What We Know:

Universities have had to contend with a rapidly changing legal environment since 2011, when the Obama Administration released a "Dear Colleague Letter" stating they would hold schools accountable for complying with Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. 

What We Don't Know:

What role does media coverage play in the ways universities respond to sexual assaults on their campuses? 

Data and Methods:

This work is part of the broader University Responses to Sexual Assault (URSA) project by Drs. Elizabeth Armstrong and Sandy Levitsky. This arm of the project draws on archival data of diverse media covering sexual assaults on campuses from 1990-2019, tracing how media narratives of this landscape have shifted over time. 

Findings:

We find that survivor-centered narratives about campus culture and sexual assaults shift to narratives focused on due process in the post-2011 period. We trace how high profile claims of false rape allegations spearhead this new narrative. We also uncover the narrative templates and semantics that reccur in news coverage post-2011 to delegitimize campus efforts to hold perpetrators responsible for harm. 

Why This Matters:

This work contributes to our understanding of how social problems emerge via the news cycle and news saturation. As articles move through lines of production, each has a cadre of producers behind it. These producers include news outlets, private news collection agencies, political organizations, government officials, university public relations offices, and individual journalists. What we have found so far suggests that different constellations of actors are responsible for manufacturing the two narratives that informed our initial data collection. These manufactured narratives and broad distribution ultimately inform policy at multiple levels.

This work has led to multiple forthcoming papers.

You can read about the various publications and impacts of this work here.