The Dartmouth Summit on Sexual Assault concluded its open sessions Tuesday, and attendees worked in groups on key issues surrounding sexual assault on Wednesday and Thursday.
Working groups focused on prevention and education, direct service and response, confidentiality and legal issues, investigations and accountability and research and assessment. There, experts and practitioners developed specific policy recommendations and materials to share with colleges and universities. The working groups will continue to develop these recommendations over the next year.
Researcher and forensic consultant David Lisak, who came up with the idea for the summit and working groups, said the concept came from his experiences holding trainings and conferences and consulting with universities around the country.
“What I was encountering really at every college and every university were the same kinds of questions and frustrations, and the people at these institutions were trying to figure out how to best respond to sexual assault, how to navigate through the various federal guidelines and laws and regulations,” he said. “What I saw was every institution trying to figure this out on their own.”
While those he spoke to reacted enthusiastically to the idea of the summit, it took Lisak three years to find an institution that would host the conference, largely due to the expense and staffing that it would require. Even the White House was interested in hosting, but did not have the funds, he said. A Geisel School of Medicine professor contacted Lisak after hearing about his idea, asking him to email outgoing Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson. Within several weeks, Lisak had word Dartmouth would host.
Since he had never worked with the College and knew of its troubles with sexual assault, he was skeptical at first that Dartmouth was serious about the summit, Lisak said. The College’s commitment soon became clear, he said.
“There were no limits, no contingencies, no nothing,” he said. “They were willing to put the idea in practice, the exact idea that I had been dreaming about.”
Johnson said she hopes that hosting the summit will be further evidence of the seriousness with which Dartmouth takes this issue, and that senior leadership and the administration are determined to “do what’s right.”
To Lisak, the best part of the conference were the working days, in which 75 to 80 professionals, including students, from across the country worked together on projects.
Several institutions have indicated that they will support the proposals of the working groups, which will be released in the next year.
“I think, well, we’re not going to make everything perfect, but I think this will have a very positive impact in a very serious way,” he said.
The most important contribution this summit will have on the issue of sexual assault is that it brought together of many different perspectives and roles, including student life professionals, students, Title IX coordinators and university attorneys, provost Carolyn Dever said. Past conferences have focused only on the perspectives of individual groups.
“This is a very complicated problem and challenges universities and colleges in many different ways, so having the mix of expertise is going to be important for us finding new solutions,” she said.
Dever said she found the “Sexual Assault on Campus: Federal Perspectives” panel particularly powerful, since it offered some clarity on different standards. Dever also commended the working group element of the summit, since it will have “tangible outcomes,” she said.
It takes “some guts” for Dartmouth to take leadership on an issue like sexual assault, Dever said. While she said she cannot answer whether sexual assault is more prevalent at the College than at other institutions, she said it is a positive sign that Dartmouth will stand up and convene experts from across the country to address sexual assault. At the other educational institutions she has worked at during her career, sexual assault has always been an issue, and she said she is proud to now work at a college that hosts such a conference and works to come up with constructive solutions, Dever said.
“Sexual assault is sensitive, frightening, intimate — it pushes people’s buttons,” she said. “It transforms lives, and not in a positive way, and to be a school that’s actually committed to meeting and finding solutions, means we have to go through some painful discussions.”
Tori Nevel ’16 attended every open event of the summit. She said she found the sessions useful and that she feels she can better understand issues surrounding sexual assault, as well as problems for colleges addressing these issues — especially surrounding Title IX — moving forward.
The summit shows how far the College has come, she said, since sexual assault was something that was not spoken about publicly until recently.
“I think it’s very important that Dartmouth hosted this summit just to reaffirm that Dartmouth does have a commitment to ending sexual assault,” she said.
Nevel hopes to see the College work more with the surrounding community, place students and survivors on decision-making boards and have more transparency regarding sexual assault, following recommendations researchers put forth during the summit.
Casidhe Bethancourt ’16, who served on the summit’s student advisory board, said while she understood the reasoning behind limiting student involvement — that experts in the field have years of experience in areas that students are still grasping — she also felt that it was important to involve student voices, given that students can speak far more effectively to the current environment on college campuses.
SPCSA invited student activists from other colleges who participated in the Summit and created a network so they can move forward together, SPCSA and advisory board member John Damianos ’16 said.
The next summit on sexual assault will likely be in about six months, Lisak said. While organizers originally thought the next summit would be in about a year, they now say the working groups need to meet in person sooner, at a summit that would involve two or three days of work.
While Lisak said he does not know where the next summit will take place, Dartmouth has agreed to continue supporting the working group projects logistically and with staff moving forward.
“We really need that very badly because it’s almost like this has been so successful that we almost weren’t expecting it to be as successful as it was,” Lisak said. “So now we need some help to keep this going.”
