republicans take back house so we can get real health care reform in this country. >> host: thank you. it's been a privilege. >> you you are watching a specil edition of booktv now airing during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. ..

>> thank you so much, it's great to be here, thank you for coming out. in every room there are always survivors so if you start to feel distressed by what i'm sharing obviously it's okayto get up and take a break . there's a national sexual assault hotline is one 806 56 hope. so i'm going to start withthe story . in boston was a sweet student. hot summer nights, sex with his girlfriend and it's pretty much the sexiest story in the book. that's not thestory on going to tell, sorry . but he was a good guy . he was the kind of guy who

had developed a series of nicknames for the kinds of orgasms his girlfriend had because he wascommitted to making sure sex was something that felt good for her to . but austin also sexually assaulted someone. he told us a story about the night freshman year he was in a room with his roommates girlfriends roommate. so the roommate has a girlfriend. two people get shoveled into the same bedroom together. the girl was pretty drunk and she said to him she wasn't interested in doing anything but he was anxious and he felt he was behind his peers. everyone had more sexual experience than he did he got in her bed and started to touch her body. and then he thought to himself, this isn't the thing so hestopped . when austin told us that story he became distraught. because it was in the telling of that story he realized

what he had done was sexual assault and it was hard for him to put together what he had done which he knew was wrong with the fact that he thought he was a pretty good person and he thought of people who sexually assault people as bad people i think that's one of the questions that we're speaking to in the book, the fact that people can do things that are very harmful to other people without necessarily being bad people . hold like bad person good person thing has surrounded the conversation about campus actual assault and we bring a very different object to the problem. our book is not about fear, it's not about punishment. it's about prevention so so much of the conversation about campus sexual assault has focused either on eradjudication, sort of be where going to punish our way out of this idea or on the idea that the perpetrators are sociopaths and if only we

could identify those few of you have men we could at least catch them and campuses would be safer places but if you think about driving, think about all the effort that goes into teaching young people how to drive so that they can do what a pretty dangerous thing which is to move a two tonvehicle around the world without hurting other people . there's drivers ed and road design and car engineering, many systems in place at multiple levels so that they can do that safely and what we call for in the book is a parallel system for sex. to teach young people how to have sex without hurting other people so i want to back up and tellyou about the project . sexual citizens pulls back the curtain on what it feels like to be a college student today so it's about sexual assault but it's not just about sexual assault, it's about the life of college students. it's based on the immersion in campus life so we did in-depth interviews with

hundred 51 students, all of them at least once but some of them up to three times because they had experienced so many assault it couldn't fit into one or even two interviews. we had a team of researchers because shamus and i are old, very old but we're too old to hang around the students and was that would be creepy for them to see their professors at parties so we hired a team of younger researchers who were staff and they did what we call economic fees. they socialize with students as they went about their daily lives on the bus after the athletic fields and in the dining hall and in the dorms and at parties in religious aces so wherever students went, there also went our research team, never hiding themselves so they were spying, they were doing research so that they identified themselves and we as researchers andwent to a lot of parties . so we interviewed the students, they did observation and we talked with student groups to find

out how they talk about sex and socializing when there with each other. this was all in the context of a much larger project the sexual health initiative to foster transformation which i codirected with a friend and colleague claude mellon which one funded by columbia university so it was the giant ship project which had two surveys , the non-european the whole community engagement portion and the book is based mostly on the ethnographic research, that research telling time with and talking with students as they go about their daily lives. let me tell you another story. when was a call sort of conventionally very attractive white woman and when she came to new york she settled right into sort of new york city club life which she enjoyed so she told us she came into the interview with a list of stories she wanted to tell us, these are good stories and they didn't feel necessarily like good stories when weheard them . she would meet men, these

sort of being less actors and not very famous athletes and she was very clear she said on her own sexual boundaries so she would go back to hotel rooms with them and she didn't want to have sex she would describe it, he would just give them a blow job to get out of there and for her that was sort of a self protective escape but it made us think what is the feeling of indebtedness that made her feel like she owed them a blow job? when shared with us to stories of being sexually assaulted. the first was freshman year when her roommates were encouraging her to take a guy on campus, just try that and she wasn't super psyched about it but there was a freshman abor a senior who was into her and she said at least he's a senior so if i have to go out with a college guy at least that's impressive and she had in her mind a sort of mental of how it would go. she said this is going to be

