Theorizing Campus Sexual Violence: Insights from the Evolution of Campus Responses

Campus sexual violence has been the subject of more than five decades of research, yet prevention on college campuses has repeatedly failed to reflect what feminist theory and scholarship offered as the causes of violence. This historically organized narrative review traces how feminist theory, empirical research, prevention programming, and institutional policy co-evolved from the 1970s to the early 2020s. We argue that a persistent pattern runs through this history. Feminist scholarship increasingly located sexual violence in power, patriarchy, intersectionality, and structural inequality, and empirical research increasingly examined perpetrators’ attitudes and the rape-supportive beliefs that sustain violence alongside prevalence and individual risk. Yet campus prevention rarely built on this work. As prevention strategies shifted from women’s self-defense to consent education, rape myth reduction, and bystander intervention, they continued to place responsibility on individual students rather than the beliefs and structural conditions that enable gendered violence. Given what both feminist theory and empirical research had already established, these represent missed opportunities for prevention capable of addressing the structural causes of campus sexual violence. We conclude by calling for a research and prevention agenda grounded in feminist criminology. This locates the causes of campus sexual violence in gendered power, institutional conditions, and structural inequality rather than in the behaviors of those most likely to be harmed.