FROM CLASSROOM TO DORM ROOM: SERVING SURVIVORS WITH DISABILITIES 
ON CAMPUSES 


>> SPEAKER: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank 
you for joining our webinar today. I'm Ashley 
Brompton with the Center on Victimization and 
Safety at the Vera Institute of Justice. I would 
like to welcome you to today's webinar. We are 
pleased to bring you this webinar as part of 
our 2019 End Abuse of People with Disabilities 
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will be getting started in just about 5 minutes. 

>> SPEAKER: Hello, everyone. We'll be 
getting started in just a couple of minutes. 
Actually, we will go ahead and get started. Good 
afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our 
webinar today. My name is Ashley Brompton with the 
Center on Victimization and Safety at the Vera 
Institute of Justice. I would like to welcome you 
to today's webinar. We are pleased to bring you 
this as part of our 2019 End Abuse of People with 
Disabilities webinar series. We have just a few 
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Our presenter today is Kaitlin Shetler. 


Kaitlin has her masters of social work from the 
University of Tennessee Knoxville. She works for 
the Vera Institute of Justice as a senior program 
associate providing technical assistance for the 
Office on Violence Against Women's Disability Grant 
Program and the Disability and Deaf Resource 
Center. Before coming to Vera, Kaitlin was the 
director of Disability Services at Lipscomb 
University in Nashville, Tennessee for five years. 
She provided disability awareness training to 
faculty and staff, developed policies, and ensured 
compliance with federal and state disability law, 
and served over 600 students by providing them with 
access to social and educational accommodations. 
She also served as a Title IX investigator, working 
with students experiencing sexual assault, 
stalking, harassment, and discrimination. Kaitlin 
currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her 
husband and 3-year-old daughter, who enjoys 
dressing up as a princess, eating cupcakes instead 
of green beans, and singing when she should be 
sleeping. Thanks, Kaitlin, and I will now turn the 
presentation over to you.

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: Thank you so much, 


Ashley. I really appreciate it, and I'm really 
excited to talk to you guys today, um, about 
serving survivors with disabilities on campus. Um, 
so, thank you so much. I was the director of 
Disability Services at a medium-size university for 
about five years, worked closely with our Title IX 
office during that time. I served as an 
investigator and a trainer, and I also served on 
the Behavioral Intervention Team on campus. So, 
I'm presenting today from a context of a social 
worker and also a person with a disability. I hope 
that today's content will give you some practical 
tips in serving sexual assault survivors with 
disabilities on college campuses. Um, so, before 
we begin, I do want to get a sense of who is with 
us today. I read a little bit in the chat pod, but 
I would love for you guys to answer this question. 
Are you a disability services provider? A Title IX 
coordinator or sexual assault provider? Or do you 
work in a different context, like a TA provider or 
in advocacy work? And if so, go ahead and let us 
know in the chat pod. I'm going to give you a few 
seconds to answer that, just so we know who's with 
us. Great. Thank you so much. It looks like we 


have a really good mix of people here. I hope that 
everybody can find something that's going to be 
helpful, and I'm going to leave some time for 
questions at the end of the presentation, just in 
case there's anything that I may have left out or 
something else that you would like to bring up. 

So, let's go ahead and move along. To set the 
stage for this discussion, I do think it's helpful 
for us to understand that disability is experienced 
as a college student, how is disability experienced 
as a college student. So, 20 percent of college 
students identify as having a disability, and these 
can include the following types of disabilities; 
learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, language 
processing disorder, and dysgraphia, ADHD, physical 
disabilities, and health disabilities, such as 
diabetes or cerebral palsy, autism, blind or 
low-vision, intellectual or developmental 
disabilities, autoimmune disorders, mental health 
conditions, such as depression, PTSD, and anxiety, 
deaf and hard of hearing students, and students 
with food allergies. So, it's important for us to 
note that this list is not exhaustive, nor do all 
people experiencing these things that I just 


mentioned identify as disabled, but this gives you 
a really good idea of who might be on campus. So, 
students with disabilities navigate college in 
various ways. Most institutions have, and all of 
them do, if they receive federal funding, a 
disability services office, where they can go and 
request accommodations. So, some schools have 
student-run organizations or disability cultural 
centers where they can access support and 
resources. 

There are often barriers that students with 
disabilities face, and these include attitudinal, 
physical, and institutional, and in the trauma 
field, there's the discussion around complex trauma 
and how experiencing marginalization due to holding 
multiple identities can occur. For example, being 
a student of color on campus is a different 
experience than being a white student, and when you 
add disability, gender, sexuality, and/or body type 
to that, experiences of marginalization and trauma 
have the ability to compound and create the need 
for specific and targeted solutions. 
Unfortunately, this presentation today is unable to 
address the whole and total scope of the needs 


experienced by different student survivors with 
disabilities, so know that what I talk about may or 
may not apply or may apply in a different way, 
depending upon the cultural context and the 
identity that someone holds. That said, most of 
what I say can be adapted in all of the communities 
that you work in. So, the other thing that's 
helpful to know before we get into the intersection 
of disability and victimization is how students 
with disabilities navigate college with 
accommodations. For students with disabilities who 
require accommodations, those accommodations can 
vary, depending on need. 

