The University of Wyoming sent an email to the student body as well as its employees in order to assess the typical belief about why sexual assault happens and what causes it.
The response from the survey will give the university a better idea of improving the policy, education and response related to sexual violence on campus.
“Some of the things people believe that why violence happens we might see those beliefs shift so that they line up with what actually causes violence vs what people think happens,” Megan Selhiem, Stop Violence coordinator said.
The completion of the survey is entirely anonymous and takes 45 minutes to complete. At the end of the survey, one will be directed to a new link that will ask their UW e-mail address to enter a drawing, which at no point connects to the survey.
“The survey is really long, at a point I felt like shutting it down but then I eventually completed as it will help campus to provide more resources and lead to an improvement to stop violence,” Nicole Austin, UW sophomore student, said.
The survey is open for the month of February. Since Friday, 300 students have completed the survey and Stop Violence is hoping for at least a thousand people to complete it total. 1200 students participated when the climate survey was carried out in 2014.
“It[the survey of 2014] also showed that there were things that people believed to be true about why violence happens and what causes it that are not true and so it provides some really good information about where we could focus when talking to the university and why sexual misconduct happens and what we can do to stop it,” Selhiem said.
The No More Campaign has initiated the surveys, but the Psychology department at UW carries out the organization and creation of the survey.
“It’s a good number to have at least a thousand because there are so many students on campus that we need a certain number to be able to say that the data is representative of the whole campus,” Selhiem said. “If it’s too small then we can’t really say that.”
The 2014 survey results showed that a number of students experienced sexual misconduct at UW but there were a large number of people who had experienced it before attending UW.
“It means that we have freshmen who are starting at the university who have already been the victims of violence and that’s important to keep in mind when they were doing education and programs,” Selhiem said.
“Maybe a lot of people don’t know about the Stop Violence program so what can we do to make our words out there and know how to get help and things like that,” Kendal Binion, graduate assistant at Stop Violence said.
UW student Juan Vintimilla said, “It’s a great thing that [the] university is putting an effort to the problems like violence and assault.”
