I Heard That’s Where Girls Get Raped: Embodied Experiences of (In)security and Crime Perceptions Among Undergraduate Women Students

Abstract

Drawing from trauma-informed interviews with women undergraduate students, this article examines the ripple effects of sexual violence on student (in)security and mobility. Campus sexual violence is an exceedingly common occurrence, with 1 in 5 women having experienced sexual assault during their college tenure. Women undergraduates are also shown to have the highest rates of sexual assault anxiety of all demographic groups, yet despite the ubiquitous nature and high rates of fear, it is still not well understood how such violence collectively impacts women students’ notions of security, geographical mobility, and independence, regardless of whether they as individuals have experienced assault. Focusing on a cross-section of women undergraduate students from the University of Arizona, I analyze how their perceptions of sexual violence impact their behavior and safety strategies. I illustrate how exhaustive women undergraduate’s ‘prevention’ methods are, and how women students shoulder the burden of safety and care in lieu of the university. Lastly, despite data that women are most likely to be assaulted by someone they know in a private space, interviewed students expressed great fear of strangers and public spaces on campus, perhaps signaling that misleading sexual violence narratives have impacted women student’s independence the most.