like this slow production so on the first date we will make out, maybe we will go to second base. on the second i'll let him finger me, were not going to have sex until the third day and she imagined in her mind but that wasn't what he was thinking so he was pretty emphatic when they were back in her room that he wanted to have sex and she managed to convince him that they were not going to have sex but he could sleep over and that would be nice to cuddle together and she woke up in the night and he was pumping her leg . and she was like, that's gross, what are you doing? so he stopped and then the next day she was discussing it with her mom and her mom is like he's sexually assaulted you and she rejected label and said it was not sexual assault and roommate said that was sexual assault so when is mulling the story over and she tells us the next time she was sexually assaulted which was at the end of one of her early years in school after

people were pretty like not entirely moved out but she was one of the last people in the dorms and some guy who she described as scummy la club model promoter guy said he had some good pot and they were going to go to morningside park and get stoned together and that seemed like a fun thing to you on a hot summer day so they go to the park and spoke a little and then go back to the dorm and he wants to make out and she's not that into him. she's like i'm good. and he was not good. so he tried to force the issue and they were back in her room and he was grabbing at her and it was kind of scary and she was trying to convince him he had to leave and he was like i'm going to tell the guard that we smoked pot and she was like i'mgoing to tell the guard you're trying to rape me . so she definitely had the trump card there. she managed to get him away but she was really shaken by the experience and so she called her mom to talkabout it .

in talking with her mom she said she realized maybe it wasn't so bad what happenedto her . she said really nothing happened, he just said some bad things to me but she's like nothing happened, i'm okay so it's inthe second thexperience that she started to realize she didn't know anyone anything .he was emphatic, he said i came all the way uptown and i'm not even going to have an orgasm? she said yes, you came all the way uptown and you're not going to have an orgasm so that was the moment she moved from thinking about herself as someone who owed someone a blowjob to having a clear sense of her right to not have sex and not just a core idea in the book, if the idea of sexual citizenship. people have the right to have the kind of sexual experiences they have andalso do not have the kind of sexual experiences they don't want to have to and other people have the same rights . in general we found heterosexual men and been

socialized to their own right to pleasure and not so attentive to other people's right to sexual self-determination and that women, heterosexual women in particular had been socialized to care about what they owed other people and to be less certain of their own right to sexual self-determination including their right to say no.. so the point is not to say it was gwen that she should have had a better idea of her own sexual citizenship but rather the point is to think about what kind of world are we building where a dutiful, confident, otherwise very effective in the world young woman ofeels so indebted to other people for pleasure and what kind of world are we building where someone homes someone else's leg in the middle of thenight after they said they're not interested in having sex . who raised, not what is wrong with that person who raised that person to notknow better ?

instead of thinking about campus sexual assault as a problem that is the fault of campuses we widen the lens out to say that it's all about responsibility so that includes families and communities and schools, thinking back to the driving metaphor, making sure people drive safely is not only the responsibility of one person. when parents talk with their kids about driving, they don't sit them down and explain how spark plugs work. that's not how you teach someone to drive . and you also don't teach someone to drive by just teaching them about stop signs and red lights is sort of what the focus on consent does so instead driving is a complex human behavior and it involves being able to be attentive to a lot of different kinds of inputs at in once and i don't want to shock you but that's pretty similar to sex so we need to do that same kind of training so people can be prepared to

accomplish a pretty complex interpersonal interaction without harming other people. one thing that's useful to think about is the role of gwen's mom in all of this and how much support she got from her mom. how important her mom was in being the person she could turn to when she needed to figure out what she was struggling with . she would not ever have been able to speak with her mom if she felt like her mom was going to judge her for having sex and it also, we didn't have a lot of stories about dad doing this in the book so another take-home is the need for dads to step up and do more of the emotional labor around sex specifically but child rearing in general. so one more story before i wrap up and we chat . and this is sort of the classic story that you might think of when you think about campus sexual assault. lucy was a freshman, she had gone to boarding school, a very protective conservative boarding school environment and she had not had much chance to socialize, plus

like a lot of columbia students he was busy doing what you need to do to get into a highly selective school so she didn't socialize much in general so she was excited for college. she wanted to lose her virginity and party the popular. she and one of her roommates went to a bar freshman meet where they met two seniors and they were so excited to be getting attention from the seniors and so seniors bob hendrix read the bouncer and let the freshmen in with their fake ids because that's what bars do they let pretty girls in when i have not very goodfake ids . so the guys bought them drinks and lucy was pretty drunk and she was pretty great with hanging out with scott. she said he want to come back to my fraternityand she said sure so they sell about amsterdam avenue in the warm summer night . scott was a college student, he had lost his key so they

