The Host: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Student Affairs Podcast Series. My name is Ricky Cabral-Garcia and I will your host today. In this episode we are joined by Dr. David W. Parrott, Title IX/ADA coordinator and Sarah Mudd, Assistant Title IX Coordinator. Today we will be talking about sexual harassment and what are the possible ways to prevent it. Thank you so much Sarah and David for coming. How are you doing today?

Sarah/David: Doing well, glad to be here. Thank you for inviting us.

The Host: Great. And the first question we would like to know is how to recognize sexual harassment?

Sarah/David: Sexual harassment plainly is unwelcome conduct based on sex and falls into one of six categories: hostile environment sexual harassment, quid pro quo sexual harassment, sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, or stalking.

• Hostile Environment Sexual Harassment: Unwelcome conduct determined by a reasonable person to be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the recipient’s education program or activity. This can include:
  • Verbal behaviors like spoken or written words including name-calling, social media communications, or graffiti, innuendoes, spreading of sexually oriented rumors, requests for sexual favors, repeated unwelcome requests for dates, unwelcome flirting, or ridiculing a person’s failure to adhere to gender stereotypes
  • Non-verbal behaviors like leering, lewd gestures, or unwelcome flirting behavior
  • Physical contact like uninvited touching, hugging, or groping
• Quid Pro Quo Sexual Harassment: An employee of the University conditioning the provision of an aid, benefit, or service of the University on an individual’s participation in unwelcome sexual conduct. Examples might be when a faculty member threatens to give a worse grade if someone refuses to participate in unwelcome sexual contact, or if a supervisor promises a raise or promotion for participation in unwelcome sexual contact.
• Single occurrence of:
  • Sexual assault
  • Dating violence
  • Domestic violence
  • or Stalking

is what meets the definition of Sexual Harassment.

The Host: Well, how does one prevent sexual harassment?

Sarah/David: The first step to stopping sexual harassment is knowing what it is. Once you know what it is, it’s important to understand that it takes all members of the Cardinal Community to prevent and stop harassment on our campus.

First- be committed to not harassing others and be mindful of the impact your words and actions may have on others. If someone turns you down or doesn’t respond as you wish, move on and don’t ridicule, lash out, or persist.

Second- make sure your friends know that you take sexual harassment seriously. If you witness a friend in a questionable situation take steps to intervene. We talk about being an active bystander by doing one of three Ds- Direct, Delegate or Distract. Direct means to directly get involved. This could look like telling your friend that a joke is not funny, or if a friend has had too much to drink, walking them home. Delegating means getting someone else involved. This could be enlisting another friend or someone who knows the person better. It could mean calling an RA or ULPD. Finally, Distract means just that- do something to distract from the situation. If you’re at a party and you see someone who is clearly drunk being lead away from the party by someone else, you could spill a drink on one of them by accident, go up and tell the person who’s drunk that their friends are looking for them and walk them away or ask for directions.

Finally, if you or someone you know has been sexually harassed, you can report it to the Dean of Students Office or the Title IX office to learn more about resources and options.

The Host: Thank you, and what happens when someone reports sexual harassment?

Sarah/David: When someone reports sexual harassment, either the Dean of Students or the Human Resources office will reach out to the person who is reported to be receiving the harassment, whom we call a complainant. The Dean of Students office does this if the person alleged to be doing the harassing is a student, HR if the alleged harasser is a staff member. They will provide a resource guide and ask to meet. At that meeting, the staff member will offer supportive measures to help remedy the harassment which varies based on the person and the context of the harassment. Next, they’ll explain what the sexual harassment process looks like including the two options to resolve a formal complaint- informal process or formal process. The Informal Process is similar to mediation where the parties work with a trained facilitator to reach an agreed resolution. The Formal Process includes an investigation and may lead to a hearing.

What happens next after that meeting is generally up to the complainant. A formal complaint is needed to engage either the formal or informal processes. A formal complaint is a request from the complainant detailing what occurred and asking to engage in the sexual misconduct process. Generally, if the complainant doesn’t want to file a formal complaint the university keeps a record that a report was made but does not launch an investigation. Sexual harassment can be traumatizing to a complainant, for that reason we open the doors for them to know their options and then allow them to make the choice about which steps they’d like to pursue and when. This allows them to process the experience as they need to and have autonomy over how they’d like to move forward.

The Host: Well, thank you so much for your time and for sharing such important information. I hope our students are now aware and will have all these details in mind. Thank you again. Hope to see you soon!

The Host: For our listeners for more information go to louisville.edu/studentaffairs.

Also did you know that there's an academic university event, an HSC event, and university holiday calendars online for your convenience. They will be at louisville.edu/calendars.

Finally, we would like to give a shout out to the UofL Admissions for their first in-person orientation sessions since 2019. We are excited to welcome the fall 2022 Cardinals.

That’s all for today, thank you to our listeners for staying with us today. We hope you found this interview very helpful and informative and if you haven’t listened to the previous podcasts about Studying abroad, housing and more, go to our website at louisville.edu/studentaffairs to find more information. Take care. See you soon!