Content Warning: sexual assault, sexual harassment
Title IX was born in the ‘70s in a set of education amendments. It first began as a law to prevent the mistreatment of people based on sex within the United States but has since grown to encompass several different topics essential to modern culture. These range from equity in athletics, transgender student rights, and sexual assault.
Within the UC system, there exists a system-wide Title IX advisory board composed of two representatives from each campus: one graduate student and one undergraduate student. For UC Davis, our undergraduate student representative is Claire Chevallier, a third year psychology major.
“Our job is to collect feedback from students about the way that sexual assault is handled and prevented at our institution and relay that to the Title IX office,” Chevallier said.
Chevallier has experience working with the subject matter key to this position. She’s currently a chair for the Sexual Assault Awareness Advocacy Committee and states that this is what gave her the drive to become our Title IX representative.
“Being a part of this work and advocacy work has been really rewarding,” Chevallier said, “And I wanted to take that to the next level by working with admin to facilitate a bridge between students and admin on this subject matter.”
Chevallier hopes to get a conversation going on this campus about sexual assault. She believes that conversation, awareness, and education are key steps into creating a safer campus all-around. In general, students being more vocal will contribute to changes on the campus.
“If you hear an inappropriate joke, say, ‘Hey, that contributes to rape culture and normalizes it. Don’t,’” Chevallier said. “I hope that I can reach out to as many communities as possible. Especially communities that we often don’t interact with that much. It’s a very big campus.”
A concept that Chevallier emphasized was making sure that we, as a campus, understand that different communities within our makeup experience the concept of sexual assault in different ways. Particularly, she pulled the contrast between the LGBTQIA+ community and the Greek life community on campus, saying that they don’t experience sexual assault in identical ways, so we need to understand and educate upon those differences.
“I hope that ultimately we can make long-lasting changes that will make UCD a safer place, especially in regard to holding accountability and creating a culture of accountability between the students and the admin and within the student body itself,” Chevallier said. “We want to guide the campus toward a holistic approach that involves teaching people that sexual assault is a multifaceted issue.”
Chevallier believes that the creation of this Title IX board is, in itself, already a step in the right direction. Previously, students would have to go to the Title IX office for information, but they now have a clear line of communication within their own campus.
Chevallier also makes note of how important the graduate student community is on campus as well and how the education of these students is essential to a better campus.
“Undergrads kind of live in our own little bubble, unaware of graduate struggles,” Chevallier said. “Graduate students, unfortunately, don’t get a lot of outreach aside from a few trainings at the beginning of each year. They don’t get much consent education. There’s no way of knowing if they’ve ever received education on consent, which is really scary. A big role for our graduate representative is to bring more awareness to sexual assault in the graduate student community.”
Chevallier will be having office hours from 1:00-2:00 p.m. on Mondays in the AMC room of the MU on the third floor. She will also be collecting feedback via online forms so that students can share their opinions and concerns. She concluded with the fact that she is not a reporting source, encouraging students to look to CARE, a campus resource, for their reporting needs. Her role is to be a liaison between the Title IX office and our campus, and she hopes to create a relationship that cultivates education, awareness, and accountability.