were locked out and they sat outside waiting to be let in eventually the other girl catches up with lucy so she had done the bystander training . he was trying to get and i on her friend was clearly nothing was going to happen with the guy. scott and lucy go into the fraternity with the friend nancy. scott asked the girls if they want to drink. they say yes and in the fraternity, the alcohol is kept up on the second floor because the fraternities are allowed to have alcohol so the way they responded by keeping it upstairs. they went upstairs. and he makes some drinks. hlizzie's friend passed out immediately and didn't touch or drink and scott said to lucy the you want to see my room andthen been making out off and on over the night and she didwant to see his room, she was enjoying being with him and was basking in the attention n . they went upstairs to his room . he started to takeoff her pants and she said number and he said , it's okay.

but it wasn't okay because he return and he didn't listen to her. so that is sort of the classic story that you think of when you think about a sexual assault or on-campus and if you only think about that in terms of not being a man and melissa being a woman you capture part of it because he was bigger than she was. but he was also a senior and he was also in a space that he controlled not just in a building that he lived and surrounded by his friend on the third floor in a place where she had never been at an institution where he had been for three years and knew all the rules and new what college students don't do and that she was new and unfamiliar with a lot of things ewso one of the things we do in sexual citizens as we complicate the ways you might think about power and we show how there are lots of different ways that you need to think about power in order what we could change toprevent campus sexual assault . we talk a lot about race in the book and the ways in

which the racial landscape of campus produces sexual assault. every single black woman we spoke with in interviews, every single one had experienced with unwanted sexual touching. and that's not just a sexual assault problem, that's a racial justiceproblem . we talked with and we describe in the book the query results that students experience, women assaulting men which is a part of the story that is rarely told and we tell the stories from the perspectives ofassaulters . who words you rarely hear except in a courtroom where there interested confessing on their innocence. there's some assaulters who do not show up to be participate in our study so there are people who social category are intentionally harming their fear did not come to be interviewed for

obvious reasons but there were threekinds of assaulters who stories we tell in the book there are the assaulters , one of them starts his story, put on a tie so i knew we were going to have sex. and then he proceeds to tell stories of being invited to a sorority formal by a girl who he didn't particularly like he didn't dislike her, he just wasn't that into her but it was a high perceived sorority and he was excited to be invited to a formal at one of the two really good sororities because there is a clear campus order. he had an early practice the next day so he didn't drink, she drank a lot read he was so drunk at the end of the night in the pouring rain that he brought her back to his room because he couldn't figure out how else he could get to bed in time to get up early for his practice and then he described to us having sex with her as she went in and out of consciousness, she was very drunk because for him, it's possible he really was a terrible person and he was putting on a story and

recounting us this so i think if you knew it was a bad thing he wouldn't have told us so he told us a story about solving her and what he seems to think he was doing was just coming through on an obligation that she had invited him to the formal, informal frequently involve sex through , unless you explicitly go to a formal with someone as friends is understood to be consent sex. in a way this is problematic but part of what we do in the book as we lay out how students actually have sex rather than how we wish they had sex so he was, this is one of assaulters, the oblivious assaulter, we describe this as an act of entitlement. o there are students who like austin who in the course of telling the story come to label what they did ask assault and then there are some students who know that what they did was an assault and were very troubled by and have never figured out anyone to talk with them about it so utthey came in to tell us the story in the hopes other people knowing about it would

perhaps do some good. so those are some of the storiesof assaulters that we share by way of conclusion , really remembering that the book is about prevention , one key take-home is that schools, faith communities and news organizations need to do more than just the places where children are safe from being assaulted they need to step up as stakeholders we need to ask ndthem to step up as stakeholders and thinking about the roles they can play in sexualassault prevention . it's very important to do this for college. we found in the survey at a quarter of the women who participated in the survey had been assaulted before they startedcollege . not great but experienced some form of unwanted nonconsensual sexual contact so that a lot. and that's a risk factor for being assaulted in college so the prevention war needs to start before hand. we also found in that same survey that women who'd

gotten sex education that included training and had sex they didn't want to have which is not absent only sex education, it's just good sex education or half as likely to be assaulted, is likely to be raped so that they really big side. that is effective as a vaccine as a flu shot is for flu and we spent a lot of effort making sure everyone gets the flu so a big message in the book is we need to spend the same amount of effort making sure everyone gets sex and because that is part of what's going to take to get us to for immunity for sexual assault, is not going to buy itself be the thing that keeps all sexual assault from happening but it is a way to teach people to not assault other people. it's not sex and is not just good for preventing people from being assaulted, it

