Jenny Hall-Jones, interim vice president for Student Affairs and dean of students, hopes to bring resources she gained at the Sexual Violence Prevention & Response Summit to Ohio University.
COLUMBUS -- Representatives from Ohio University and about 80 other Ohio colleges attended a summit Thursday regarding sexual violence prevention and response.
The Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Summit, hosted by the Ohio Department of Higher Education at Columbus State Community College, included multiple speakers and discussion sessions for universities to brainstorm ways to decrease sexual violence on campuses throughout Ohio.
Jenny Hall-Jones, OU's interim vice president for Student Affairs and dean of students, was one of the representatives from OU at the summit. Hall-Jones said the university is trying to bring back OU’s Survivor Advocacy Program, and that the skills taught at the event would help it do that.
“We want to make sure we’re doing it right.” Hall-Jones said.
OUSAP temporarily closed last November after its program coordinator left OU, and the university is in the process of hiring an interim advocate, according to previous Post reports.
Nick Oleksy, OU’s Title IX coordinator, and Char Kopchick, the assistant dean of students, also attended the summit.
Chris Linder, an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Development Services at the University of Georgia, opened the summit as a keynote speaker.
Linder said if universities begin to look at how past sexual violence cases have been handled, they can improve the process in the future. She also said universities need to start treating prevention and response to sexual violence as two separate topics.
“We are spending, unfortunately, more energy on response than prevention,” Linder said. “I think that’s harmful.”
Linder taught a first-year student seminar about sexual violence that allowed her to get to know the students and engage in discussion with them.
“It has to be a discussion-oriented piece,” Linder said. We can’t stand up and lecture at students anymore, we have to get in there with them, ask them questions."
Linder went on to lead a discussion group that focused on “stretch goals” for university officials to make. By pushing the boundaries, Linder said universities can improve significantly.
“The goal for this is to help people really take a step back and think about what they’re doing related to prevention,” Linder said.
David Lee, a keynote speaker at the summit and the director of prevention services at the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, spoke about comprehensive strategies to prevent sexual violences on college campuses.
During the speech, Lee said the 50 to 60 minute videos that inform college students about preventing sexual assault may not be enough to stop such crimes.
“We need to be attentive to making sure there’s primary prevention,” Lee said.
Lee said campuses should get involved with the community around them and collaborate to create the cultural change needed.
“We need to learn from our experiences,” Lee said.
The summit also focused on educating the university representatives about the brain chemistry shifts that survivors of sexual assault experience.
Alexander Leslie, director of campus services at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, and Vanessa Sampsel, campus victim specialist with the crisis center, explained the kind of hormones that researchers believe are released in a survivor’s brain during a sexual assault, a process deemed the ”hormone soup theory.”
“When someone experiences a life-threatening situation … our body does what it needs to do to survive,” Leslie said. “That includes releasing hormones needed to survive."
Hormones released during a sexual assault can cause the survivor to become paralyzed, Leslie said, adding that the hormones can also cloud the survivor's memory.
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“It makes it really hard to remember things, it prioritizes certain systems over others,” Leslie said.
Over time, as the rapid hormone release subsides, more concrete memories from the assault begin to come back to the survivor.
“We can keep (students) in mind and move forward,” Leslie said.
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