The Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) at Keene State works throughout each semester to educate students on how to identify sexual violence, provide safe spaces for those who are struggling and amplify survivor voices. Every two years, the Office puts out a survey known as the Sexual Misconduct Climate Survey to get a quantitative understanding of how sexual violence is being perpetrated on campus. Catherine Workman, who serves the Keene State community as project director for the federally funded OVW Campus grant program, has been presenting the data gathered by the most recent 2026 edition of the Sexual Misconduct Survey at training workshops. Workman sat down with The Equinox to share what this data means to the OVW and the campus community and describe the work that the OVW does with the survey results and in general.
“If you were on campus last year, you remember when you came back from winter break we had these “Be Heard” posters and asked folks to do the climate survey,” Workman said. “…The information we have is from the last three surveys, so we can actually start to do some compare and contrast to see how [the campus is] rating, because the survey questions are also pretty consistent for each iteration of the survey, so we can compare and contrast the results.”
“With all that being said,” Workman continued, “a lot of the questions are self-attestation, so it’s self-report, and we do on some of the definitions, like when we talk about victimization, define what sexual harassment is and give examples so there’s somewhat of a parameter when you’re answering, but again it’s self-attestation. And we do get a good response rate–it’s hard to define exactly how many students were on campus in winter of 2026, but 819 students completed the survey. So 24% completion response rate which is quite high for a survey with this magnitude.”
“Based on the information we have, the results indicate there are decreases in the incidents,” Workman shared. “Stalking is going down, dating violence is reportedly going down and sexual violence and victimization have decreased. But as you know with any statistics, correlation does not equal causation, so there could be many different factors and variables that are contributing to those decreases.”
Workman shared how the survey has evolved over her time at KSC.
“The survey was actually one of my first tasks when I was hired. I started in this role in January of 2004, so the ‘04 survey was just coming out, and my first tabling event I did on campus was to promote the survey [and] encourage students to complete the survey and answer any questions they might have.”
Workman continued, “In the last two years, I’ve done a lot to try and highlight the importance of completing the survey because this information informs the work that I do. It lets me know that there’s still more work to be done. For example, we ask about differences in sexual orientation in instances of sexualization. We have heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian/gay and then queer/other, and you can see [in the data] the rates for bisexual and queer are quite high. So that’s a concern.”
“You can also see our nonbinary and gender expansive community are reporting the highest amounts of victimization,” Workman said, “so we really want to address that. That’s why we do presentations for faculty and staff on supporting student survivors and building a trauma-informed campus because we want to make sure that everyone understands that at any given time, you could be speaking and engaging with a survivor. It’s not like a survivor wears a scarlet letter on them identifying as a survivor, so you want to be mindful of that; we want everyone on campus to be mindful of that and lead with empathy.”
Workman described some of the work that the office conducts in the workshops they hold on how to engage in conversation while being mindful of survivors.
“One of the things we talked about with faculty was [when] presenting in a classroom setting, providing predictability as possible. Making sure the students coming in are aware of ways that they can participate, warnings of upcoming difficult content that might be included in the class so that they can take whatever self-care measures they need to during that time so that they’re not blindsided. So offering that, and in all different aspects we work with community assistance and the community directors so everyone on campus is receiving that same message.”
In regard to what she would most like highlighted about the survey, Workman shared it would be the sense of widespread community safety the campus feels, as indicated by the survey results.
“When I work the family resource fair during orientation, one of the biggest questions I get from parents is, ‘What is the number of sexual assaults,’ or ‘How violent or safe is your campus?’” Workman shared. “And those are hard questions to answer because even if you look at the reports, you have to take the information with a grain of salt because it is what’s being reported and we know that sexual violence is very much underreported. But what I like to [highlight to parents] is the sense of safety that students report feeling on campus, because I think that is really important versus what’s the number of incidents reported on campus. 96% of students in 2026 reported that they feel safe on campus here at Keene State, and that’s pretty amazing, I think. Again, we’d love that number to be 100% of students feel safe on campus, but I’ll take 96%. Those numbers continue to move in the right direction.”
The other number Workman said she likes to highlight is the confidence level that students have that if they do make a report to campus, the report will be taken seriously. “[It is important that] that is handled with the level of care and professionalism that it requires. I think that is really important because we know a lot of survivors will not report if they don’t think that they’re going to be believed, or they don’t think that the report will be handled with sensitivity and care. So the fact that our students don’t feel that way and feel comfortable and confident in making a report to us is also really important. We want to continue to build that relationship and have that reputation with our students.”
Workman shared what she emphasizes in her role as project director for the OVW grant as a whole.
“When I came on campus, there hadn’t been a project director in my position, so there had been a little bit of a lapse,” Workman said. “I had to work really hard to kind of promote the grant and why I’m on campus [and] my role on campus. I think some folks think your perception of what sexual violence is can be the worst of the worst, but it really starts in subtle ways, and we want folks to be able to identify and recognize the subtleties before the behaviour rises to the level of abuse and severe and grotesque violence.
“That’s a lot of the conversation I put on the role on campus is recognizing those unhealthy and unsafe behaviors early on, and then empowering students with the skills necessary to mitigate those situations or remove themselves from the situation to protect themselves, or stand up as a bystander to change the dynamic of an environment or atmosphere.”
“I joke with Jeff and Kelly Joe in the Title IX office that really students should see my role on campus as my job is to put them out of a job,” Workman continued. “We will not stop until we have a 100% confidence rate in how Keene State would respond, or we have a 0% victimization rate on campus. That’s the focus of my job, is to put Title IX out of a job for having to respond to incidents of violence.”
When asked if she thought students had any misconceptions about the OVW, Workman said, “I think just where we’re located and the nature of the work, I think students can sometimes see our office as, like, the punitive office and relate it to some negative connotation in their mind. We’re not as cool as fun as the Student Center, we don’t have the NOC. We don’t have a lot of third space opportunities where students can really drop in. We’re a destination location, like if you’re coming here you’re coming here because you have a purpose or a reason to be coming here.”
Workman said she would like to change that this year. “This year I’d like to have a Survivor Night so students can feel like they have a place to just drop in. They won’t necessarily have to be a survivor or identify as a survivor to attend, there will be no questions asked. I want to create a space for students to feel comfortable to just come and be themselves, if that is watching a TV show with a friend while another group does a puzzle or another group does Scrabble, or Magic: The Gathering or whatever it may be. My goal is to just have a space for students to come be in community together and have that safe space on campus.”
“There is always more work to be done, but we’ll celebrate the wins when we get them,” Workman proclaimed.
The 2026 results from the Sexual Misconduct Climate survey can be viewed on the Keene State website. To visit the Office on Violence Against Women here on campus, stop by the first floor of the Dean of Students Office on 48 Butler Court.
Serena Taylor can be contacted at
staylor@kscequinox.com
