May 09, 2014 03:12 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The University of Texas - Austin (UT) and Johns Hopkins University will join the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in helping the White House craft sexual assault policy recommendations for the rest of the nation.

According to Inside Higher Ed, the Obama Administration singled out the three schools in its new report, titled "Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault."

UNH, UT and Hopkins are expected to "lead by example" in displaying how a school should respond to complaints from its students of sexual assault. They will also conduct studies to help make formal recommendations the White House plans to eventually mandate for all schools.

UNH focuses on prevention and the school teaches its community to intervene in potentially dangerous situations. More than 300 other schools have adopted their "bystander intervention program," which include tactics like spilling a drink on a person whose acting like a predator.

The program was inspired by a gang rape on the school's Durham, N.H. campus in 1986 in which bystanders did nothing.
UT campus police have developed a handbook of sorts to help other police officers communicate with sexual assault complainants. For example, their toolkit encourages officers to say things like "I know reporting a sexual assault is hard. It took a lot of courage for you to make this call."

Noël Busch-Armendariz, director of Texas' Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, told Inside Higher Ed sexual assault stereotypes are often what harm police investigations most.

"When we have non-stranger sexual assault, things get thornier for law enforcement to figure out. That was the big impetus for the White House to bring us into the conversation," Busch-Armendariz said. "We really need to help law enforcement shift from investigations that looks at a focus of victim behavior that looks at a focus of offender behavior."

At Hopkins, nursing professor Jacqueline Campbell, who has studied intimate partner violence for more than 30 years, is taking a data-centered approach. She will conduct a study that includes surveys, interviews and statistics on gay and lesbian sexual assault. The study will be information-based, but it will also be outside-the-box and will attempt to quantify consent.

She wants to find out how many males on campus experience sexual assault and how many attacks in general occur off-campus. The study will also focus on how victims are treated at health centers.

"So often, when a victim reports the alleged perpetrator, it becomes a he-said, she-said or he-said, he-said," Campbell told Inside Higher Ed. "If we did a better job in documenting those injuries we would have an additional source around consent."

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