So, the list you see on your screen is not 
exhaustive, but it does give you a good idea of the 
different offerings available based upon disability 
and need. Students may use some of these in 
classes, but not all, or they may not even need 
these accommodations until a triggering event 
arises, so it's helpful to know that they're 
available when you work with a survivor with a 
disability. We know that 20 percent is the often 
cited statistic when discussing disability in 
college students, but this number is most likely 


higher for a few reasons. Disclosure is a personal 
choice, and there are many reasons a student may 
not disclose their disability to disability 
services. So, they may have a disability, but not 
need accommodations, they may have a disability and 
see accommodations as a Hoyle to their independence 
and resiliency, and they may, as in the case of 
many medical and law students, be worried that 
identifying as disabled will ruin their chances for 
graduation or a good internship, and it's really 
important to be aware of this dynamic. Many 
students with disabilities don't seek services 
until a traumatic event occurs, so it's at this 
point that they may require accommodations that 
they haven't had in the past. The emotional load 
of dealing with a sexual assault while managing 
one's disability may have implications for how a 
student subsequently performs in the classroom, how 
they relate to their peers, or how they interact in 
the dorm room. 

Since we're talking about the intersection of 
victimization and disability, it's also important 
to see how survivors and students with disabilities 
share some of the same challenges. While survivors 


of sexual assault have options of reporting or 
gaining support in college, like some students with 
disabilities, they may choose not to report or seek 
services due to stigma or fear of losing friends. 
This is especially true if the perpetrator is a 
peer. There can be often a fear of social 
repercussions and feelings of shame associated with 
the assault. When survivors with disabilities 
navigate college, their experience of being a 
person with a disability and being a survivor of 
sexual assault tends to distinguish them from 
individuals experiencing just one of those 
identities. Students with disabilities may have 
different perpetrators, so whether it be a personal 
care assistant or a residence life staff member or 
even a faculty member, students with disabilities 
can be at higher risk due to their perceived 
vulnerability. Survivors with disabilities may 
present trauma in different ways than survivors 
without disabilities, especially if one's 
disability affects language processing, following 
social cues, or already includes trauma, such as 
students with post-traumatic stress disorder, 
anxiety, or a mental health condition. So, a 


survivor with disability may also experience double 
the stigma, so they're not only a person who's 
experienced sexual assault, but also a person with 
a disability. Typically, campuses are not equipped 
to work at this intersection, and this also affects 
the connections students feel to other survivors 
and the access these students have to services, 
which leads us to the question of why are we 
actually talking about this, why did you come here 
today. 

Some of the questions that I usually hear 
surrounding this conversation often go like this; 
why are we talking about this? Aren't colleges 
doing a good job already of addressing sexual 
assault and harassment? Isn't this what the Title 
IX office is for? And aren't colleges legally 
required to provide services for people with 
disabilities? It seems like there's already enough 
support for students without focusing on this 
specific population. To all of this, I would 
absolutely disagree, and I think you guys would 
too. I recently did a quick Google search on the 
ten largest public universities and the ten largest 
private universities. What I found is not one of 


these 20 schools mentioned the intersection of 
disability and sexual assault. Title IX pages did 
not clearly indicate accommodations for students 
with disabilities, and disability services pages 
did not clearly link to sexual assault resources, 
and this mirrors what we see in research. There's 
a large gap in research regarding interventions and 
services for survivors with disabilities in 
college. The data that we have is limited, and we 
do have a few statistics. We know that, for 
example, 31.6 percent of females with disabilities, 
compared to 18.4 percent without, report 
experienced sexual victimization on campus. So, 
the National Council on Disability released a 
report in 2018 called Not on the Radar: Sexual 
Assault of College Students with Disability. It is 
a terrific, comprehensive report on the gaps that 
exist in research and practice around students with 
disabilities who experience sexual assault. 

