ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates what it means to approach campus sexual assault as a public health problem. It explains a public health approach by pointing to two major public health successes – reducing teen driving fatalities and providing clean water – and notes that a challenge in applying this perspective to sexual assault is the difficulty of specifying which aspects of the environment make assaults likely to happen. It then uses three concepts – sexual citizenship (the right to sexual self-determination), sexual projects (what sex is for), and sexual geographies (how the built environment shapes sexual and social interactions) – to provide an analytic framework for identifying elements of campus life that make sexual assaults likely to happen. Those concepts are applied to three stories of sexual assault. Finally, the conclusion shows how sexual geographies, sexual citizenship, and sexual projects lay the groundwork for approaches to prevention that go beyond telling people not to commit sexual assault.
