culture of respect

Strengthening the MMA Campus

LIKE MANY COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, MMA has the unfortunate duty of dealing with sexual assault on campus. Elizabeth True, former MMA VP of Student Affairs (now at Eastern Maine Community College) and currently an MMA board member, saw a need to improve how assaults and their aftermath were handled, and knew that MMA needed a broad organizational and cultural change.

At her urging, MMA joined Culture of Respect, a program of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). MMA is the only maritime academy among the 140 colleges and universities that have joined this program. Culture of Respect helps schools support survivors of sexual assault, prevent sexual violence, and communicate that violence is unacceptable. It provides an assessment of each school and helps implement ways to assist them in dealing with the issue. Its key focus is on prevention and response.

MMA realized that as a maritime college, its women students could be especially vulnerable as they were sometimes the only women on board a ship or working in power plants. Academy officials are determined to build a culture on campus that teaches students how to act with respect toward one another. If that respect is learned on campus, it can be transferred to ships, power plants, and other places in the real world.

Beginning the journey was a huge undertaking and was met with some resistance at the start. But people realized that building a respectful, inclusive, and equitable culture is a sexual assault prevention strategy and the opposite of dealing with it after the fact. Students can identify resources on campus for help and feel more comfortable reporting any incidents.

MMA marked Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October and is training advocates in survivor support. Students have been surveyed about the climate on campus and the campus is undergoing an assessment of how it deals with sexual assault and harassment. Building a strong culture of respect will take time, as does all institutional and cultural change. Alumni are encouraged to become involved, to help, and to promote a culture of respect in their own workplaces.

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