Campus Sexual Violence and the Cost of Protecting Institutions: Carceral Systems and Trans Student Experience

Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) students on university campuses experience high rates of sexual violence relative to their cisgender peers and are less likely to utilize campus resources. Despite this, TGD students’ voices are often left out of conversations about campus sexual violence. To learn about TGD students’ experiences of university sexual violence prevention and response infrastructure, we conducted focus groups with 21 TGD students at a large university in the northeastern United States. Informed by abolition feminism and critical trans politics, we undertook this thematic analysis to examine the limits of current systems to respond to TGD students’ needs and reduce their victimization. Our findings highlight how carceral logic contributes to TGD students’ exclusion from and distrust of university systems to address sexual violence. Further, our findings illustrate how TGD students’ visions for healing-oriented approaches to sexual violence on campuses align with transformative justice principles. These findings suggest that feminist social work must support the development of campus sexual violence prevention and response infrastructure that moves away from a reliance on carceral logic and toward approaches developed by community-led transformative justice organizations to inform inclusive, intersectional, campus sexual violence prevention and response efforts.