The George Washington University’s Title IX Office has released the results of its 2024 Sexual Harassment Campus Climate Survey (formerly known as the Unwanted Sexual Behavior Survey), showing some good news—for example, a large majority of student responders said they know that consent is required before sexual activity—and also some room for improvement, such as encouraging more people to report instances of unwanted activity.
The most recent previous surveys were done in 2018 and 2014. They had been conducted on a quadrennial schedule, according to Asha Reynolds, assistant provost and the university’s Title IX coordinator, but in its reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2022, Congress directed the secretary of education to develop a standardized survey. The new survey instrument has not yet been made public; to avoid further delay, Reynolds and her team updated their previous survey and released it to a random sample of GW students. The survey went to graduate students as well as undergraduates.
“The results of this survey will help us to focus and tailor our prevention and education efforts campus-wide,” Reynolds said, “and learn where there might be gaps between what we’re doing in response to sexual harassment and students' perceptions.”
The Title IX Office responds to cases of sexual assault, sexual harassment, dating and domestic violence and stalking, and some of those topics were not covered as thoroughly in previous surveys, nor were student perceptions of the campus climate surrounding these issues. Understanding those perceptions will help the Title IX Office shape its prevention work. Community members can request and register for training sessions through the office’s website. Apart from hosting training sessions (some mandatory), the office conducts outreach activities throughout the year.
The results of the survey are valuable for several reasons, said Beth Riley, assistant director of prevention and response in the Title IX office.
“With any campus climate survey like this, you’re going to get some results that are positive and some that might feel more negative, but it's all really essential for us to have this information so we can align our efforts with the needs of our community,” Riley said. “It will offer another source of transparency to our community about what the culture and the climate around these issues looks like on the GW campus and areas where we can improve.”
The questions included in the GW survey are commonly used, Riley said, adding that the survey was developed using federal guidelines and a range of sources to choose questions that felt particularly appropriate for GW. More than 50 questions were included, some of them multipoint questions exploring topics in depth.
It takes some time after the survey is conducted to distill and analyze the data, Reynolds said, as well as to ensure that any responses that included personally identifiable details were anonymized.
“It’s quite a lengthy survey, so it is pretty comprehensive,” Riley said. “There's a lot of information that we got from it, both quantitative and qualitative. We spent a lot of time just reading absolutely everything we got, every single comment, pulling key themes from the qualitative data, looking at key takeaways. We wanted to make sure we were looking at everything really closely and carefully.”
The survey was sent to 6,000 students, with a response rate of around 12%. Of the hundreds of responding students, 59% identified as women and 28% as men. The numbers do not add up to 100 because there were other identifiers people could select as well.
Students were asked whether they understood GW’s procedures for managing acts of sexual harassment and if they had faith in GW’s processes for addressing such behaviors.
“One of our key findings,” Reynolds said, “was that 45% of students responded that they agreed and that they understood GW's procedures. Forty-two percent responded that they had faith in GW's processes, and 20% responded that they were neutral for both of those questions.”
Another important finding, Reynolds said, is that “94% of students indicated that they understood consent and could explain it to someone, while only 57% of students felt that their peers generally understood consent. While the overwhelming majority of people personally agreed that they understood consent, there’s a disconnect between whether they felt that their peers understood consent. I think we can glean from that data that it’s really important to live our values out loud in a way that can communicate that we as an institution have a culture of consent.”
Since it’s impossible to know what’s in someone’s mind, Riley said, there are various possible ways to interpret the discrepancy between the number of students who say they understand the importance of consent and the number who say their peers understand it. Some students, Riley said, may be overconfident about their understanding of consent.
“Obviously we cannot know for certain, but I think people might care about consent and practice it in their day-to-day life, but it might also be something kind of private. They’re not talking about it. And even if we believe in something really dearly, if we’re not telling other people about it and communicating about it, they would never know. So living your values out loud—demonstrating what matters to you in a way that others can see—can influence the culture,” Riley said.
“The good news is that 92% of students reported being very likely to stop having sex with a partner if they say to stop, even if things started consensually,” Reynolds said. “Ninety percent of students said that they would stop sexual activity when asked to, even if they are already sexually aroused or have removed clothes. Those are really high numbers. They’re not 100%, which demonstrates that there’s still room for improvement and understanding what consent looks like. But it’s very positive that the vast majority of students reported that they were very likely to seek consent.”
Riley too said she was encouraged by the findings around prevention-related behaviors, with many students saying they would be likely to intervene if they saw sexual harassment in progress but echoed Reynolds in saying that there is always room for improvement. She would like to see more people reporting incidents of concern.
“We do see a pretty low level of people actually reporting,” Riley said. “That’s consistent with these types of harm nationwide. Of those who reported that they had experienced an act of sexual harassment, only 10% of them actually made a report. And of those students, most of them did come to the Title IX office. But again, that's under-reporting. We want to make sure folks feel comfortable coming forward and accessing resources.”
The most common reason for not reporting incidents was that students didn’t necessarily think what happened was significant enough, either because they didn’t feel they were harmed or weren’t sure their experience counted. The takeaway for her office, Riley said, is to emphasize the various ways sexual harassment can take place and what the office can offer in those situations.
Another finding was that student awareness surrounding Title IX issues declines by degrees after the first year, as memories of the training required for all first-year students fade. In response, the office has added optional training for graduate students to its website and will be sending outreach to academic programs. In addition, booster sessions will be offered via Zoom throughout October.
Some students suggested that the university implement things it is already doing, Riley said. “Sometimes people would say they want to see online reporting options, which is something we have in place, or opportunities to do anonymous reporting, which we also have in place. People asked for annual disclosures of reporting numbers, which we do in our annual report.” The takeaway, Riley said, is that her office needs to more broadly publicize existing resources and options.
