A year after Indiana University Bloomington joined a national program to end sexual violence on campuses, a plan has been formulated to improve policies, practices and procedures.

Through the university’s participation in the Culture of Respect Collective, IU Bloomington’s initiative co-chairs and committee members will use the next year to achieve goals that were identified through the assessment process based on six Culture of Respect pillars:

• Survivor support
• Clear policies
• Multitiered education
• Public disclosure
• Schoolwide mobilization
• Ongoing self-assessment

“Indiana University takes seriously the goal of addressing sexual violence on college campuses, and its improvement plan for the Bloomington campus reflects that commitment,” said Kelly Hogan, associate vice provost for health and well-being in the Office of Student Life. “Our goal is to implement changes that are sustainable and enduring, and involve the cooperation and collaboration of students, faculty and staff so that everyone feels supported and understands how IU is working to the greater goal.”

One of the goals is to create targeted messaging campaigns each semester about the supportive measures available to students who have experienced sexual misconduct before coming to IU.

“There are a lot of students that come to IU who have already experienced trauma or sexual abuse,” said initiative co-chair Jennifer Kincaid, IU’s associate vice president of institutional equity, Title IX coordinator and ADA coordinator. “We have resources to help those students, but we need to make sure they know about and can connect to these services.”

Other goals include:

• Meeting twice a semester with the student group that has been created to support sexual violence prevention and survivor support.
• Creating a four-year plan with students trained on a different topic each year: bystander intervention; healthy relationships; how culture and intersectionality affect sexual violence; and sexual harassment in the workplace.
• Creating a program for student organizations and student leaders to become certified after going through training on policies, procedures and how to support survivors.
• Creating an optional comprehensive training program for employees each semester that covers trauma-informed care, how to respond to disclosures and how IU responds to sexual misconduct.
• Creating a webpage with information on how employees can report sexual misconduct that occurs outside the workplace, and the community resources that are available to them.

“If we have healthy and supported faculty and staff then they’re better able to serve our students,” said co-chair Sally Thomas, director for sexual violence prevention and victim advocacy at IU Bloomington.

In reviewing its policies, practices and procedures to craft the improvement plan submitted for review to the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which oversees the Culture of Respect Collective, the co-chairs and committee members received feedback that helped them hone objectives and ways to achieve them.

“I think we did really well in survivor support in that evaluation,” Thomas said. “We’ve spent the last few years really finding more ways to support survivors, and that was reflected in our feedback.”

Kincaid said that although IU entered the initiative focused on students, one bit of surprising feedback was the need for more resources for employees, which reinforced the fact that sexual violence extends beyond campus.

“That’s something I think we can be stronger on,” Kincaid said. “We can have more available for employees related to sexual misconduct or violence.”

Kirk Johannesen is a communications consultant in the Office of the Vice President of Communications and Marketing.