain their circumstances while managing the consequences of violence. Universities should coordinate counseling, academic adjustments, housing support, and safety measures so that students are not forced to sacrifice their education to avoid further contact with an alleged perpetrator. Public agencies and employers must similarly ensure that access to assistance does not depend on a survivor’s ability to shoulder substantial financial or bureaucratic burdens.

Policy Recommendations 

Schools should provide age-appropriate education on consent, boundaries, coercion, and harassment, while guaranteeing that adults in positions of authority are subject to credible oversight. Universities and employers must examine recurring patterns of misconduct, defend individuals from retaliation, and evaluate whether their procedures work in practice rather than merely existing on paper. Independent review and public reporting of de-identified outcomes can help reveal disparities in disciplinary practices and determine whether institutions disproportionately rely on educational sanctions when stronger consequences may be warranted. Prevention should be evaluated using evidence on institutional behavior, student safety, reporting accessibility, and outcomes for those affected.

Research dedicated to women must accompany these commitments. Longitudinal and mixed-methods studies can help establish how sexual violence affects educational persistence, employment continuity, as well as health and housing stability over time. Institutions must maintain consistent records that distinguish allegations, findings, and sanctions, permitting researchers and legislators to assess whether interventions are effective. FERPA should be applied in ways that protect identifiable student information without treating confidentiality as a justification for withholding all aggregate information about institutional performance. Clear reporting standards would promote public accountability while curtailing the risk of exposing survivors or allegations without established responsibility. 

Recognition of this system alone does not dismantle the material conditions through which oppression is reproduced. A worker may know that harassment is prohibited and still fear losing her livelihood; a student may understand university policy and still distrust the process behind its enforcement. Women are expected to remain vigilant while institutions often evaluate their performance through procedures rather than the conditions those procedures are meant to change. Women are expected to anticipate male aggression, manage its consequences, and navigate support systems that may demand considerable time and money. Universities cannot demonstrate that they adequately protect students simply by maintaining a reporting system or imposing temporary sanctions after misconduct has been established. Nor can legal recognition alone secure autonomy when women lack the resources to refuse coercion, leave unsafe environments, or continue their education without penalty. The measure of progress must be whether women gain greater control over the material and institutional conditions of their lives.

Women’s rights cannot be assessed solely by the existence of laws, policies, or disciplinary mechanisms. It must be measured by their capacity to participate in public life without continually organizing their choices around the foresight of male violence, and to exercise their rights without forfeiting the means of survival. The responsibility for change belongs not to the women who must survive violence, but to the social institutions and power structures that shape the conditions under which it occurs.

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Works Cited

 

 

1. Farley, Lin. 1980. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job. Warner Books. 
2. Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Penguin Random House.
3. Dworkin, Andrea. 1981. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Putnam.
4. Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 1981. The Woman That Never Evolved. Harvard University Press.
5. Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, edited by Nancy K. Bereano, 114-123. Crossing Press.
6. Jina, Ruxana, and Leena S. Thomas. 2013. “Health Consequences of Sexual Violence Against Women.” Best Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology 27 (1): 15–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2012.08.012.
7. Geppert, Angela B., Aarushi H. Shah, and Jennifer S. Hirsch. 2024. “‘Hardly Able to Move, Much Less Open a Book’: A Systematic Review of the Impact of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Victimization on Educational Trajectories.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25 (2): 1129-1149. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231173430.
8. Dartnall, Elizabeth, and Rachel Jewkes. 2013. “Sexual Violence Against Women: The Scope of the Problem.” Best Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology   27 (1): 3–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2012.08.002.
9. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (U.S.). 2004. Sexual Violence Prevention: Beginning the Dialogue. Division of Violence Prevention. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/43233.
10. Rostami, Arian, Monica Burman, Mehdi Ghazinour, and Jonas Hansson. 2025. “Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment Against Police Employees in European Countries: A Scoping Review.” Journal of Sexual Aggression 31 (1): 33–52. doi:10.1080/13552600.2024.2316156.

 

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Author Bio