University of North Carolina Wilmington

Background
In spring 2004, two University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) students were murdered by fellow students. Both young women were murdered by men whom they knew. In the immediate aftermath, UNCW was determined to establish a high-profile resource for students or community members who were affected by violence or had concerns about safety. It started with a simple Web site called Safe-Relate: Help with Violent or Abusive Relationships, linked to the main campus Web site in many places.

UNCW continued to make far-reaching changes to increase campus safety and make violence prevention a priority. It established a broader violence prevention and intervention program called UNCW CARE: Collaboration for Assault Response and Education. University funding and a 2006 grant from the U.S. Department of Education supported staff positions for an assistant director of violence prevention and a coordinator for men’s programs to develop a variety of prevention programs and resources for the campus community. The Safe-Relate Web site expanded to include issues of sexual assault, stalking, harassment, and resources for key constituencies, such as faculty and staff or parents. UNCW heavily publicized Safe-Relate and campus resources to students through a comprehensive safety program for men and women in new student orientation, as well as in major student publications.

After the shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, UNCW decided to make Safe-Relate a more comprehensive safety-related site. Crime prevention and response were highlighted on the site, as well as resources to address issues related to troubled students. The university established a Student Behavior Intervention Team, which is co-chaired by the assistant and associate vice chancellors for Student Affairs and has members from Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, and University Police. The Student Behavioral Intervention Team comprises a select group of university administrators charged with the responsibility of identifying, investigating, assessing, and monitoring high-risk behaviors exhibited by UNCW students. In addition, this team attempts to determine whether, based on behaviors exhibited by the student, the student may pose a threat to the university community.

The Safe-Relate site remains as a stand-alone resource for issues of interpersonal violence, as well as being one-third of a more comprehensive all hazards safety Web site that details UNCW emergency notification structures and preparation for and response to all types of emergencies, including weather and public health emergencies.

CARE’s Mission
UNCW CARE is dedicated to intervening on a broad spectrum of violent behaviors, including sexual assault, relationship abuse, stalking, and harassment, as follows:

• Providing a comprehensive range of violence intervention programs, trainings, and educational campaigns to the UNCW campus
• Responding to students who have been victimized, by providing supportive services, including crisis response, individual advocacy, and coordination with both on-campus and off-campus resources
• Providing empathetic consultation to students, faculty, and staff who are affected by their own or another's experience with abuse or assault
• Collaborating with on- and off-campus constituents who are also involved in raising awareness of, intervening on, and expertly responding to these issues
• Working to reduce overt and covert expressions of violence within the campus community
• Promoting the maintenance and continuing development of a campus environment characterized by support and respect

CARE is a collaboration with campus partners, including University Police, the Office of the Dean of Students, Counseling Center, Health Services, the Women’s Resource Center, and Housing and Residential Life. It also works collaboratively with the local Rape Crisis Center and Domestic Violence Shelter and Services.

CARE’s cadre of peer educators are UNCW students whose goal is to reduce the risk of sexual assault and sexual harassment in the hopes of eliminating such behaviors. They conduct interactive presentations, awareness campaigns, and programs that reach out to university students, high school students and the Wilmington community. Peer educators at CARE include a traditional peer education group that started as UNCW’s student-led Reach Out! program in 1999 and a 1 in 4 men’s sexual assault peer education chapter advised by the coordinator for Men’s Programs. These peer educators have brought female and male students together who are dedicated to taking an active approach to ending violence against women and men.

Weaving the Fabric of a Non-Violent University is the name of the two-year project that was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Grant Competition to Prevent High-Risk Drinking or Violent Behavior Among College Students. This project allowed CARE to build capacity for its programs as well as attempt ambitious campuswide initiatives to increase campus ownership of violence prevention. This project had three main goals. The first was to create a comprehensive campus violence prevention model, drawing from the community psychology field, of which each member of the community considers himself or herself a part. The second goal was to generate a coordinated series of programs and services to address relationship violence in a comprehensive way. Examples include curriculum infusion mini-grants for faculty, a bystander intervention social norms campaign, and an identified helper program called I CARE. The third goal was to develop evaluation tools, such as a campus self-study (similar to an environmental scan) and campus violence survey, both for UNCW and other campuses wishing to use them.

A variety of measures were used to try to gauge the global effect of this project on campus. The CARE program saw a tremendous increase in traffic and service utilization. It had 80 percent more contacts with students, parents, faculty, and staff, and so forth in the last year of the project than the year before the project. Requests for programs, mostly I CARE, a program about alcohol and sexual assault called Mixed Messages, and a program about healthy relationships called Real Relationships, were up over 60 percent just between fall 2007 and fall 2008. Using data from survey instruments, the program achieved or nearly achieved their goals of awareness of CARE services, belief that the institution has a comprehensive violence prevention and intervention program, and awareness of where to refer students who have experienced violence. All of these results were strongest among students, which is key because they are the program’s target audience and students often reveal their experiences of violence first to a peer. There was a small (3 percent) reduction in overall abusive dating behaviors and students indicating that they were in an emotionally abusive relationship during the project, although the ambitious goal was a 10 percent reduction. A strong indicator of success in achieving the program goals of campuswide ownership with faculty members was that approximately 60 percent of students indicated that they had received information about violence or safety from a UNCW faculty member. Programs to engage men were successful not only in helping men get involved in CARE programs, such as the 1 in 4 men’s sexual assault prevention peer education group or the Men’s Summit program, but also in strengthening male student leadership on campus overall by the education and focus on men that was ignited on campus.

Translating Collaboration Values to Practice
In the spirit of collaboration within a comprehensive approach to promoting student health and safety, CARE coordinators maintain a strong link to CROSSROADS, the UNCW Substance Abuse Prevention and Education Program, and the Counseling Center. In fact, UNCW Director of Substance Abuse and Violence Prevention Rebecca Caldwell, who coordinates the prevention and education component of CARE, also serves as the director of CROSSROADS. Under her leadership, the program has developed as a comprehensive substance abuse prevention program in a higher education setting. In fall 2004, CROSSROADS received the National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week award from the Inter-Association Task Force for excellence in year-round alcohol prevention programming. In July 2009, CROSSROADS project Changing a High-Risk Drinking Culture through the Lens of Gender was named a Promising Model Program by the U.S. Department of Education.

Assistant Director of Violence Prevention Dee Casey, who coordinates the crisis response, intervention, and training component of CARE, joined CARE from the Counseling Center, where she had specialized in working with students concerned about substance abuse as well as family, relationship, sexual assault, and other trauma issues since 1988.

Collaboration is a core value of the Division of Student Affairs at UNCW, under the leadership of Vice Chancellor Patricia Leonard. This collaboration is expressed through partnerships, key working groups such as the Relationship Violence-Sexual Assault Response Team and the Student Behavior Intervention Team, and even the physical positioning of offices. For example, CARE is located on the same floor as the Counseling Center, Student Health Services, and CROSSROADS in Westside Hall, an intentionally designed student services building in the heart of campus. The collaborative spirit at UNCW is the cornerstone of how the initiatives described in this case study fit together to generate an effective campus response to emerging issues related to violence prevention on college campuses.

The collaborative model at UNCW is illustrated by this figure:

UNCW Collaboration for Violence Prevention and Response