Skip to content

UH sex misconduct bill tackles growing problem

Details

Article

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently reported on a legislation which Senior Landecker Fellow Kris Coffield helped to draft to strengthen protections for sexual assault survivors on college campuses.

Among else, Hawaii House Bill 554 would require Hawaiian universities to provide “mandatory annual, trauma-informed, gender-‐ inclusive, LGBTQ+‐inclusive sexual misconduct primary prevention and awareness programming for all students and employees of the university.”

When asked about the reasoning for his work on this legislation, Kris, who works as office manager for state Rep. Jeanne Kapela (D, Volcano-Naalehu-Hawaiian Ocean View), an introducer of the bill, shared with the newspaper that such support “would have made a major difference for him after he says he was raped by a professor and three graduate students.

Indeed, troubling trends in sexual violence on college campuses stretch across the States, the article  by Esme M. Infante reports.

[The legislation] is the best form of justice that I could achieve personally … to make sure that doesn’t happen to somebody else,” Krish shared in this moving piece.

Kris is one of thirty 2021-2022 Landecker Democracy Fellows. This fellowship, a collaboration between the Alfred Landecker Foundation and Humanity in Action, was created to strengthen a new generation of leaders whose approaches to political and social challenges can become catalysts for democratic placemaking and community building. Read more about the fellowship here.