ASWSU of

University

Kelsey Phariss
Undergraduate
Researcher
Washington State

Washington State

Date: October 15,

2016
To:
Nikki Finnestead, Green Dot Community Coordinator
Taylor Christenson, ASWSU President
From: Kelsey Phariss, Its On Cougs Director of ASWSU Executive Staf
Subject: Comprehensive climate assessment of undergraduates at Washington State
University
The purpose of this memo is to present the findings of the October 2016
Comprehensive Climate Assessment of Washington State University
undergraduates. This assessment was designed to garner a diversified,
representative body of knowledge through focus groups, online questionnaires, and
in-class assessments with the goal of figuring out what students know about sexual
assault, what they dont know about sexual assault, and how university
administration and affiliated student organizations can use this information to
bolster programs and bring attention to the issue of sexual assault.
Summary
The research yielded diverse, salient data which revealed that the student body at
Washington State University is undereducated in the following fields: how to ask for
consent, how to give clear consent, how alcohol afects consent, what resources the
university provides for survivors and bystanders, and how diferences in culture
afect rape and rape myth acceptance. With this information, we recommend a
repurposed packet with results of the assessment coupled with myriad resources to
provide administrators and student groups with accurate first-hand climate
information, examples of ways to create programmings and presentations using this
information, and ways that we can improve established institutional practices
regarding sexual assault and reporting.
Introduction
Beginning in 2014, Washington State University underwent a national investigation
led by Title IX that dealt with the mishandling of two sexual assault cases in 2007
per the guidelines laid out by the Clery Act of 1990. Presently, the university is still
under investigation because of an inherent lack of victim reporting and the
subsequent climate assessment that came of the investigation.
As a precursor to the continued investigation, in the recently released 2016 Annual
Security and Fire Report done by the University Police Department in conjunction
with the Student Conduct Board, the statistics for sexual assaults from 2013 to 2015
is as follows:

Per the CDC, 54% of rapes go unreported (2) and approximately 1 in 4 women are
sexually assaulted in college. (3) Using the Table above as a reference, its
statistically probable that 3,900 rapes occur each year (when 30,000 students
attend the university, 52% of them women) and 2,106 of them go unreported.
Keeping this number in mind, the fact that only 16 sexual assaults went on record in
2015 is unsettling.
Per a study conducted by The Students Center of Health at West Virginia University,
one of the primary reasons for this phenomenon is universities around the country
are misreporting the total number of sexual assaults on campus to provide the
faade of a safer campus for future students, thus perpetuating rape culture. (3)
Furthermore, Washington State University did not have an official center for sexual
assault training for incoming freshman students until ten years ago, and that center
was only given 10-minutes to speak to incoming students at Alive!, Washington
State Universitys freshman orientation. It wasnt until last year that the university
allotted 30-minutes to this program. However, there is still no university-required
seminar, programming, or class that gives students the tools they need to
recognize, identify, and respond to sexual assault on campus.
As a result of this, university students feel that they have an inherent lack of
information regarding sexual assault, and the results of the assessment confirmed
this notion. This assessment helps pinpoint areas in need of educational reform, and
will give administrators and university programs the tools they need to target
aspects of sexual assault that students need to learn.
Furthermore, alongside this information, we have partnered with Green Dot the
university bystander training program for healthy relationships to give
administrations helpful packets and pamphlets that will aid them in their endeavor
to create community response teams, programmings, and programs for students on
campus. As a result of this study, we have accrued enough information to establish
a cohesive informational packet to aid in the progressive movement through
Washington State University Administration to decrease sexual assault on campus.
Research Methods
Our research began with an interview with Nikki Finnestead, Green Dot and violence
Prevention Coordinator on campus to acquire permission to use a sexual assault
assessment for a community-wide report. After obtaining these permissions, she
told us that we need to make sure that we are reaching as diverse a population as
possible to provide the most salient data. Make sure you have questions pertaining

to personal diferences, cultural diferences, and that you are making sure to ask
delving, probing in your anonymous surveys, said Nikki.
We based our initial assessment outline on the 2011 Texas Needs Assessment by
Noel Bridget, and made sure that our questions addressed the wider issues
pertaining to what students currently know about consent and sexual assault, what
they would like to know, and outlets we can use to reach them successfully. The
project consisted of several cohesive steps, as listed below:
1. Drafting the assessment
2. Distributing it to campus administration and monitoring it to make sure it
reached classrooms and was emailed out to students
3. Coordinated with Alternatives to Violence in the Palouse and Green Dot to
organize focus groups with Residence Hall freshman, Division-One athletes on
campus, and Greek community members.
4. Over the course of the next few weeks, we compiled the data and created an
organized informational packet that we will distribute to campus information
centers, Health and Wellness centers, classrooms, and administrative offices
to promote change, help engage the community, and show areas in which we
need to improve.
The task schedule was as follows:
Tasks
Reviewing
policies
and
literary
review
Create
evaluation
and
assessmen
ts, plan
focus
groups with
facilitators
Send out
assessmen
ts to
classes and
student
emails,
begin focus
groups
Finish focus
groups
Begin to
compile
data
Prepare
report and
send it out

