Officials from 10 UNC-system schools gathered in Chapel Hill Wednesday morning for the academic year’s first Campus Security Committee meeting. The meeting focused on how to address system-wide issues like campus crime data collection and reporting.
Members of various subcommittees focusing on data collection, training recommendations, campus climate surveys and a system-wide safety conference discussed their efforts in the past academic year.
LaKesha Alston Forbes of East Carolina University’s Equity and Diversity office described her committee’s challenges in creating a standard reporting system for Title IX violations across campuses, sparking the morning's longest discussion. Because each school is able to create its own policies about what constitutes sexual offenses like rape or sexual assault, she said, compiling meaningful data system-wide can be difficult.
"We don't have the standard definitions,” she said. “Sometimes, we're not talking about the same thing as far as even our definition of sexual assault, our definitions as it relates to policy violations and that sort of thing."
Dave Johnson of North Carolina State University's Institutional Equity and Diversity office said having different definitions for basic concepts like consent or sexual assault from campus to campus “doesn’t make any sense.”
"What we're hearing is that students don't get why consent at NC State is not the same as consent at UNC or at Central or wherever,” Johnson said. “How is 'sexual harassment' not the same all over the state? How is 'sexual assault' not? How is 'consent?' How is there not one 'consent' definition?"
