Doctoral candidate Sara Wooten co-edits The Crisis of Campus Sexual Violence

09/30/15

Awareness of campus sexual assault is at a historic high, but how these institutions respond to sexual violence varies. In Louisiana, current sexual assault policies are not uniform across campuses. Higher education scholars, administrators, and practitioners need to better understand how to adequately and effectively implement sexual assault prevention and response practices.

Co-edited by doctoral candidate Sara Wooten and Dr. Roland Mitchell, The Crisis of Campus Sexual Violence: Critical perspectives on prevention and response brings issues surrounding campus sexual violence into the limelight.   

According to this text, there is little research and scholarship on the role of leadership in “developing institutional strategies for mitigating campus sexual violence or how legal mandates shape, or fail to shape, higher education institution responses to incidents of rape and sexual assault.”

This book provides a necessary and more holistic understanding of the challenges that colleges and universities face in implementing adequate and effective sexual assault prevention and response practices. It is a major contribution to scholarship on combating and preventing sexual violence on college campuses.

Sara Carrigan Wooten is a Doctoral Candidate in Higher Education and Curriculum Studies in the Educational Leadership and Research department in the School of Education at Louisiana State University.

Louisiana Senator J.P. Morrell appointed her to a Louisiana Campus Sexual Assault Working Group. This group is tasked with identifying how higher education institutes are failing to protect their students. It develops sexual assault policy recommendations for colleges and universities in Louisiana. Wooten helped evaluate the Board of Regent’s uniform sexual assault policy for Louisiana higher education institutions. She also evaluated proposed legislation on campus police sexual assault training, campus climate surveys, sexual assault protective orders, and rape kit testing and handling procedures.

Roland W. Mitchell is the Joe Ellen Levy Yates Endowed Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Research Engagement and Graduate Studies and Co Director of the Curriculum Theory Project in the College of Human Sciences and Education at Louisiana State University.

About SOE

The LSU School of Education offers graduate and undergraduate programs in Curriculum and Instruction and in Educational Leadership, Research, and Counseling. The school’s mission is to prepare P-12 educational professionals to be leaders, practitioners and scholars knowledgeable in contemporary educational issues. 

About CHSE

The College of Human Sciences & Education is a nationally accredited division of LSU. Formed in 2012, the college brings together programs and capitalizes on individual strengths to create a dynamic new college that addresses the socially significant issues we face as a state and nation. The college is comprised of the School of Education, the School of Leadership and Human Resource Development, the School of Kinesiology, the School of Library and Information Science, the School of Social Work and the University Laboratory School. These combined schools offer eight undergraduate degree programs and 18 graduate programs, enrolling more than 1,900 undergraduate and 977 graduate students. The college is committed to achieving the highest standards in teaching, research, and service and is continually working to improve its programs.