All students on the Indiana University Bloomington campus will receive the same email this week. It’s an invitation to participate in the first campus climate survey about sexual violence.

“The survey is really about perceptions and beliefs,” said Emily Springston, IU chief student welfare and Title IX officer. Plus, she said it’s an opportunity to see the effectiveness of IU’s initiatives as well as the prevalence of sexual violence.

The survey was one of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault recommendations released in April. However, a campus climate survey was already in the works at IU for about two years, said Justin Garcia, an assistant professor of Gender Studies and a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.

Yet, he and other organizers said it depends on the students — who have until early December to respond — to make it successful.

“We’re going to ask them all to be a part of this with us and help us understand the problem,” Garcia said. “We need to understand the scope of the problem so we can eliminate it.”
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