This session will unpack the principles of restorative ju stice and transformative justice and what they can best be used for. It will explore the recent efforts within higher education to implement restorative justice practices in sexual harassment, sexual violence, and sexual misconduct cases and lesson learned from practitioners.

Few studies evaluating efforts to address sexual harassment in higher education have been undertaken, making it challenging to determine whether those efforts are effective, ineffective, or even harmful in application. This session will feature three presentations that will provide insight into evaluating efforts to address sexual harassment, including prevention, response, remediation, and procedural-based interventions, among others. Speakers will discuss the newly released paper, “Approaches to the Evaluation of Sexual Harassment Prevention and Response Efforts,” from the Evaluation Working Group of the Action Collaborative, as well as the Conflict Resolution, Accountability, Respectful Interactions, Ethics, and Supportive Environments (CARES) Survey and the Effect Modifier Assessment (EMA).

This presentation will provide an overview of the legal framework that governs IHEs’ response to allegations of sexual misconduct in the patient care context and set forth concrete recommendations for how IHEs can mitigate risk and coordinate an effective response, with a focus on improving existing policies and reducing power differentials.

Although trauma-informed principles are becoming more central to campus efforts to respond to sexual harassment and violence, institutions of higher education have been less attentive to whether (and how well) university websites help survivors and bystanders to figure out what support is available to them, and what actions they might wish to take, following incidents of sexual misconduct.  This session will examine the growing movement among web designers to incorporate trauma-informed principles, detail ongoing research on the impact of web design and content on student survivors, and introduce a new website at the University of New Mexico that helps staff and faculty navigate their options for responding to sexual harassment and other harms. 

Please take this time to view the posters, interact with presenters in-person or online, and enjoy refreshments provided for in-person attendees.

Join us for a networking session to connect with other attendees over refreshments. We encourage virtual attendees to utilize the "Attendee Directory" for virtual networking,

Sexual harassment happens everywhere and so are efforts to address and prevent it. This session will explore efforts internationally that are working to address and prevent sexual harassment, in hopes of learning lessons and advancing the work beyond the bounds of any one country. 

The Department of Education’s amendments to Title IX regulations are anticipated to be released in October of this year. Some of the proposed changes will be relevant to ongoing conversations at many institutions of higher education around creating inclusive environments for transgender, non-binary, and pregnant individuals in academia. This moderated discussion will feature three speakers who can provide insights into the intersection of Title IX rules and regulations and the experiences of transgender, non-binary, and pregnant individuals.

Historically, much of the research on bystander intervention in academia has focused on improving bystander behaviors in undergraduate populations. Only recently have organizations’ interest in and attention to bystander intervention trainings that focus on workplace environments affecting faculty, staff, and graduate students increased. This lack of bystander intervention resources specifically catered to faculty, staff, and graduate students may be attributed to the complex work environments that make it hard for these individuals to intervene. This session will explore these complexities and some efforts at campuses to develop bystander intervention programs for these communities.

Institutions of higher education (IHEs) are confronting a systemic challenge in which faculty or staff who have been found responsible for sexual or gender harassment are able to transition from one IHE to another without the new employer’s knowledge of prior misconduct. This is often known as “passing the harasser” and may enable known harassers to withdraw from ongoing investigations before a conclusion is reached and sanctions are enforced. This session will debut a paper by the Response Working Group of the Action Collaborative, entitled “Exploring Policies to Prevent ‘Passing the Harasser’ in Higher Education” which looks at the decision points associated with the development and implement of anti-passing-the-harasser policies that augment background checks and other information-gathering strategies during the hiring process. It will also feature a presentation from Boston University about their work with the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM’s Ethical Transparency Tool (ETT), which is being piloted this year as a tool that IHEs can use to support their policies and procedures.