According to the US Department of Justice, women (33 per cent) are more likely than men (19 per cent) to experience violent victimisation (Morgan and Kena, 2018). Black women students are especially at risk of experiencing rape or sexual assault (Planty et al., 2013). A special report on sexual violence among college-age women found that between 1995 and 2013, the rate of sexual violence victimisation for Black females was 2.5 times higher than for white females (Sinozich and Langton, 2014). Furthermore, unlike other groups, Black women students were more likely to experience sexual victimisation than Black women non-students (ibid.). While Black women students experience higher rates of sexual violence, they remain on the periphery in discussions about sexual violence in higher education and violence against Black women (Wooten, 2017). Black women's violent victimisation in higher education and the marginal attention to the problem reveal the persistence of the US' historical legacy of racist and sexual violence.In this piece, I analyse the primary stories or narratives used and invoked by two popular movements against gender-based violence to ascertain their potential to address Black women students' experience of campus sexual violence. I examine the In My Words movement, the latest rendition of the national fight against campus sexual violence, and the Say Her Name movement, the leading movement for Black women's lives in the US. Together, these movements symbolise different attempts to deal with the issue of gender-based violence on campus and racist and gender-based violence against Black women. Subsequently, I employ a decolonial feminist framework for understanding Black women's experiences of sexual violence on university campuses and in other institutions.
decolonial feminist praxisDecolonial feminist theory explains how women of colour are not included in the category of woman, a designation for white women that includes protection and bodily sanctity (Lugones, 2010). Black
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