So, you can see from the gaps outlined below 
that there are several opportunities for campuses 
to better serve this population, from implementing 
policies and procedures to fostering better 
collaboration, it's important for institutions to 


make this specific population a priority. Before 
we continue, there are four considerations that we 
must examine as we prepare to do this work. The 
first consideration is stigma. If students with 
disabilities don't see themselves represented in 
campus conversations around sexual assault, they 
may be too embarrassed to report, for fear that 
their disability will be on display. Stigma or 
fear of stigma keeps students with disabilities 
from seeking accommodations in the classroom. Add 
a sexual assault or traumatic event to the mix, and 
this could be especially difficult for a student 
worried about how they will be perceived by faculty 
and peers. The second consideration is access. 
Students with disabilities may choose not to report 
or seek help if they can't easily access the 
services provided to students without disabilities. 
Survivors with disabilities require accessible 
on-campus reporting protocols and considerations 
around accommodation. When counseling services or 
the Title IX office is inaccessible, survivors with 
disabilities are left to fend for themselves, and 
oftentimes, the result of this inaccessibility can 
be dangerous or deadly. The third consideration in 


this discussion revolves around inclusion. It's 
not enough to offer accessible services or 
accommodations. Students must know that they're 
there and that they're welcome to use them. 

When Title IX campaigns and materials or 
sexual assault programming doesn't mention 
disability or doesn't consider accessibility and 
planning, survivors with disabilities receive the 
message that they are not welcome in those spaces. 
So, a good example of this is prevention 
programming, such as take back the night. Is this 
an activity that's inclusive of people with 
disabilities? If not, why? And how can it be? 
The final consideration is responsiveness. There 
are students with disabilities who are not 
connected to disability services. If they seek 
services, are the resources available to them going 
to know how to work with their disability or offer 
up appropriate accommodations? What is the 
responsiveness of other resources and programs to 
students with disabilities? So, how can campuses 
and programs serve survivors with disabilities? 
One way to effectively meet the needs of survivors 
with disabilities is through providing 


clearly-stated and reasonable accommodations. 
While the Title IX office offers accommodations for 
students making a report, and while disability 
services often provides accommodations to students 
registered through their office, a survivor with a 
disability may fall through the cracks. They may 
or may not be registered with disability services, 
the need for accommodations, and these 
accommodations could include flexibility with 
attendance and deadlines, testing accommodations, 
dorm room accommodations, or the need for emotional 
support animals. There is this myth of the ideal 
or the typical survivor, just like there's this 
myth of the normal presentation of disability, and 
when these two collide, service providers must be 
willing to set aside biases and meet the student 
where they are. 

Survivors with disabilities often struggle 
with the stigmatization and ostracization due to 
their disability, thus they may be more aware of 
needing to mask when discussing their assault. 
This means that they may say they need less support 
than they really do, as not to be a burden to those 
helping them, and masking is something that people 


with disabilities are very adept at, and due to the 
stigma they experience because of their disability, 
they try as much as possible to, quote unquote, fit 
in with those that they see as abled. When 
accommodations aren't normalized and when access 
isn't prioritized, it's easy for survivors with 
disabilities to pretend that they don't have a 
disability when reporting their assault. This is 
also true when we look at the barriers a survivor 
with a disability encounters that keeps them from 
reporting. Disability can add an extra layer to 
the reporting process and may be abandoned by the 
survivor for fear of being lost in the mix, being 
retraumatized, or being accused of lying. If a 
deaf or hard of hearing student is not told that 
ASL interpreters are available to them, or if a 
student with dyslexia is not provided a reader or 
verbal instructions during the reporting process, 
or if a student with a mental health condition is 
assumed to be histrionic and dramatic, these 
students will most likely choose not to report 
their assault or seek healing services. 

The other piece to this that must be mentioned 
is examining faculty and staff perceptions around 


disability and sexual assault. How do faculty 
perceive students receiving accommodations? Do 
they think that these students are lying or lazy or 
don't deserve to be in college? Are they providing 
the accommodations just because they're legally 
required to or because they actually believe in the 
necessity of such a practice? One of the most 
important things to do when working with faculty 
and staff is to review existing trainings and 
professional development opportunities. So, what 
policies and procedures, as well as trainings, 
exist currently to assess and educate for biases? 
At the end of the day, the people interacting most 
with survivors with disabilities on campus will be 
their peers, their faculty, and their residence and 
student life staff members. A disability services 
office or a Title IX office or a counseling center 
can be as accessible as it wants to be, but without 
the buy-in from the rest of the campus, it'll be a 
hard journey to full inclusion. So, this is where 
I get to ask you a question. What barriers do you 
perceive as being the greatest to survivors with 
disabilities on campus or in your programs? So, if 
you don't work on a campus, what barriers do you 


think are the most impactful for survivors with 
disabilities? You can use the chat pod to answer, 
and we'll take a minute to read some of the 
responses, and some of these answers could be 
included on the ones on screen, so like faculty and 
staff perception, other students on campus, 
physical accessibility, barriers to finding 
services, virtual/printed material accessibility 
barriers to finding services, stigma, mandatory 
reporting. 

