Reducing Campus Sexual Violence through Research-Based and Survivor-Centered Interventions

Elizabeth Hutchison is a Latin American historian, a specialist in twentieth-century Chilean women’s labor, a scholar-activist of human rights movements, and a faculty member at the University of New Mexico since 1998. From 2016 to 2020, she directed the Feminist Research Institute, and since 2020 she has served as Associate Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, where she builds programs to support faculty and staff who experience bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment. This includes the Staff-Faculty Wayfinder website, a user-centered, private, intersectional, and trauma-informed website for employees at UNM. Building on her experience in shared governance and administration, and in response to a settlement agreement between the Department of Justice and UNM (2016-19), Dr. Hutchison helped to found Faculty for a Sexual Assault-Free Environment at UNM (Faculty SAFE), an ad hoc faculty organization that promotes changes in policy, strengthens support and advocacy, and advances research on campus sexual violence. This work has allowed Dr. Hutchison to collaborate with faculty, staff, students, and administrators on multiple transformative efforts in support of targets of sexual harassment, including the Presidential Task Force on Mandatory Reporting; the Title IX Committee; the CCRT Student Conduct Committee;  and the Advisory Board of the LGBTQ Resource Center. Since 2019, Hutchison also has served as a UNM representative to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Action Collaborative for Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education.

This event is sponsored by the History Department, the Women and Gender Studies Department, the Sociology and Sexuality Studies Department, and the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Chair in U.S. History. For further information, contact Marc Stein at marcs@sfsu.edu.

Selected publications and presentations:

• “Reporting is not Supporting: Why Mandatory Supporting, not Mandatory Reporting, Must Guide University Sexual Misconduct Policies” (2021), with Kathryn Holland, Courtney Ahrens, and M. Gabriela Torres, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (December 22).
• “Making Campus Safer: Fighting Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment in Academia” (2020), The Academics’ Handbook, ed. Lori A. Flores and Jocelyn H. Olcott, 4th ed. (Duke Univ. Press).
• “Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Institutional Challenges of Conducting Research on Campus Sexual Violence in the New Age of Title IX,” Beyond Prevalence: The Next Generation of Research on Campus Sexual Assault, Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia Univ., Oct. 5, 2017.