to
administrat
ors

23

25
30
October

10
16
November

22

1. Reviewing Policies and Literary Review

This step was instrumental in the success of our study, and we compiled the
assessment by comparing our questions to that of studies at other universities so
that we could examine what they did wrong, what they did right, and base our
assessment of those qualities so that we dont have to navigate the errors faced by
those researchers during their assessments. First, we looked at studies taken in the
western part of the United States in the hopes that those campuses would match
the climate of our campus more than a school in the easternmost part of the
country would. Second, we compared the outlines of the assessments with the ones
provided through Green Dot in the hopes of avoiding any legal troubles associated
with an assessment of this nature.
2. Create evaluation and assessments, plan focus groups with facilitators
After collaborating with Nikki and the team at Green Dot, we scheduled focus
groups with Residence Hall freshman, Greek students, and student athletes. Next,
we reached out to the head of diferent departments to see who would be willing to
distribute the assessment to freshman and senior classes around campus. The
reason we chose freshman and seniors as benchmarks is because freshman are still
new to college, within their first semester and have just been exposed to the
required freshman trainings. Seniors, on the other hand, have not had trainings for
up to four years, and have been exposed to media reports of sexual assault since
they enrolled in college.
We sent out the assessment to students enrolled in Womens studies, Gender
studies, Psychology and Sociology students, as well as a mix of Communications
and English classes. Then, we collaborated with ATVP advocators on campus
because facilitation training for focus groups can take up to three months, and
hosted multiple focus groups to garner information to answer the key questions
posited in the introduction.
3. Finish focus groups and begin to compile data
After the focus groups were finished and students who wanted to had the chance
to complete the online and in-class assessments, we started to pool together the
data into specific sections: percentage of students who answered yes or no to all
the online questionnaires with filters for age group, gender and ethnicity, and then
we summarized the answers from our focus groups so that we could deliver
digestible information to student resource centers and administrators.
4. Prepare report and send out to administrators

After completing the steps from number four, we created a packet with all the
information gathered and sent it of to the Office of Equal Opportunity, Planned
Parenthood representatives on campus, Alternatives to Violence on the Palouse,
Green Dot, Health and Wellness centers around campus, the Dean of Students
office, G.I.E.S.O.R.C., Gay-Straight Alliance, ASWSUs Its On Cougs campaign, the
CFSL, and every Greek student body president in the hopes that students and
administrators can use this information to engage the student body, inspire
dialogue, and come up with climate-applicable solutions to this problem for students
on our campus.
Results
As stated in some of the previous sections the results indicated that students on
campus are lacking cohesive information in the following areas:
1. Consent
a. What consent means
b. How to ask for consent
c. How consent if afected by alcohol
d. How do you truly know if yes means yes, and what coercive
behaviors look like
2. Resources
a. Where you can go for student accommodations
b. Who you report to on-campus versus who you report to in a police
station
c. How are rape kits tested? Why dont victims get to see their results?
d. What can the school do for someone sufering from PTSD?
3. What constitutes as rape
a. What is sexual assault versus rape?
b. How can you tell if you have been sexually coerced, or if you sexually
coerced someone else?
c. How does alcohol afect your rights as a complainant and respondent?
When compared to the results from Breitenbechers studies on Sexual Assault on
College Campuses and Gidyczs et. al study on sexual assault assessments, its
clear that knowledge around consent is a problem. In these two studies, the most
commonly reported question was, How do you know if you get consent?
In our own study, sexual consent was a grey area, and many university men dont
really understand the logistics behind asking for it. Its definitely a huge problem
for the Greek population, says Zac Thomas, President of Sigma Pi Fraternity. Men
at wazzu have had no real training for asking for consent, and in when youre in a
small, isolated college town filled to the brim with alcohol, its sadly not surprising
that you have women caught in the crosshairs.
These results indicated that students at Washington State University have a
profound lack of knowledge surrounding the issue of sexual assault, and when
compared to the studies mentioned above, its clear that this is a national
phenomenon. Noels Sexual needs Assessment in Texas concluded that the majority
of perpetrators and victims didnt understand the logistics of sexual assault,