Let's take a second and see, as you're 
thinking about student survivors on campus with 
disabilities, what barriers do you perceive? Not 
knowing the process of how to report, I see that, 
definitely. Attitudes. Stigma. Your reaction 
from others on campus. I see somebody said not 
giving the resources in a form that they are able 
to read. I think this is very important, and I 
don't think a lot of people think through that. 
Issue with accessible buildings, I see that a lot 
in colleges too, where, um, offices start out being 
accessible, and then because of construction or 
staff turnover or some other reason, offices get 
moved before classes start into inaccessible 


buildings, and nobody has thought through how that 
impacts people with disabilities. Stigma, 
definitely. Um, I like this comment, attitudes, by 
AJ, if students feel like faculty have to be 
required to provide accommodations, they're less 
likely to report to faculty. So, we're going to 
talk about faculty in a second, how to work with 
faculty and what to think about as you are 
processing this with a student, but I also want you 
to think about some of these barriers. We'll talk 
about solutions, but think through what solutions 
you think would be helpful. Language and trust, 
definitely. Angie, if you would type a little bit 
more about that, because I think that is a very 
important point, what you mean by language and 
trust. Transportation, I think is a wonderful 
point. Do we pay for Uber to get people to us? 
Are students aware of the accommodation? Fears. 
This is especially, um, I know that this is a 
conversation that many universities are having of 
the different experience of students who are 
commuting, so commuter students, versus students 
who live on campus, and I think that that is 
important to think about, student survivors with 


disabilities who live on campus and the access that 
they have to support, versus student survivors with 
disabilities who are commuting and the lack of 
access they have to certain healing services, and I 
think a lot of this is how are these things going 
to be communicated. The guilt experienced and not 
wanting to be a burden. These are really good. 
Fear of being demonized for reporting, yes. 

So, we came up with a lot of barriers, but 
what are the solutions? Knowing all of this 
doesn't matter, unless there are ways to do 
something about it. So, in this next section, 
we're going to explore the solutions to removing 
some of these barriers that we've identified for 
survivors with disabilities, and these are 
obviously not the only solutions, but they are some 
of the most important ones. So, to begin, we're 
also going to do another exercise. I want you to 
think about this situation. A student with a 
disability discloses a sexual assault to your 
office, to the Title IX office or to disability 
services office, or even if you're working in a 
program outside of a school, a student with a 
disability comes in and says this is their 


experience. Think about the campus experience. 
What are the next steps of the people working on 
campus? Do they know immediately who to call or 
how to ask the student about their disability? Do 
the people working with these students feel 
confident in knowing what resources are available? 
Are there confidential avenues for students with a 
disability to report? And what training do you or 
other offices have they received around serving 
survivors with disabilities? These are really good 
questions if you're thinking about starting a 
training for offices on campus for how to better 
respond to survivors with disabilities disclosing 
assault. And here, I think it's important to note 
that one of the most important values held in 
sexual trauma work is confidentiality. When a 
survivor has a disability, this value does not 
suddenly disappear. 

When serving survivors with disabilities on 
campus, autonomy, self-determination, and 
self-identification are values that must be upheld 
through policy, procedure, and practice. There are 
many survivors with disabilities who do not want 
disability services to be involved in any way in 


the reporting of their assault or the services 
provided hereafter. A person with a disability may 
wish to keep their disability diagnosis private, 
even if the professional working with them is, 
quote unquote, sure they have a disability. So, 
what does someone do with a survivor with a 
disability? The most important thing is to 
maintain their confidentiality and follow their 
lead. Make sure there are policies in place that 
prioritize confidentiality of the person reporting 
or seeking services. Don't call disability 
services immediately or disclose or force the 
student to self-disclose, and I think this is even 
being mentioned in the chat pod as we're talking 
about having people feel comfortable with 
expressing this to the offices they are, what 
policies are in place for protecting, for trust and 
protecting people's confidentiality, um, 
communicating in ASL or using an interpreter, they 
are, um, they are such a private experience through 
that interpreter, so what policies are there to 
make this easier. 

So, the question is how do you walk the line 
between respecting autonomy and confidentiality and 


making things accessible? This is done by publicly 
advertising accessibility, by adding questions 
about need of accommodations on forms and in 
interviews, and by creating universally-designed 
spaces that welcome people with disabilities. When 
a person feels comfortable and accepted, they will 
feel more at home discussing their needs. So, what 
does that mean for connecting campus resources? 
How do you work collaboratively with each other if 
confidentiality and autonomy are strongly-held 
values? How does disability services, the Title IX 
office, student life, and residence life work 
together while maintaining people's 
confidentiality? This is primarily done through 
building strong relationships with other offices, 
and this should be done systemically, where it 
doesn't matter what individual occupies each role, 
but a relationship in which the department or 
office is created to seamlessly collaborate with 
another department or office. This shouldn't be in 
response to a specific incident or student, but 
holistically and universally, and part of this 
depends on developing a referral system between 
offices. This is a coordinated response that 


respects students' rights, while allowing offices 
to share information that is only approved by the 
student, and this kind of collaboration can be very 
beneficial for all involved. When a student is 
able to enter the system of care at every stage and 
at any office, they're more likely to receive 
exceptional healing services. 

