How students, alumni, and staff are helping shape Carleton’s approach to campus safety and sexual misconduct
Trinity Hanif ’26 remembers New Student Week when she arrived at Carleton—the social energy was infectious, dorm room doors open welcoming people to stop in for a chat, lots of green space to explore. A “bubblytype, welcoming atmosphere,” she says. She also recalls the many CarlTalks, especially the one about consent.
“We watched this video called ‘Consent Tea’ and the whole premise was you’re not going to force somebody to drink tea,” recalls Hanif. “If somebody says they don’t want to drink tea, you’re not going to give them tea. Or if somebody’s asleep, they don’t want tea. If they’re unconscious, they don’t want tea. If they say, ‘No tea,’ they don’t want tea. I think that is a good way to make what consent is stick in your mind. But my overarching criticism was that it simplifies consent and what boundaries are because sometimes there’s coercion and power imbalances and all these other factors that go into consent. It’s not just a blanket yes or no.”
Hanif, who in high school advocated for legislation supporting rape and sexual assault victims, knew she wanted to play a part in what Carleton was doing in the realm of sexual assault and violence.
First she joined the Community Board for Sexual Misconduct, a group of faculty, staff members, and students who hear formal sexual misconduct cases, decide on sanctions and meet regularly for training that covers everything from the formal complaint process to Carleton’s Policy Against Sexual Misconduct. She followed that up by becoming a peer educator on the Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response (SMPR) team, which offers a variety of educational programs to students including bystander intervention training, consent and boundaries, the culture of respect and alcohol, incapacitation and consent.
“I always hear that colleges don’t really care about these issues,” says Hanif. “That they don’t want to hear students out. That they don’t have a great process. Historically, looking at colleges across the country over time, that has been true. But when students are a part of the process, that’s when voices can be heard. If students aren’t getting involved in the Title IX board or SMPR or they’re just not coming to our events, then they don’t really get a say in how the college is handling these issues or the college’s perception of these issues. To change how colleges are responding to assault, students need to be active participants in that process.”
Carleton has faced accusations in the past of mishandling of such cases, including a 1991 lawsuit by four women who alleged the College failed to protect them against known assailants and mishandled their complaints while they were students in the 1980s. In the years since, Carleton has worked with students, faculty, and staff to overhaul its procedures, including in 2009 when there was a review and subsequent revision of the College’s Sexual Misconduct Complaint Process, and in 2016 when students started a petition to hire a full-time Title IX coordinator.
But the stakes remain exceedingly high—offering strong motivation for constant evolution in how the College works to prevent sexual misconduct on campus and respond when incidents do occur. According to the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), statistics show that among undergraduate students, 26.4 percent of female college students and 6.8 percent of male students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation, while 23.1 percent of transgender, genderqueer, and nonconforming college students have been sexually assaulted.
The College has documented some of the changes to its sexual misconduct policies and procedures over the years—some prompted by voices on campus, others in response to changing federal legislation. And with newly updated Title IX rules, the revisions keep coming. What remains constant is the need for sexual misconduct prevention and response work across campus.
Title IX Work
In 2017, Carleton hired its first full-time Title IX coordinator, Laura Riehle-Merrill, who had been involved with Title IX work at the College since 2012.
A federal civil rights law enacted in 1972, Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal funding. This April, the U.S. Department of Education released an overhaul of Title IX regulations, requiring institutions to implement changes by August 1, 2024. Among the updates are redefining sexual harassment to include sex-based harassment and changing the term’s definition from behavior that is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” to behavior that is “sufficiently severe or pervasive.”
In an interview before leaving the Title IX coordinator position in June, Riehle-Merrill said in one of her busiest years on the job, she dealt with 119 reports, three of which went through the formal complaint process. Anyone who has experienced sexual misconduct on campus has the right to file a non-formal or formal complaint under Title IX. Most people, she says, want to either know what support and resources are available to them or for her to have an educational conversation with the person who they reported as harming them.
“In the early years of being in this position, I think there was a misconception that if we have higher reports of misconduct on our campus, that means more folks are experiencing harm,” she says. “But what we now know is that it means we’ve created a culture where people feel more comfortable coming forward. In my first year or two, we saw a 15 percent increase in reports on our campus.”
“To change how colleges are responding to sexual assault, students need to be active participants in that process.”
In its most recent annual report, Carleton’s Title IX Lead Team—a group of faculty and staff members tasked with coordinating the College’s sexual misconduct prevention, training, response, and compliance with Title IX—noted that there were 58 reports regarding 53 incidents involving sexual misconduct in the areas of harassment, inappropriate conduct, sexual assault, stalking, dating violence, and fondling.
“I work with students and staff and faculty impacted by misconduct. A bright spot of that is seeing folks showing so much courage by sharing how they’ve been impacted. Nothing can take away the pain that they’ve experienced,” says Riehle-Merrill. “It is very sad work.”
