Universities

Gender relations on the university campus are undergoing major transformation worldwide.  The issues are diverse and complex, ranging from the long-standing crisis of sexual assault on campus, to a rapidly shifting gender landscape today as gender is being redefined and expanded beyond the rigid binary of masculine and feminine.  The voices of previously marginalized gender non-conforming populations and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexed (LGBTQI) communities are coming increasingly to the foreground. 

The prevalence of sexual assault and dating abuse on university campuses is a major crisis.  Statistics show that approximately one in five college women in the United States have been the victim of rape, and nearly 90% of them knew their rapist. A recent U.S. study found that 43 percent of college women experience violence and abusive dating behaviors, and 58 percent reported they did not know how to help someone who is experiencing dating abuse.  According to U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, “colleges and universities across the country would prefer not to acknowledge they have a problem for obvious public relations reasons.”  

GERI programs have been introduced on several university and college campuses in the United States and South Africa, and new programs will be introduced in Costa Rica in 2019.  The GERI process has been introduced at the following universities to date:  

South Africa:

• University of the Western Cape
• Stellenbosch University
• University of the Free State
• University of Kwa Zulu Natal
• University of Cape Town

United States:

• Pacific Lutheran University
• California Institute of Integral Studies
• K. Gandhi Center for Nonviolence (University of Rochester)
• University of Washington (Bothell)
• Southwestern College
• University of New Mexico

Academic Research on GERI

A three-year research project on the GERI methodology was launched in 2016 by Professor Pumla Gobodo Madikizela and Dr. Samantha van Schalkwyk, both now at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.  Two GERI workshops were conducted for a cohort of 28 students over a full academic year, with monthly follow up sessions.  Everything was recorded and the data were meticulously analyzed, and the peer-reviewed research articles will be published in 2019. 

To summarize the research and its findings:

Experiences of gender violence are taboo topics in most university contexts. This research project provided a critical opportunity for university students to begin to identify social conditioning and harmful gender norms, which are often invisible.  These students “excavated” their experiences, peeling away various layers of socialisation and silencing, and thereby began to free themselves—collectively and individually—from the lifelong shackles of patriarchal conditioning.

Preliminary conclusions from the research affirm that if applied widely on a long-term basis, this [GERI] work has the potential to change realities and to promote a safer life for all genders on campus. It would equip young students to become change agents in the world, because it creates spaces whereby people can engage on levels beyond fear, anger, projection and denial, and face head on the realities of gender oppression—in all of its forms and facets.  The hope for true transformation lies in such processes that facilitate a breaking down of patriarchal meanings and a realization of our full, uninhibited, and shared humanity.