Another solution to a barrier includes 
managing faculty and staff expectations. So, it's 
important here to dispel the myth of the double 
accommodation. One of the biggest concerns that I 
fielded from faculty is why is this student asking 
for double time, when they already get time and a 
half with their disability accommodations. Asking 
for things, like more flexibility with attendance 
and deadlines, often doesn't make sense to faculty, 
if they're not trained in trauma or working with 
survivors with disabilities. It's also important 
to remember that most Title IX investigators, 
residence life, and student life staff members are 
not trained in the specific concerns surrounding 
survivors with disabilities. The following list is 
important things, is a list of important things to 
include when training faculty and staff. So, for 


faculty, it's important for them to understand the 
impact of sexual assault on academics and the 
classroom experience, how sexual assault and 
disability can prompt an accommodation plan, how 
important sensitivity and competency is around 
disability and sexual assault. Types of training 
that is important for staff to understand, and this 
includes Title IX investigators and responders, are 
disability considerations in interviewing and 
accommodation, how to offer these and how to 
provide them. I'm going to go back for a second to 
look at this connecting campus resources graph and 
see how disability services, Title IX, student 
life, residence life, I think the other piece that 
needs to be included in there are also faculty and 
staff expectations, because the classroom is so 
important as well, so how do you include all of 
these people in a systemic, um, in the system in a 
response that's going to be coordinated and, um, a 
good response to serving survivors with 
disabilities on campus? And we're going to talk 
about that in a second. 

So, I think the first thing that we need to do 
is spot able-ism. When we think about working with 


survivors with disabilities, we have to think about 
how are we going to assess for able-ism within each 
point of receiving services. Able-ism can be 
structural, institutional, or individual, and it's 
the systemic discrimination or prejudice against 
people with disabilities. It's important for us to 
evaluate how and if able-ism is impacting services 
for survivors and how to fix those issues. So, on 
this slide, you can see examples of how able-ism 
can show up in different ways. Structural able-ism 
may look like the following; physical barriers, 
steps, no automatic doors, no accessible bathrooms, 
poor or no signage; inaccessible materials, no 
consideration for visual impairments, learning 
disabilities, etc.; events, marketing, these 
exclude people with disabilities, people with 
disabilities are not planned for, and the events 
are not accessible to them. Institutional able-ism 
might look like the following. We've talked about 
it with faculty and staff. Attitudes and behaviors 
that show people with disabilities are unwelcomed, 
so either ignoring or hostile, focus on financial 
burden rather than the burden to the survivor with 
the disability. We see that a lot on campus, where 


the concern is how much this is going to cost 
versus how can we do the right thing for the 
student, and then, finally, personal able-ism might 
look like the following, so the language somebody 
uses or the bias that somebody brings to doing this 
work. 

So, how do you correct these things when you 
see them? Especially in context of a bureaucratic 
system, like a university. There are four steps 
that you can take, no matter where you work or what 
your role is. First, you need to identify the 
problem, what's going on. Then you need to consult 
with other professionals and with people with 
disabilities on how these barriers affect survivors 
with disabilities. For the Title IX office, or for 
the counseling centers, this might look like 
pairing with disability services to think through 
how to make things most accessible or vice versa, 
this could be the Title IX office coming into 
disability services and talking about how things 
can be safer. Next, figure out a reasonable plan 
of action and change. Get around a table, figure 
out how are we going to fix this, what do we need 
to do, and then correct, to the best of your 


ability, the problem, and I think this will work 
for addressing most issues around able-ism, and 
thinking through other issues that require 
higher-level interventions, the most important 
thing that somebody can do is cultivate 
relationships with upper-level administration and 
find ways to present statistics on why that problem 
is important enough to correct. So, find the 
reason that people think that that's important, 
even if that means just retention, and come at it 
from that angle and work with them to see why it's 
important for you to effectively serve this 
population. I think one of the most important 
things to leave you with as we're thinking through 
this, and I'm going to leave time at the end for us 
to kind of have a conversation, a back and forth 
conversation, but I want you to think about these 
list of entry points, where accessibility can be 
prioritized, with printed materials, emotional 
videos, maps, parking, office access, advertising 
accommodations, first-responder training, Title IX 
interview training, take back the night, and other 
campus fundraisers, I want you to consider how the 
following affects these things, the type of 


disability somebody has, and the needs that they 
have. 