could help them learn about sex and healthy relationships in a way that keeps them from being the assaulter. parents obviously need to step up and raise children who know better than assaulting people and that involves not just telling them, in the same way you don't just tell your kids don't crash the car, you teach them to drive so teaching your children how to not be a assaulter involves the basic messages about how to be a human being. when your kids someone slip you tell them to apologize ideally you keep them not to step on other people's feet so thinking about the work that parents do to help people manage their bodies. think about oral hygiene. every night you watch your kids as a brush their teeth and you don't trust them to tell you they brush their teeth because you watch them because you know they're a little sticky so the same llevel of effort not just around sexual health and safety, not just about wearing condoms and making sure your kids have whatever kind of prevention methods they need but talking about s how sex figures into relationships and how, what

sex is going to mean nto them in their lives and those are the kinds of value conversations that parents need to be having with people and then i think the final ar message is that there's a legislative message here to that the me to movement has been a mason for keeping the problem of sexual violence on the front burner and has not always had a clear policy agenda and there is a lot of evidence that comprehensive sex and works get there so much variability from state to state so everybody should actually read the book the person that you should be called their state legislator and demand a provide comprehensive sexual education for kids because we know that's part of building a context where there is less sexual assault on campus so that it area let's talk. [applause] >> i'm really curious, do you have any numbers or

statistics about how many young men and women do get, have unwanted sexual advances in safe in college were given in thecountry every year ? >> so the race that we found on the columbia campus are pretty similar to the rates that have been shown at campuses across the country so we found by graduation that one in three women had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact is not always great. it can be unwanted touching but that can be very scary. and about one in six men had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact so that from the survey, not from the ethnography and those are the numbers that have been shown in survey research across the country and i think it's important to note that the rates of sexual assault are higher for women in the same age group who are not in college that there's a lot of

attention on women in college and they're easier to survey because they're all in one place. of assault are lower for men are out of college but those are the numbers. >> i have a follow-up. so you mentioned that there are two instances in which you had a senior and there's a freshman and you wright said that because of the ongoing unequal power dynamic that that could lead to cases in which some people think they are entitled to some sort of sexual experience. out of that one to three people that has one of the three women that has an unwanted sexual encounter n, what percentage of that are people from like let's say the same class. freshman freshman, junior year, as opposed to nlike senior freshmen, etc. >>.

>> that is a question i would answer using the research rather than the ouethnography. people talk about i guess i have a sort of a notanswered your question . but we do know, and this is widely remarked on the beginning period of freshman year is referred to as the red zone causes a period of a lot of vulnerability. one of the things we call attention to in the book is the role of age-based power to disparities. so women, because it's typical for women to have a different relationship with men who are older, first year when have the most possible partners in the campus social world whereas senior men have the most possible partners in the campus world. the take-home for us in terms of prevention is that men and in particular older men and i would say in particular older wealthy white men need some

work in acknowledging their own social power. if you think about the storyi told you about lucy and scott , i don't know if that scott was a good person or bad person, we didn't interview scott but what i can tell you is in that instance where lucy said no and he said it's okay. he was not seeing her as a person . he was probably, the most charitable interpretation we could make of that interaction is was unaware of his own power so i think the important part of our prevention work needs to be to help p the people on campus are more powerful see that power. and to engage with them in a conversation about checking themselves in a way that they don't feel i can. it's not their fault they were born white men. and it's not their fault they were born to wealthy families but by being the guy with the canada goose coat and being in a fraternity being in the third floor, they are in a position or they are r-vulnerable assaulting someone.

