How Campus Public Safety Departments Can Be Agents of Cultural Change
Relationship violence among college students happens with remarkable frequency, but campus public safety practitioners can do much to address this issue, both on campus and in our surrounding communities.
Image via Adobe, by Mr Doomits
Imagine a pot of boiling water. Now place a raw carrot into that pot. Within a few minutes, the carrot reacts by becoming limp and soft, losing its strength. Imagine that same pot again, but this time, you have a raw egg. Placing the egg into the boiling water will cause the egg to harden in time, losing its fluid form and flexible nature.
Finally, imagine you put into that boiling water a coffee bean, but unlike the carrot and the egg, the bean responds to the boiling water very differently. Whereas the carrot and egg are affected by their environment, the coffee bean actually changes its environment and changes it completely to something good… coffee. Moreover, the longer the bean remains in this environment, the more change it creates.
Think of this boiling water as relationship violence, with the carrot being the victim and the egg being victimizer. The good news here is that the coffee bean is the campus public safety department.
Campus-law enforcement and security leaders find themselves in a highly visible environment where enormous expectations and demands intensify every day to create greater safety on America’s college campuses. Although there is a tendency for institutions of higher education to focus on incidents involving would-be attackers whom we do not know and who are from off-campus, there is a far more prolific threat to our colleges and universities: relationship abuse.
Every day, millions of our best and brightest young people attend colleges and are involved in a variety of relationships. Within many of these relationships – be they romantic, platonic, familial or professional – are active and ongoing levels of violence.
Many Students Come to College with Histories of Abuse
For the college campus of today, casual acquaintances form quickly, and in many instances evolve into dating relationships. We know that students today arrive at college in a far more sophisticated frame of mind with respect to relationships, particularly romantic ones. Many of our students also arrive with a history of abuse from past romantic relationships and, unfortunately, parents. By the time many of these students begin the next phase of their academic journey, they have already been the target of various forms of physical, emotional and sexual abuse or other forms of violence. Others may also have been perpetrators of abuse (as well as victims) before they ever arrive on campus.
Despite this grim reality, there is reason for us to be hopeful because we see an opportunity. College relationship violence may be the area where campus law enforcement can contribute the most to making our communities and our world safer. We can be agents of change by adopting proactive strategies to identify relationship violence at its earliest stages and mitigate the opportunity for it to become a part of someone’s life.
We need to recalibrate our focus on campus violence. We need ongoing, active and candid dialog about the risk of relationship violence, and we must provide collaborative programming that provides actual solutions and resources for students who are facing this type of abuse. Relationship violence is among the most pervasive and harmful threats to our students, and if we do not commit ourselves to addressing it more completely, it will most certainly continue to grow within our communities at an alarming rate.
We Know Much More about Dating Violence Now
Recently, one of the most comprehensive, sources of research-based information and programming evolved from Pamela Lassiter-Cathey and Dr. Wind Goodfriend’s Institute for the Prevention of Relationship Violence (IPRV), an organization located on the campus of Buena Vista University in Iowa.
Led by their extraordinary work in the forthcoming book, Before the Boil: The Early Warning Signs of a Potentially Violent Relationship, the authors have advanced our ability to understand what have become very familiar conditions and warning signs that ultimately evolve into volatile – and in many cases, highly dangerous – relationships.
Their research has produced a comprehensive, well-tested list of relationship dynamics, which, according to IPRV, offers a much more complete assessment of a relationship. Using a scale of one to 10, this assessment focuses on 14 related but independent areas of an aggressor’s behavior.
Lassiter-Cathey and Goodfriend also provide critical information and contemporary strategies to help us respond to these situations and be far more effective in the future. This includes one of the most powerful books composed on this subject, Voices of Hope – Breaking the Silence of Relationship Violence.
Where Before the Boil provides an excellent analytical presentation of the relevant factors and dynamics learned from years of study, Voices of Hope offers readers an unparalleled set of narratives from the very heroes who have made their way back from destructive relationships.
Other Helpful Tools Available to Campuses
Lassiter-Cathey and Goodfriend have also developed progressive tools for campus law enforcement officials and their colleagues as well as the broader campus communities, more specifically, our students. These resources include:
- The Trauma Advocacy Certificate (TRAC), which is a fully accredited professional studies specifically dedicated to trauma advocacy
- Professional training programs for campus law enforcement officials
- The Voices of Hope stage script, which is a powerful play featuring the stories of women and men whose lives have been touched by relationship violence
In the coming months, IPRV will release two smartphone apps. “Voices Vow” invites individual and group participation in the effort to eradicate relationship violence. It encourages participants to take an electronic vow to treat others with kindness and respect and to accept only such treatment in return. The second app, “Before the Boil,” identifies the warning signs described above and allows students to evaluate their own relationships.
Students who utilize the apps have access to ongoing violence prevention education, referral networks for resources, opportunities for activism and involvement, and other resources provided by IPRV and their strategic partners.
College Campuses Need More Resources
There are a great many resources and methods that can facilitate an assessment of a relationship that could be dangerous. We also need a far more comprehensive and multi-faceted set of resources. Additionally, college and university law enforcement executives must have the ability to inform and develop the skills of our staffs. That training must also apply to our colleagues from residential life, athletics, counseling services, health services and pastoral services, to name just a few.
Helping people who are concerned about their relationships to identify and understand these warning signs could help provide the motivation for them to take immediate actions to prevent or stop violence. As leaders in our campus police and public safety departments, resources like those developed by Lassiter-Ca
they and Goodfriend could help us and our campus partners become more effective in the response to relationship violence.
We are the instruments that change the environments, but to be our most effective, we must fully immerse ourselves to accomplish that change.
Randy Burba is former president of IACLEA and retired chief of public safety at Chapman University. Stan Skipworth was formerly the director of campus safety at the Claremont University Consortium. This article was originally published in 2016, but the recommendations still apply.
Note: The views expressed by guest bloggers and contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Campus Safety.
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