USC joins assault prevention collaborative


USC will join the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education as a founding member, University officials announced Tuesday in a letter to the USC community. 

The collaborative aims to prevent sexual assault and harassment by implementing systemic changes and policies at its member universities.  

“As a founding member of this NASEM collaborative, the University will play a substantial role in developing the scope and vision of this important project and is making a pledge of significant financial support for the next four years,” Executive Vice Provost Elizabeth Graddy wrote.

As one of 28 founding members of the initiative, USC hopes to accomplish four main objectives through its involvement in the consortium. According to the memo the collaborative seeks to raise awareness of sexual misconduct and discuss recommendations to approach it. The consortium also plans to share institutional strategies to reduce harassment, gather research results across institutions and develop a standard for measuring progress toward reducing and preventing harassment.

“This investment reflects the Provost’s deep commitment to address openly the issue of sexual harassment here at USC and to work together with our peer institutions to help prevent sexual harassment throughout higher education,” Graddy wrote. “These efforts are vital to upholding our core values and fulfilling our responsibility to our students, faculty and staff.” 

Nine professors from the Keck School of Medicine, the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, the Rossier School of Education and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences will serve as representatives on the NASEM collaborative alongside Graddy . 

Associate professor of emergency medicine Parveen Parmar,  one of the representatives in the collaborative, said she and other faculty attended a national meeting in Washington D.C. in November to discuss how leaders at various academic institutions have developed models to address sexual abuse on their campuses. 

“What was born of that event was movement toward this collaborative on addressing sexual harassment in science, engineering and medicine,” Parmar said.

Parmar said it is necessary to find new ways to address sexual harassment at USC to create a safe campus for all community members. Through the consortium, she said that USC will be able to learn about and implement models that have worked for other universities. 

“Like any other threat to public health on campus, sexual harassment is a threat to the health of our campus, and I think it needs to be addressed using those best practices that we can glean from a multi-institution collaborative like this,” Parmar said. 

Cynthia Herrington, another representative in the collaborative, said that in two weeks, representatives will meet to discuss their agenda for the four-year initiative. In the future, she said the collaborative plans to hold two national meetings each year, one for representatives and another for any interested institutions.

In light of sexual harassment allegations against two former campus doctors, Herrington said it is necessary for USC representatives to work with other schools to find potential solutions and discover new metrics to accurately measure sexual harassment incidents. 

“Because of the challenges that USC has faced, there’s a lot of brainstorming occuring presently, and for us to be able to work with other members of academia to find best practices, I just think it’s an imperative,” Herrington said.