The safety of women on college campuses: implications of evolving paradigms in postsecondary education.

This volume serves as the second in a two-part special issue focusing on the victimization of college women. Asserting that the fields of violence against women and postsecondary education both still lack a detailed understanding of the presence of victimization on college campuses, how to respond to its aftermath, and how to prevent its occurrence, in the summer of 2013, the University of Kentucky Center for Research on Violence Against Women hosted a national scientific meeting on this topic. Presentations made at the meeting and related articles were compiled into a two-volume special issue. The special issue includes 17 main articles and discussant responses. Volume 1 of the special issue appeared in July 2014. Its opening spoke to the current shifts in models of postsecondary education and highlighted implications of those evolving paradigms on the safety of the nation’s university women. Articles in Volume 1 addressed a range of topics, including conceptual and measurement issues, the academic impact of victimization, and the legal and service responses that have been made by universities. Sherry Hamby, Callie Rennison and Lynn Addington, and Christopher Krebs offered reviews and a discussant article that spoke to the construct of violence and that identified limitations in the current definitions used in the field. To the discussion on types of violence, Joanne Belknap and Nitika Sharma proffered the concept of ‘‘stealth violence’’ and its impact on college women. The first volume also included an article addressing the impact of sexual victimization on academic performance among college women, which I offered with Jessica Combs and Gregory Smith. Volume 1 went on to place focus on how universities have responded to the victimization of college women. An article by authors Chiara Sabina and Lavina Ho explored correlates of service utilization by victims of dating violence and sexual assault and outlined reasons victims have for not seeking services. Attorney Nancy Chi Cantalupo brought together legal scholarship and case study research in a second article to recommend provocative amendment to federal law or regulation to mandate that all higher education institutions survey their students approximately every 5 years about students’ experiences with sexual violence. Legal and disciplinary issues were also examined in an article by scholar Mary Koss and student affairs professionals Jay Wilgus and Kaaren Williamsen, which recommended a restorative justice university response to intimate forms of violence against women. This second volume of the special issue now brings focus to the domains of risk, self-defense, and prevention. In the first of these articles, Antonia Abbey, Rhiana Wegner, Jacqueline Woerner, Sheri Pegram, and Jennifer Pierce offer a systematic review of empirical studies on the association between alcohol consumption and men’s sexual aggression. Their review identifies and reviews 25 cross-sectional surveys, 6 prospective studies, and 12 alcohol administration experiments published between 1993 and August 2013 with male college students and young adult (nonincarcerated) samples. The second article in this section, authored by Catherine ‘‘Katie’’ Kaukinen, synthesizes the knowledge base on risk and protective factors for dating violence while highlighting its relevance to gender-based violence against college women. Kaukinen’s review highlights the limitations of the existing literature and knowledge base while exploring a newer scholarship on health and behavioral risk factors that co-occur among college students experiencing dating violence. Heather Littleton and Martie Thompson each follow the Abbey et al. and Kaukinen articles with insightful commentaries. Littleton notes an important overlap in the two areas of study, including for example, that individuals in relationships where dating violence has occurred are more likely than students not in violent relationships to engage in other health risk behaviors including heavy alcohol use, substance use, and casual sex. Thompson summarizes common themes that emerge across the two articles and then highlights