The first published findings of the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), a major study of sexual violence and sexual health among Columbia University and Barnard College undergraduates, highlight the extent and multiplicity of undergraduates’ sexual assault experiences.

Results appeared in the journal PLOS ONE.

The findings come from a survey that is one component of the SHIFT project led by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry, implemented with input from administrators and undergraduate advisory boards, and funded by the Office of the President.

The researchers sent an online survey to a randomly-generated sample of 2,500 students, representative of the Columbia and Barnard undergraduate student bodies. Of those selected for the survey, 1,671 or 67% took part, a very high response rate for studies of sexual assault on college campuses. Among the respondents (ages 18-29 years), 22% said they had experienced a sexual assault since starting college. This finding is in line with rates seen in previous studies of undergraduates. Women had much higher rates of sexual assault than men (28% vs 12%), and risk was even higher for gender non-conforming students (39%).

“This study, one of the most robust undertaken to date, is a stark reminder that sexual assault is all too frequent an experience for undergraduates, particularly women, but also for LGBT students and men,” said first author Claude A. Mellins, PhD, SHIFT co-principal investigator and professor of Medical Psychology in Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences.

The SHIFT survey revealed that the most common kind of assault was unwanted and non-consensual sexualized touching—including kissing, fondling, or grabbing in a sexual way—with over one-third of those who experienced sexual assault reporting an experience of sexualized touching but no other type of assault. Rates of attempted and completed penetrative (oral, anal, vaginal) sexual assault were half those for touching (15%)—“but still unacceptably high,” Mellins emphasized. No matter the type of assault, incapacitation (such as from alcohol or drugs) was the method of perpetration reported most frequently (>50%) by women, men, and gender non-conforming students. Women were much more likely to report use of physical force against them than were men (35% vs 13%); equal proportions of men and women (33%) reported verbal coercion, which includes criticism, lying and threats to end the relationship or spread rumors.

“The implication of this variation in sexual assault experiences is that a ‘one size fits all’ approach to prevention is unlikely to be effective,” said Mellins. “For example, what’s going to stop unwanted sexualized touching at a party is likely to be different from what’s going to stop rape among intimate partners. Bystander interventions that ask students to prevent assault among peers may be effective in social settings like fraternity parties with a lot of drinking, but may not be sufficient for incidents in contexts without others around and where verbal coercion methods or physical force may be used.”

The SHIFT findings point to a number of risk factors for sexual assault—including non-heterosexual identity, sorority membership, casual sexual encounters (“hook ups”), binge drinking, and having experienced sexual assault before college—that have been seen in earlier studies. The study also uncovers risk factors for victimization or survivorship about which little has been written—in particular, experiencing economic hardship and fraternity participation (the research literature typically only focuses on fraternity members as perpetrators). Very few differences in prevalence w