and if they'redrunk , they're even more likely to do that so helping those young people think about how to move safely through the world without hurting their peers, that the best thing we could do. >> i know this research is obviously ongoing and the process is ongoing but the you have anythingspecifically set up post the writing of this book ? >> we have like a billion campuses so i'm week to week and my suitcase not focus on after the book. i have really enjoyed the high school talks that i've given and i'd like to continue even after bookstores were interested in hosting us i would like to continue on talking with young people and with parents about what is the work they need to do to prevent campus sexual assault and i think

working with legislatures. when every state in america has comprehensive sex ed education my work is not done . >> how do you manage or how would you say the process of changing the process by which we choose to teach sex and soda and especially the public school sector, i know there's you alluded to the sort of spark plug analogy area at its spark plug versus how do you drive a car do you have any ideas abouthow to go about that ? >> there are states that have changed their loss. california has california ouhealthy impact so all young people in california starting in middle school in every single public school in the state comprehensive sex ed that is inclusive so it speaks to clear kids and talk about racial inequality and it makes sense and reflects the experiences of everyone. colorado passed a law last year that if schools are

going to teach and it has to be comprehensive. the law is, laws like that are being discussed in new york, georgia and kentucky and alabama this year so i think the #metoo moment is a moment of opportunity. nobody wants to mistakenly sexual assault someone so we are all on the team, team parent about launching our kids safely into the world without doing that so i think this is a moment of opportunity and the american educational system basically is a system to reproduce inequality so we are swimming upstream and pushing against that. right now if you are rich or you live in an urban area you are much more likely to get sex education that is more like driving than the spark plugs and if you are poor or live in a rural area you are

more likely to get either abstinence only sex education or no sex education at all so we created a situation in which there is a thing that we know that works butonly the rich kids get . so we could do better. >> thank you. >> i was interested in the part where you talk about the interviews with the offenders so whatever you want to call them and in particular people who had been able to label the experience or what they did as assault before talking to you then have time to talk about. and so i feel like there's more spaces being open on especially university campuses for people who have been assaulted to process the experience, to talk about it and label it but there's not a lot of spaces for people who have committed assault. and like you said that's a punitive ways of dealing with

sexual violence, that people have a vested interest in proving that their innocence, not to actually process the experience i was wondering if you have any insight from the interviews about how the people who have been able to recognize that experience , how that happened. like, how did they manage to sort of see what they had done as assault before coming to talkto you . >> some of them, and i think it's important to acknowledge there were very many because it wasn't a thing a lot of people showed up to talk about. some of them and then in therapy and had had a chance to deal with it in a sort of one-on-one therapy contextbut i think you're right and you make an important point that there is not , there's no institutional feedback loop that exists for people who have harmed someone. if you hurt someone you need to do two things you need to do the repair and you need to learn to do better.

and right now, the curative, were not going to punish our way out of this and the punitive framework keeps people hifrom telling other people that they harmed them becausethey don't , they know that it's like to have, but there's only a hard hammer, there's no soft hammer and they don't want to bring that down as people have sex with people boarding their friend network and sometimes people they care about so there's no way of people getting the feedback for the most part that says hey, what you did, it hurt me. it didn't feel good. and that means the person who's going to keep doing that and the person who was harmed doesn't get an apology, the or the work of repair is not done so we're very again, the book is not primarily about adjudication and punishment we are very supportive of the restorative justice work and i think thinking about a place where people, there's a lot of sex that we described in the book is not assault but it's unkind.

or just confusing or not pleasurable. people are having a lot of sex is not feeling good to them so to have some sort of resource where people who have participated in experiences that don't feel good or that feel troubling can go and work that out is important so i think that's a framework that might leave room for assaulters also to come forward and get some help working on what i think we use the word perpetrator and offender because we are not working from a psychological or a legal framework. we just call them assaulters because in the same way that people who, sometimes there are people who have sex with men who don't describe themselves as gay reediting perpetrator is not an identity so there are people who assaulted someone, they are not necessarily

assaulters is who they are but they do need a space on campus or in the world to learn how to have sex in a way that isnot damaging to the people around them . anybody else? thank you very much. good work. thank you so much, thank you all forcoming out . >> tonight on the communicators, american economic liberties project founder sarah miller on big tech companies as monopolies and the impact of corporate concentration. >> now there's essentially a couple of strategies, if you're a tech startup are you going to sell to facebook or google and what that's done is its works the ability of innovators in silicon valley to innovate according to market needs and according to ideas you instead everyone is guessing earlier, how can i

develop something that facebook will live or that google will buy that is not necessarily really how we want an economy to function. >> want the communicators tonight at eight feature on c-span2. >> you're watching a special edition of the tv. now airing during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic . tonight biographies read first robert wilson, editor of the american scholar, he recalls the life of pt barnum, cofounder of the barnum and bailey circus and the early 20th century russian immigrant rose pastor stokes who is a founding member of america's communist party and married to new york millionaire james graham felt stone and later journalist janet kaplan on the discoveries of women geniuses today and throughout history. enjoy book tv now and over the weekend on c-span2.