E-raamat: Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors

Campus Whisper Networks examines how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities. Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Janet Shope and Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone -almost always a friend. Most college students know someone who has been assaulted. Simply knowing, by means of relationships, that one or more peers have been assaulted affects the knowers, and the effects reverberate unevenly across campuses.  

Shope and Pringle highlight the structural properties that prohibit relational knowledge from becoming official institutional knowledge, confining it to whispers and secrecy within informal spheres of knowledge. The rules governing the circulation of such knowledge create an uneven epistemic field of sexual assault. This uneven field is consequential for the communities, affecting survivors and their confidants and shaping student views of the college community. Campus Whisper Networks demonstrates how personal and institutional avoidance, both the “need to not know” and “no need to know,” create knowledge gaps that hide the community’s wounds and prevent personal knowledge from becoming social knowledge. 

College students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone, almost always a friend, and most students know someone who has been assaulted. These survivors and confidants are part of a campus whisper network. We examine the whisper networks, and how formal and informal structures channel tellings. Knowledge gaps among students and between students and administrators create an uneven knowing field, which affects knowers, their college perceptions, and thwart possibilities of change.   

Formal and informal communication rules ensure that awareness of sexual assaults within one’s community is uneven, mostly confined to whisper networks where survivors tell friends who keep their secrets. The pockets of whispering, secret-keeping, silence-holding, and avoidance constitute a fractured community unable to see its wounds, let alone address them.