With an informal resolution of a formal complaint, the Title IX coordinator works with each party to see if they can come to a voluntary agreement. If a complaint rises to a formal Title IX case, there is an investigation and hearing. A panel consisting of two members of the Community Board on Sexual Misconduct and an outside hearing officer is assembled to hear formal Title IX cases and decide on sanctions as it considers its “responsibility to balance the following: keep the campus safe, prevent recurrence, and remedy the effects of the behavior in violation.”
Carleton’s Title IX Coordinator informs reporting parties of their right to contact law enforcement. Individuals get to determine whether and when to report to law enforcement, and the Title IX Coordinator is available to help with this process if desired.
“What’s inherently challenging is that any complaint that comes forward typically involves multiple people—complainants, respondents, or witnesses—all of whom are our students,” says Carleton President Alison Byerly. “We have to run processes that are fair to everyone while being as supportive as possible to a student who reports an incident. It’s not surprising that students sometimes feel frustrated with what feels like a lot of processes involved. But that is part of our effort to make sure that whatever the outcome of a concern or a case, we are able to defend it and that it is perceived as fair to all parties.”
Looking Back
In 2017, after reading “A Matter of Consent” in the Carleton College Voice, Xandria Birk ’88 was deeply concerned. The extensive story covering Carleton’s work in preventing and addressing sexual violence was missing some key components, she believed. Among them she said were the College’s high-profile sexual assault cases that occurred in the 1980s and the 1991 lawsuit that followed, which brought national media attention both to Carleton and to the issue of sexual assault on college campuses. As a result, changes were made to the College’s policies on sexual assault, including requiring additional support for survivors of sexual assault and educational programming on the prevention and response to sexual violence. Lawsuits like this one led to Minnesota Congressman Jim Ramstad’s introduction of the Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights in 1992, which was signed into law by President George Bush.
“What the plaintiffs did, at enormous personal cost, led to federal standards for institutions of higher education on how to deal with problems they had encountered at Carleton,” Birk says. “Their resolve brought protections to survivors of campus sexual assault everywhere, setting standards that are still the law of the land. That is history we should own and alumni we should be proud of.”
For several years Birk and a group of Carleton alums called Endeavoring To Do Better have been researching Carleton students’ history of activism on campus sexual assault and policy, documenting their work in a Timeline Project focused on students’ struggles for gender equity on campus since the 1960s. At the 2023 Carleton Reunion, Birk gave a talk on Endeavoring To Do Better and shared the timeline.
“This is relevant, important information,” Birk says. “Hopefully, we all understand that the value of studying history is that it tells you how we arrived at the present moment. It can inform you about choices you do not want to make because of the consequences that are seen in history. That is an important part of why we did the Timeline Project. But the other thing is, there are things that happened at our college that are of national significance and are still relevant.”
She hopes the effort can aid in shaping current sexual assault policy and prevention efforts at Carleton.
“We know that many alumni retain memories of experiences of these events at Carleton that they continue to find painful and that they want to see the institution recognize,” Byerly says. “As someone who became president of the College in 2021, I can’t speak to the actions of my predecessors, but I can say that the College fully acknowledges that this is an area in which we have felt the need to do better: that we have been improving over many years, that there are many things we do differently today, and that we would not operate in exactly the way that we did at moments in the past. What is important is to have heard those voices and recognized those experiences as we continue to evolve in how we manage these issues for today’s students.”
Peer Education
Even before starting classes at Carleton, all incoming students are required to complete Sexual Assault Prevention for Undergraduates, an online sexual violence prevention program. During their first week on campus, students participate in CarlTalk programs as part of New Student Week. These sessions, often peer-led, offer information about campus policies, values around consent, healthy relationships, and preventing sexual misconduct. Student athletes also take sexual violence prevention] training annually as a requirement of the NCAA Board of Governors Policy on Campus Sexual Violence.
Recent graduate Patrick Djerf ’24 served as an SMPR educator and presented a number of trainings during his time in the position. He believes peer education is valuable when communicating about sensitive topics.
“It can be easier to take in this information when it comes from someone you’re in classes with or someone you’re friends with,” says Djerf. “These can be heavy topics. Everyone is coming into a workshop with different lived experiences that are going to inform how they can handle situations, and if it’s a space full of familiar people or people you feel really comfortable around, it’s conducive to growth and discussion.”
Hanif says when people know about their bodies, that can be a preventative measure for sexual violence. As an SMPR peer educator, she created a sexual pleasure talk in 2024, addressing topics from the erogenous zones to anatomy and how some things might feel good to some people, but not to others.
“I feel like people have such a narrow view of what assault and sexual violence prevention looks like,” she says. “I want to expand that. For example, we do a lot of work on consent, boundaries, and the culture of respect—those types of issues are mainstream ways of thinking about how to prevent violence. But I think having a good basis for sex ed and for what sexual pleasure looks like are also preventative measures for sexual violence. When people understand their bodies and understand what they like, they’re more confident in their ability to communicate with one another and to establish boundaries, wants, and needs.”
