Toward a Critical Sociology of Campus Sexual Assault: Victim Advocacy as the Lifeworld Resisting the System

As scholars, practitioners and activists continue to strive to better understand, prevent and respond to campus sexual assault, we need stronger conceptual frameworks that provide insight into both causes and potential solutions. In this article, I propose a critical sociology of campus sexual assault, informed by Jürgen Habermas’s and Dorothy Smith’s work, and illustrated through data from interviews with campus sexual assault victim advocates. Specifically, I examine how understanding policies and practices operating primarily through the system versus the lifeworld can help us to identify those that serve institutions versus those that serve survivors. I argue further that policies and practices that prioritize consensus, self-articulation, and care—those that promote a particular understanding of the “lifeworld”—can help us to resist systemic oppression that contributes to the problem of campus sexual assault, potentially strengthening our response to this problem. I argue that our best hope for more effective efforts to reduce and ultimately eliminate campus sexual assault requires collaboration among academics, activists and advocates who center the experiences of survivors, in the spirit of critical theory’s insistence on the active participation of citizens in their own emancipation from oppressive systems.