So, coming back to this, how would the type of 
disability impact the accessibility that you're 
providing and the needs? For printed materials, 
will you need to provide something in large print? 
Will you need to provide something in simple 
language? Do you need to caption your promotional 
videos? For maps and parking, do you have 
something labeled for where the accessible parking 
spaces are? For office access, are there steps to 
get to your office, or is there a way that somebody 
who uses a wheelchair or has a mobility disability 
can come into your office easily, without worrying 
about how much, um, attention they will attract for 
advertising accommodations, are these 
accommodations available online, on the website? 
Do students know before they come? Because 
students do a lot of research before they decide 
to, um, seek services, do students know before they 
come that accommodations are available to them in 
the office, or do they have to hunt for it and ask 
around? Are first-responder trainings talking 
ability disabilities, talking about the best ways 


to intervene with somebody who has a disability and 
different types of disability? Title IX interview 
training, are the interviewers who are talking to 
these students aware of how a different disability 
might impact the way that they give their 
interview? Take back the night and other campaign 
fundraisers, are these accessible to all people? 
Are they held in an accessible way? 

One example I've seen are people doing, um, a 
marathon or a 5K in high heels to bring awareness 
of sexual assault on campus, and my question would 
be, um, around the accessibility of this, what 
message does that send to people, um, who have a 
mobility disability? So, if you're going to 
prioritize these things, who do you talk to? How 
do you do it? That's going to be the importance of 
bringing people with disabilities, bringing 
students with disabilities, bringing disability 
service providers, um, and bringing healing 
services around a table to have these conversations 
and to be very, um, very aware and very intentional 
about the services that you're providing, making 
sure that when you're going into somebody's office, 
you don't have to go through the service entrance, 


because that's the only place that's accessible. 
So, in all of those ways, how do you prioritize 
access? And I kind of want to leave us, um, with a 
story. I mentioned briefly about emotional support 
animals near the beginning, and I wanted to come 
back to this point. So, when I was the director of 
disability services at my institution, I had two 
requests for emotional support animals related to 
survivors with disabilities, and after going 
through the Title IX process, I had a student who 
requested a cat and a student who requested a pig. 
Both of those requests were relevant to the 
student's particular context and their situations, 
and both of those requests were approved. So, it's 
important to always seriously consider the 
accommodation request and how the need for it may 
be completely understandable in the midst of 
trauma. I'm going to open up for one more question 
for you to think about in the chat pod and for us 
to discuss and give you time to think about this 
and write out your responses. What do you think 
you could do to better serve survivors with 
disabilities on campus? Add information about the 
Title IX office on disability services website, 


yes. Provide large print materials for support 
groups you run on campus. Be more clear about what 
accommodations you can provide while screening for 
support groups. 

So, a lot of this is about communication. 
Provide mandatory information to first-year 
students about supports for students with 
disabilities. Be approachable, patient, and seek 
services in different areas. Create 
multidisciplinary teams and bring support services 
into campus. Partner with local organizations that 
serve survivors and individuals with disabilities. 
Perhaps these organizations can provide on-campus 
training. So, this is a really good idea in how 
to, um, utilize your resources, especially since 
people on campus often feel strapped for time and 
resources, being able to partner with people could 
be a really good solution. Create prevention 
programming that includes and emphasizes students 
with disabilities. Make disability services 
accommodations clear on the advocacy, Title IX 
websites, and on purpose. Accessible for mobility, 
large print materials. Recruit more deaf 
volunteers. Reach out to disability office to see 


what training they provide to Title IX and law 
enforcement. Form relationships with Title IX 
offices. Very good. I think the other thing, um, 
as you guys are thinking through that, I think the 
other thing to think about is not only adding info 
on Title IX offices or in disability service 
offices about the resources, but really talking and 
digging deep into the fact that students with 
disabilities, survivors with disabilities, and the 
victimization rates are so much higher. They're 
more at risk, and, so, being able to name that and 
put that where students can see it, they might feel 
less alone, they might feel less stigma. 

The other thing that we didn't get to talk 
about really in-depth when we spoke on 
confidentiality is mandatory reporting. A lot of 
times, there is confusion, especially on a college 
campus, around disability and mandatory reporting, 
and what do we do, if somebody comes into Title IX, 
the Title IX office who has a disability and 
discloses it, and do we need to go ahead and be a 
mandatory reporter, and I think one of the, um, one 
of the things to that is we need to think through 
what the laws are and be aware, but also, 


understanding everybody's right to confidentiality 
and the ability to hold that as a really high, um, 
value is super important, and usually, um, working 
with your disability services providers can really 
help you talk that through and understand that. 
So, I'm going to move on to questions. Thank you 
so much for your time, and, hopefully, I can answer 
some things that, maybe, didn't get fleshed out in 
this presentation. 

