SUNY Empire State College Participates in 2018 SPECTRUM Conference

Student Ian Corbett, president of SUNY Empire State College’s LGBTQA+ alumni/student club, Professors AmyRuth Tobol and Nadine Wedderburn and Elliott Dawes, the college’s chief diversity officer for institutional equity and inclusion, were among the participants in the 2018 SPECTRUM Conference, “Preventing and Responding to Violence Against the LGBTQI+ Community,” hosted by the SUNY system.

The conference, sponsored by SUNY, provided research-based prevention and response training to “…turn the dial on sexual and interpersonal violence against sexual and gender minorities, while providing the most trauma-informed and culturally-competent response and care when incidents do occur.”

SPECTRUM is the nation’s largest higher education conference devoted to preventing and responding to sexual and interpersonal violence against members of the LGBTQI+ community.

More than 600 people attended the conference. Attendees from public and private colleges and universities came from as far away as Alaska, Hawaii and Canada.

The need to address these issues is acute. According to national surveys and reports:

• Sixty-three percent of transgender and gender nonconforming people reported serious acts of discrimination and/or violence, including bullying and assault.*
• Bisexual women reported much higher prevalence rates of rape and sexual violence, compared with lesbian and heterosexual women, and lesbian women and gay men reported intimate partner violence rates at or higher than heterosexual men and women.**
• Sexual assault and sexual misconduct experiences were higher among transgender, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, questioning and other gender identities, compared to cisgender students.***

An immediate benefit of the conference was the sharing of the SUNY Sexual Assault and Violence Response website. SUNY SAVR provides students with information, resources and support, including how to report crime to law enforcement and the campus.

“We hope that through our work with our Title IX and diversity, equity and inclusion panels, the LGBTQ Student and Alumni Club and colleagues at the college, we can share this information and develop strategies for providing a safe, inclusive and rich learning environment for all of our students,” said Tobol.

"Well done, SUNY,” said Wedderburn. “It is important to me that I stay current on matters that inform my teaching of social policy and diversity competence. To be able to attend this conference, and hear from leading practitioners in this rapidly evolving field, has been an invaluable professional development opportunity. I learned from scholars who are nurses, lawyers, counselors, public health professionals and university administrators, just to name a few."

Feature speakers included:

• Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center.
• Jane Clementi, founder of the Tyler Clementi Foundation.
• Kristina Johnson, chancellor of the State University of New York.
• Jim Obergefell, lead plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), the U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the U.S. Constitution.
• Antuan Magic Raimone, an actor who has appeared in the award-winning Broadway musical “Hamilton,” gave a talk, “Soldier of Love: My Survivor Journey,” at the 2018 TEDx Lincoln Center.
• Sarah Warbelow, legal director of Human Rights Campaigning.

“We also had the wonderful opportunity to hear Antuan Magic Raimone’s powerful personal story of surviving abuse, as well as Jane Clementi’s story about her son Tyler’s suicide after being outed on social media,” said Tobol.

Training sessions attended by SUNY Empire faculty and staff included:

• Creating affirming spaces for transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
• Queering the curriculum.
• LGBTQI 101.
• Addressing exclusion and invisibility in sexual violence programming and policy.
• Acts of violence and the LGBTQI community: an effective legal response.
• Supporting LGBTQIA+ students: the shifting legal landscape and what it means for your institution
• Demystifying the sexual assault forensic examination.

*The 2012 report by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
** The 2013 National Intimate Partner Sexual Violence Survey, which was conducted by the U.S. Department of Health’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
*** The 2015 AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct.

SPECTRUM was held at the Albany Capital Center, Albany, N.Y., June 19-20, which coincided with National Pride Month, in honor of the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan.