Accounts of violence against women and sexual harassment continue to fill our news feeds, connected by threads of institutional betrayal. Title IX failures at Louisiana State University. Plans to tarnish the credibility of a woman who made harassment allegations. Sympathy for a man arrested for the murder of seven women, six of whom were Asian.

As these stories illustrate, institutions sometimes create the circumstances that make abuse more likely, fail to be accountable, attack whistleblowers and survivors, or minimize the violence.

Institutions also tend to go quiet and turn inward in the wake of disclosures, as Dr. Kathryn Becker-Blease and I recently wrote. Unfortunately, turning inward neither meets survivors’ needs nor offers institutions the best shot at solving the persistent problem of violence against women and harassment.

Indeed, persistent and multifaceted problems require broad collaboration, not isolation. Fortunately, institutions can use community-engaged methods as a guide to building robust and impactful collaborations that promote courage.

Community-engaged methods are characterized by bringing together partners from across different entities – say a university with nongovernmental organizations – to collaborate in a way that is reciprocal and values the multidirectional flow of information at all stages of work.

Community-engaged methods, which have been used across many fields, from public health to university research and teaching, include:

• Building relationships with people inside and outside the organization in a way that allows diverse perspectives to thrive in order to advance understanding and discovery.

• Prioritizing trust through clear and ongoing communication, and by recognizing how power and privilege affect everything from group dynamics to decision-making.

• Identifying shared priorities where all have the potential to benefit from working together.

• Taking action, such as a research project or program implementation, to address shared interests.

• Evaluating and communicating outcomes, both positive and negative, to multiple audiences.

With these steps in mind, we can begin to see that many institutional activities feel engaging without being community-engaged. Imagine a college sexual assault task force comprised of administrators, staff, and faculty that invites survivors to focus groups, and then holds a town hall to discuss resulting policies. From the start, the questions asked come from the perspective of the institution. A narrow perspective is unlikely to lead to new discoveries and may contribute to the perception (or reality) that institutions are acting primarily in their own self-interests.

Now re-imagine a collaboration that brings together people positioned within and outside the college to develop a shared agenda for addressing sexual assault. A breadth of perspectives and accountability can help ensure that the questions asked, potential solutions explored, and actions taken advance institutional courage.

At least that’s been my research team’s experience in our work on multidisciplinary responses to violence against women. We saw community-engaged steps in action when we studied what happened when people in diverse roles from campuses, the criminal legal system, and community-based agencies came together to address campus sexual assault investigations. Over several years, the group invested in building an ecosystem that facilitated sharing of information and perspectives, accountability, and problem solving. The return on investment was clear. Members asked questions and identified solutions together that they would have missed working in isolation. 

Community-engaged approaches require institutional buy-in from the start: time to build relationships, willingness to share responsibility, risk, and benefit with people outside the institution, and humility about what cannot be known in isolation. Such a stance runs counter to the institutional tendency to turn inward; however, turning inward hasn’t worked. Just look at campus sexual assault rates, which have not budged in fifty years. Institutions need a new approach. Community-engaged methods offer a roadmap to institutional courage through collaboration.