Dr. Nancy Deutsch is an Associate Professor in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. A prolific contributor to the field of psychology, Dr. Deutsch’s scholarly work focuses on adolescent learning and development with respect to relationships and environment. Her research propels her work at the American Association of Universities’ Sexual Assault Survey Design Team, where she creates campus climate surveys that help inform policies to respond to and prevent sexual assault and other forms of gender-based violence and misconduct on campuses across the country.

In light of Secretary Betsy Devos’ decision last week to rescind the April 2011 Dear Colleague Letter on Sexual Violence and the April 2014 Title IX guidance document, Ms. spoke with Dr. Nancy Deutsch about the current climate of sexual assault on college campuses and the importance of Title IX in protecting equal access to education.

Could you start by telling me a bit about what the rescinding of the guidance really means and how this impacts projects like your Campus Climate Surveys on Sexual Assault and the National Leadership Institute with Futures Without Violence?

In some ways that remains to be seen. It depends on where the Department of Education goes from here as well as what schools decide to do. Right now it sounds like most schools, at least in the absence of further guidance or direction form the DOE, are mostly going to continue what they started and further the advances they made under previous guidelines. Now, my concern is that this does jeopardize some of the work. Certainly we had made broad advances in terms of getting survivors voices to be heard and getting survivors experiences on the table in thinking about how schools should respond. Title IX has been the law of the land for a long time and what the Obama-era guidelines really did was give schools some direction on how think beyond the Title IX adjudication framework and see this as a larger issue—we need to be thinking about the cultures and climates on our campuses and the ways in which they reflect our broader culture.

The campus climate surveys were a great starting point. Though they alone are not enough, there was a sense that this was eventually going to be mandated. The surveys gave us a lot of information that helps schools identify groups that may be underserved or more at risk in ways that we didn’t know. For example, the climate campus surveys documented, yet again, that it is about one in five college women who will experience some form of sexual assault while a student, but they also revealed far higher percentages of sexual harassment on campus, which is a reflection of climate and culture. More than 60 percent of undergraduate women reported sexual harassment, and for transgender, gender queer, gender nonconforming students that number is 75 percent. Statistics like this, which indicate that pockets of students may be marginalized in multiple ways, allow campuses to better articulate prevention education services resources and to think about what in campus cultures may be leading to those disparities.

Does Devos’ decision foreshadow any further attacks that the Department of Education or Department of Civil Rights may take against survivors of sexual assault? Are their future threats to hard-earned protections that we should prepare for?

My fear is yes. In the speech Devos made about a week prior to rescinding, she placed on equal footing the experiences of survivors of sexual assault and those accused of sexual assault—there is a false equivalency there. 20 percent of undergraduate women experience sexual assault and fewer than 30 percent of assaults on college campuses according to the AAU survey are actually reported. And only a minuscule portion are actually reported to law enforcement and a tiny percentage are actually prosecuted. Then overall only about 2-8 percent of reports turn out to be false allegations, so when you hold those two experiences up, the actual prevalence and size of the issue is nowhere near comparable. Title IX was meant to project equal access to education and there’s a way in which the linguistic positioning of what’s happening is making equivalent experiences that are not equivalent—in terms of their numbers and in terms of prevention of access to education. And other areas of the Department of Education are now trying to use civil rights laws that have been used to promote affirmative action as a way or rolling that back and protecting the rights of white students. Again it’s that same sort of bastardization of the law that was put in place to create equity to reify the original inequities that those laws were meant to address.

Considering that we are in the red zone—the period in which most sexual assaults occur— what are your thoughts on the interim guidance that the Department of Education has released and what are the strongest, most reliable avenues of support available to survivors of sexual assault right now?

It is very difficult to work in a changing landscape, to be constantly revising policies when you don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline. Being in the red zone on college campuses, the idea that schools somehow can be making changes to their system is not realistic. Systems work better if they are advancing what they are already doing rather than thinking about how they are going to respond next. For that reason interims are not helpful, particularly when you are talking about something that is ongoing and happening in the moment. My hope is that survivors can feel safe in their systems for reporting and can seek out support from campus services—student psychological services, deans of student offices, Title IX offices, peer groups—for that psychological support, whether that is support in changing class schedules, housing situations, or medical support. Nobody should have to go through the experience alone. That Sec. Devos has given these public statements in this red zone period without acknowledging it makes her disconnect with the actual situation on campuses pretty visible.

Thinking about student’s capacity to learn and tying this into your personal work on the relationship between adolescent learning and environments, how does the absence of proper title IX guidance’s impact student’s, particularly girls and women’s, ability to feel safe and learn?

First of all, we learn best in environments where we feel safe and feel a sense of belonging. If students don’t feel that on their campus, it’s difficult to engage. Our cognitive abilities are depressed by strong emotional reactions. If we think about what that means for somebody who has survived sexual assault and is trying to engage in the learning environment, we can expect negative educational implications.

If girls and women don’t feel that there is a safe and equitable system for them to report into, they are not going to report. The reason that sexual assault and rape are so underreported is because of the history of how they are treated, both on and off college campuses. Given how few result in prosecutions in the legal system, and the very public ways in which girls and women are themselves put on trial when they bring cases, there are many disincentives. Unless there is a sense of safety and trust in an institution, girls and women—no one—will report sexual assault.

And men need to speak out and come to the table. Similar to the need for white people to come to the table in racial justice issues, men need to come to the table in gender-based violence. If gender identity is used as a wedge, where educational equity of men is pitted against that of women, then we all lose. Campuses have to be equitable and safe climates for everyone. The focusing on false reports, which is such a small small small percentage, and elevating those to this level of epidemic ignores what is actually going on, ignores the actual numbers on college campuses, and threatens to increase divisiveness. And I think everybody needs to speak up about that and speak in support of what is actually happening and bring the facts back to bear.

And this is where different actors in different roles come in to play. I am somebody who talks a lot about everybody figuring out what their right role is in any kind of social change movement, and that we need multiple actors in multiple roles. Student activists may play a different role than Title IX coordinators or than administrators or faculty. There are different roles to be played, and that can be strategically deployed and used in concert. It’s mostly about everybody figuring out where they fit into the movement and what they can do in their realm and in their world to help move it along.