NCJ Number
185717
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 6 Issue: 11 Dated: November 2000 Pages: 1269-1296
Date Published
November 2000
Length
28 pages
Annotation
This article presents a case study of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) to examine the role of in-house victim advocates in efforts to reduce violence against women on college campuses.
Abstract
The discussion focuses on feminist strategies in higher education in a larger, historical context of second-wave feminist movements and negotiations between grassroots protest movements and institutional powers. The discussion notes that the women’s movement has had a cyclic pattern of mobilization and demobilization. Mobilization peaked in the early 1900’s and again in the 1970’s through early 1980’s. UHM experienced a decline in campus activism and protest beginning in the early 1980’s. However, an extraordinary spark of mass mobilization occurred around sexual harassment and gender and race discrimination beginning in the late 1980’s. UHM hired a faculty member in 1992 to serve as a victim’s advocate to assist student victims of sexual harassment. The position of sex equity specialist (SES) expanded in 1995 to include advocacy for employees as well. The experience at UHM demonstrates both new opportunities that the campus feminist movement has opened for women and how the movement has fallen short of its original goals. It also demonstrates the differences between the current and earlier maintenance phase of feminist strategy. Young women activists today lack the belief that they need to organize and demonstrate a united front; nevertheless, their combined assertions of individual rights may soon come to represent similar numbers, if not similar strategies, to those that have propelled mobilization of feminist efforts since the turn of the century. Notes and 15 references