Sexual Violence Prevention Coordinator Grace Espinoza oversees SMPR’s four peer educators. When she started her position in 2021, she was excited to see how seriously students took sexual violence on campus.
“They really care about this issue,” says Espinoza. “There was a lot of oversight from them to see what I was going to do. Not in a negative way, but they had high expectations of what they were hoping for. It was beautiful to see our students truly invested and wanting Carleton to be a place that is safe and a place where we’re all in community together.”
Through SMPR, Espinoza wants to help create a deeply connected community, offering a safe space where students can ask questions as they learn, without feeling shame.
“Healing from violence is lifelong for folks. The fewer people that we can have impacted by this, the better.”
“There’s this analogy where people are falling in a river and there’s a person downstream who just keeps taking the people out of the river and rescuing them,” explains Espinoza. “When you think about prevention, it’s like going upstream and asking, ‘Why are people falling in? What is happening to even have this occur? We’re so busy taking people out of the water that we’re never going to stop them from falling in.’ I think of that analogy when I think of prevention work—it’s essential. Healing from violence is lifelong for folks. The fewer people that we can have impacted by this, the better. We all joke in this field that we want to work ourselves out of a job, and I hope that someday I don’t have to do this work because there’s no need.”
Going Forward
Carleton isn’t alone when it comes to dealing with sexual assaults on campus, of course—it’s an issue for colleges across the country. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, campus sexual assault makes up 44 percent of total on-campus crimes in the United States. The same report states that forcible sex offenses increased overall between 2010 and 2020 from 1.9 to 6.6 per 10,000 students.
Recently, Carleton has moved the Title IX office from the Dean of Students Office to the Office of the Vice President for Inclusion, Equity and Community. The Sexual Violence Prevention Coordinator and SMPR will move to the Office of Health Promotion.
“One of the things that to me has been helpful is seeing this office as integral to various interlocking parts of the institutional structure,” says Byerly. “Moving oversight of the Title IX office will give it a place within not just student life, but a College-wide purview so we can think about the ways in which we handle student incidents in conjunction with the way in which we handle employee or community concerns. There’s really community-wide commitment and not something that is limited just to student life.”
“Across the board, there’s an understanding that this is now a very standard and important part of institutional structure in a way that I think has become much clearer over recent decades,” she adds.
When asked what she thought Carleton could be doing better in the area of sexual assault and violence prevention, Hanif says she’d like to see the College think more about rehabilitation when it comes to people who have been sanctioned. She’d also like SMPR to expand into doing more work addressing the “upstream causes” of sexual violence beyond consent and alcohol training.
“You can sanction them, but is that really going to change the root problem of why they’re engaging in this behavior?” she asks.
Espinoza said she’d like sexual assault and violence prevention to be part of Carleton’s bigger strategic plans.
“This work will continue to be really needed over the next 10 years and beyond,” she says. “How do we think about that from an institutional level rather than just ‘there is the SMPR office’? I think it could be way bigger the way this work is done.”
President Byerly notes that the College is committed to continuing to evolve.
“One of the things I feel positively about is that there are multiple ways for students to address these concerns,” she says. “Some of them take a formal judicial process. Others take a process of mediation. Students have more information and more choices than in the past. And I think because these are deeply emotional incidents, and everyone is different, having a variety of ways in which the College can give students more agency in addressing this behavior has been an important step forward.”
What the Title IX Changes Mean
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released its 2024 Title IX Regulations this past April. Institutions were required to update their Title IX policies and procedures to be in compliance with these new regulations by August 1, 2024 (though certain court decisions have impacted implementation—including an injunction affecting hundreds of schools around the country, including Carleton, temporarily stopping OCR from being able to enforce the new rules). These new regulations will, among other things:
EXPAND the scope of Title IX to include all forms of sex and gender discrimination, including discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity. They also expand to address sexual harassment that occurs outside the United States when that conduct affects an individual on campus.
EXPAND employee reporting requirements regarding students who are pregnant or experiencing a “related condition” including childbirth, termination of pregnancy, or lactation.
EXPAND training requirements for all employees, who will be required to receive annual training on institutional Title IX policy and reporting requirements; expand training requirements for Title IX personnel.
CLARIFY the rights of pregnant and parenting students and employees.
EXPAND access to the Informal Resolution Process for Title IX complaints.
ADJUST some of the procedural requirements related to the Title IX Grievance Process and add specific procedural requirements for complaints of sex discrimination that do not include sexual harassment.
Carleton Interim Title IX Coordinator Kari Hohn looks forward to bringing Carleton’s policy and process into compliance with these new regulations, while also ensuring the policy fits with institutional culture. Hohn states, “These regulations will allow Carleton to provide greater clarity for community members within its Title IX policy and process.”