>> SPEAKER: Thanks, Kaitlin. This is Ashley. 
I am opening it up for questions at this point. If 
you want to type them in either the chat pod or the 
Q & A pod, um, and we can go ahead, Kaitlin has 
generously left a lot of time for you all to ask 
questions, so I hope that if you are facing a 
significant barrier that you want to think through 
or there's a challenge you've been thinking of or 
something specific, um, or more general, that this 
is an opportunity to have that discussion with 
Kaitlin, as well as all of the other people who are 
on this webinar who seem to also be facing similar 
challenges, so maybe we can take this opportunity 
to come up with some solutions, if we don't even 
know of any. Again, you can put them in the chat 


pod or in the Q & A pod. So, Kaitlin, the first 
question is, um, a question about accessing 
resources for students with disabilities. The 
question is where do we access information for 
resources for students with disabilities?

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: That's a really good 
question. Depending upon the institution that that 
student comes from or the state, there are 
different places that you can go, so, typically, 
um, hopefully, most college campuses will have a 
website that at least talks about disability 
services, and, so, on that website, there should be 
a list of resources for those students. One of the 
things that we're seeing is that, a lot of times, 
those, the sites and the resources that are 
available to people are, um, hidden, right, they're 
very difficult to find, you either have to do a lot 
of Googling, or you have to get in touch with other 
students who maybe have gone through it, so one of 
the things that we would like to see, and I think 
this, maybe, is where we can come to 
problem-solving, um, is trying to figure out where 
to get it. So, I just did a landscape analysis of, 
um, programs that kind of focused on this 


intersection of disability and victimization on 
college campuses. They're doing a really great job 
at getting all of that information out, but, 
really, there's not a lot available there. 

So, looking at national programs to kind of 
do, um, advocacy work is important, and then, also, 
there are a lot of schools who are doing a really 
neat thing right now called developing, like, a 
disability cultural center, and these have really 
had the most success on campus in getting out, um, 
all of the resources that are needed. So, one 
thing that I would do is I would see if anywhere in 
your location has a disability cultural center on 
campus. If not, that might be a really good thing 
to approach a campus with, on figuring out how to 
get one started. 

>> SPEAKER: Kaitlin, thank you. We also 
have, we have another question, um, asking about, 
um, what happens when a student reports being 
assaulted by a faculty member or a staff member, 
and is there any special considerations for those 
scenarios.

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: Yes, definitely. So, a 
student is going to, I mean, some of these entry 


points depend upon where the student is reporting. 
Hopefully, the campus is going to already have 
something like this in place. Title IX offices 
work a lot on, um, these protocols, so that would 
be a question, I think, that would need to go to 
Title IX immediately, because they have the 
protocol to start that process, and, typically, I 
was never a Title IX coordinator, but I worked 
really closely with the Title IX office, and that 
would be something where the, um, faculty staff 
member would be suspended right away, they would go 
ahead and, um, probably encourage that student, if 
possible, to file an official report, so, um, all 
of those things would be handled through Title IX, 
but I think it's really important, um, to know 
that, sometimes, students with disabilities, the 
only connection they're making to staff and faculty 
on campus is going to be through disability 
services, more so than Title IX, more so, 
sometimes, even than the counseling center, so 
there needs to be a really good coordinated 
response, um, between Title IX and disability 
services, so that disability services can give them 
the right information. A lot of the mistakes that 


we might see somebody make who has not been trained 
to do that is going straight to that faculty member 
to ask them the question or, um, trying to get 
involved in a way that is unhelpful for that 
student. So, that's where we find training really 
important. 

>> SPEAKER: Thanks, Kaitlin. Um, another 
suggestion came through the Q & A pod, that the 
University of Arkansas has done a lot of work 
around students with disabilities on campus 
generally, and then, um, some of the university 
centers for excellence on developmental 
disabilities, or UCEDDs, have done some work on 
this, there's at least one in every state, and it 
might be on your campus, if you are a larger campus 
in your state, or it might be on another campus in 
your state, but they might be able to provide some 
resources as well. Does anyone else have any other 
questions or comments or suggestions for Kaitlin? 
So, Sandra has posted a question that asks how do 
we account for disability in consent policies?

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: Would you be able to 
unpack that a little bit more? 
>> SPEAKER: Hi. Can y'all hear me? 


 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: Yes. 