consent, and sexual violence, especially when alcohol was involved. In Gidyczs et.
al. experiment, students at universitys around the United States also gave
conflicting reports on the logistics of consent, claiming that alcohol didnt influence
peoples actions.
The results of this study indicated much of the same phenomenon, concluding that
students dont have a clear picture of consent, rape, or sexual assault on a
widespread scale.
Conclusions
The conclusions of this study indicate that the lack of knowledge surrounding
consent on campus is perpetuating the prevalence of sexual assault on campus,
and the inherent lack of reporting. As mentioned in the Introduction (see above), per
the CDC, 54% of rapes go unreported (2) and approximately 1 in 4 women are
sexually assaulted in college. (3) At Washington State University, its statistically
probable that 3,900 rapes occur each year (when 30,000 students attend the
university, 52% of them women) and 2,106 of them go unreported.
We interviewed over 2,000 students total, which represents about 6.67% of the total
student population. While this is a relative sample of the student population,
Greeks, student athletes, and college freshman are some of the most sexually
targeted groups on campus (3). The relationship between the inherent lack of
information and the inherent lack of victim reporting corroborate the idea that
because students dont know about sexual assault laws, consent logistics, or
resources for survivors, sexual assaults are happening with alarming frequency, and
students arent reporting the events.
In truth, these results were expected. As a collegiate senior, after interviewing the
participants for the study, it became very clear in the beginning of the research that
students had a profound lack of knowledge in these areas. Even in a lot of my
classes, theres a huge disparity between what people know, and what they think
they know in regards to sexual consent, said Amanda Moss, Communications major
and Womens Studies minor. A lot of our discussions revolve around why people are
so misinformed, and its because theres a not a lot of knowledge regarding what
resources students have to actually learn the information.
The data we collected reveals that because there is an inherent lack of knowledge
surrounding sexual assault, we need to implement changes in established
institutional administrations and established programs for sexual assault education,
because these results indicate that they are not efective in educating the student
body, and they are not reaching a large enough population.
Recommendation
Based on the garnered information, the recommendation for implementation is
after each group gets the packet of information they review their programs and
seminars and adjust the material presented to target the gaps of information
presented in the results. Implementational actions could include:

1. Giving Green Dot and Alternatives to Violence in the Palouse more than 30minutes during Alive!, and instead a registered session that all students have
to attend that addresses bystander training, interventional tactics, and how
to see if someone is consensual.
2. Having required UCORE courses on comprehensive sexual assault education,
i.e. managing healthy relationships, consistently asking for consent, how to
tell if you have not been given consent, and what resources our campus has
for survivors and people afected by this issue.
3. At the beginning of the semester, have every UCORE class show a short
video on sexual assault possibly one provided/created by the university
and how students can respond to the issue.
4. Distribute pamphlets with sexual assault information to every Residence Hall
once a month throughout the year.
5. Host Greek chapter and student athlete programming events where program
coordinators, sexual assault advocates, and trained facilitators teach
students about sexual assault as a holistic issue.
6. Have annual climate assessment surveys sent out at the end of every
academic year to both the student body and the administration to see how
people think sexual assault campaigns on campus were either successful or
not successful.
The root of the issue is an inherent lack of education, and posited by the results of
this study. The solution, therefore, is to fill the informational gaps established by the
results of the study, and attempt to dissolute the educational discrepancies
surrounding sexual assault. The result of this information being distributed and used
in a wide array of presentations and educational outreach programs will be a
decrease in rates of sexual assault on campus, an increase in reporting and survivor
safety, and a cohesive funnel of information readily available to the student body
throughout the year. The main recommendation, therefore, is to use this information
to adjust established programs to make them more efective in reducing sexual
assault on campus.
Works Cited
Breitenbecher, K. (2000). Sexual assault on college campuses: Is an ounce of
prevention
enough? Applied & Preventive Psychology : Journal of the
American Association of
Applied and Preventive Psychology., 9(1), 23-52.
Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistic. (n.d.).
The Vast Majority of Perpetrators Will Not Go to Jail or Prison. Retrieved October 5,
2016, from https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
Facts at a Glance 2012 - Centers for Disease Control and ... (2012). Retrieved
October 5, 2016, from
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/svdatasheet-a.pdf
Gidycz, C. A., Hanson, K. and Layman, M. J. (1995), A PROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF
THE RELATIONSHIPS
AMONG SEXUAL ASSAULT EXPERIENCES An

Extension of Previous Findings. Psychology of

doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1995.tb00276.x

Women Quarterly, 19: 529.

Noel, Bridget. Sexual Assault Needs Assessment in Texas: Documenting Existing

Conditions and Striving
Towards Preferred Outcomes. Austin, TX: Institute on Domestic Violence and
Sexual Assault,
2011.