Associate Professor of Politics Vanessa Tyson has been awarded a fellowship to attend the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. Since 1954, this internationally recognized fellowship has brought researchers from across the globe to a residential environment aimed at fostering transdisciplinary intellectual growth. Past participants have included Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and MacArthur Fellowship winners, and some of the most cited books in the social sciences have been completed or worked on at CASBS.
Professor Tyson will spend the 2018–19 academic year at CASBS working on a book about sexual violence against women and children. Despite a growing number of official policies aimed at mitigating this type of violence, like the Violence Against Women Act and sex-crime registries, sexual violence against women and children remains ubiquitous, with 35 percent of women worldwide having experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization.
Tyson wants to explore that discrepancy, as well as how we should devote more resources to challenging the misogynistic culture that supports this type of violence.
“It’s built into the fabric of our culture, where women are assaulted, objectified, and harassed,” says Tyson, who adds that another failure of our current policies is their neglect for victims’ holistic wellbeing. “My overarching goal is to bridge policy analysis with the trauma and the consequent emotional, psychological, social, and financial needs of the victims,” she says. “It’s time to start providing the conditions necessary for victims to emerge as survivors.”