Full Description
Campus Whisper Networks examines how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities. Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Janet Shope and Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone -almost always a friend. Most college students know someone who has been assaulted. Simply knowing, by means of relationships, that one or more peers have been assaulted affects the knowers, and the effects reverberate unevenly across campuses.
Shope and Pringle highlight the structural properties that prohibit relational knowledge from becoming official institutional knowledge, confining it to whispers and secrecy within informal spheres of knowledge. The rules governing the circulation of such knowledge create an uneven epistemic field of sexual assault. This uneven field is consequential for the communities, affecting survivors and their confidants and shaping student views of the college community. Campus Whisper Networks demonstrates how personal and institutional avoidance, both the "need to not know" and "no need to know," create knowledge gaps that hide the community's wounds and prevent personal knowledge from becoming social knowledge.
Contents
Introduction: How to Hear a Story
Chapter 1: The Secret World of "Tellings"
Chapter 2: The Uneven Relational-Knowledge Field
Chapter 3: What One Needs to Know: Avoiders and the Cost of Knowing
Chapter 4: The Secret-Keepers
Chapter 5: Say Nothing: The Silence Holders
Chapter 6: Telling on Others: Sharing One's Experience with Title IX
Conclusion: Having Heard Their Stories
Appendix A: Methods
Acknowledgments
References
Index