>> SPEAKER: Um, so, this is Sandra. So, I 
know that one of the things, when I worked on a 
college campus, um, here in Nashville, um, was that 
a lot of the work that the student advocates were 
doing were working to have access consent policies 
as part of their campus policies around sexual 
assault, and I was just raising the issue of, you 
know, um, active consent would require verbal 
consent, um, it would require that they check-in 
repeatedly, and if the person has a disability 
that, um, has, you know, impacted their ability to, 
um, provide, to give verbal consent, for instance, 
like, that intersection of, like, consent and 
disability, so I was just trying to see if you had 
done any thinking about that.

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: Absolutely. Thank you 
so much. Yeah, that does, I feel like we see that 
a lot, I feel like that comes not only in those 
consent policies, but also just any messaging we 
see around sexual assault on campus, so I think 
that's a really good point to raise. I feel like 
those conversations are going to have to be a lot 
more thoughtful, and there needs to be people 


around the table who bring that up, so whether 
that's going to be, um, if that student led, um, 
making sure that the organization or the faculty 
member charge is kind of bringing up those 
tensions, and I think holding those tensions, I 
think the best way to do that is going to be really 
parsing out everything, so looking at every piece 
of that policy and, um, really examining it for 
that able-ism that we talked about a little bit 
earlier and seeing are there ways to show consent 
without having it be out loud, verbal. Um, I know 
that that was what our school would always say has 
to be a, um, has to be an enthusiastic yes, and, 
so, what does that mean? What does that mean when 
you are thinking through disability? Is that, um, 
is that clear enough? Does that, is that inclusive 
enough? And, so, I think those are great questions 
to ask, and I don't know if there is one answer 
that we could give right now that would make sense, 
as much as it would that's got to be thought about 
in the context of, um, each school, and if it's 
not, again, what happens is you leave people out, 
you leave people out of the conversation. 

>> SPEAKER: This is Sandra again. I think 


that there was a history of leaving, um, people 
with disabilities out of conversations, even when 
the sexual assault movement was moving towards more 
consent-based laws, and I see there's a comment in 
the Q & A, um, section that, um, many states' 
definition actually -- when you become more and 
more, um, committed to active consent or, um, so, 
yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to throw you there, 
Kaitlin. You did a fabulous job on the webinar. 
It was just, I couldn't type it all in the chat.

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: Thank you. I just, I 
think that that is a great question. I think the 
idea of consent, the idea of mandatory reporting, 
the idea of disability, there's a lot that has to 
be unpacked, um, just bias wise, um, when people 
come to this conversation, if they haven't had 
these conversations before, and, so, um, I think 
it's very easy for some people who are new to the 
work to not ask some of these questions, and so I 
would say that, probably, the one thing that I 
would want to leave everybody with is just the fact 
that let's get the conversation rolling, let's have 
these, let's bring this up, let's really unpack and 
examine, because it's worth it, we need to do it, 


and it's beyond time. 

>> SPEAKER: Kaitlin, this is Ashley. Again, 
there was also a comment that came through that we 
need to be having conversations with students, um, 
even probably before college, about what healthy 
sexuality looks like and healthy sexual 
relationships in order to start having those 
conversations about consent as well. Just wanted 
to highlight that as a point that was made.

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: That's a great point. 

>> SPEAKER: Um, another question that came up 
is some of what you went through, um, was around 
providing accommodations. Do you have any 
suggestions for perhaps a Title IX office who 
hasn't really thought about providing, um, a wide 
variety of accommodations in the past about how to 
start the process of seeing how accessible their 
programming materials are and some resources for 
increasing the accessibility of those programming 
and resources?

 >> KAITLIN SHETLER: Yes, absolutely. So, 
um, for most Title IX offices, this is where I 
would say, um, tomorrow, or today, after we get off 
of this webinar, make your connection with 


disability services. That office is going to 
understand not only the law when it comes to 
reasonable accommodations that they have to provide 
due to a disability, but they are going to have a 
plethora of information on the different types of 
accommodations that that office needs to start 
thinking, be thinking through. So, definitely, 
that would be my first suggestion, is to reach out 
to disability services. That's kind of like your 
basic, go ahead, they're on campus, you can do 
that. I think the next step that really needs to 
happen is for these offices to reach out to local 
and national disability organizations, because the 
disability organizations are really going to have 
an idea of how to place accommodations in a 
holistic context and how to express that best to 
your students on campus. Another great resource is 
the Association on Higher Education and Disability. 
AHEAD has chapters in every state, so you could 
reach out to your state chapter and have this 
conversation. These are professionals, um, who 
work with students with disabilities in 
universities and on colleges, and they have years 
and years of experience to do that, so every state 


has an AHEAD chapter, and there's a national 
organization, and there are tons of resources on 
that website and tons of resources on those local 
websites. So, being able to kind of have that 
multidisciplinary approach, talking to disability 
services on campus, talking to your disability 
service organizations in your community, um, and 
then seeking out information from AHEAD, um, I 
think is going to get you started on the right 
track, but, also, making sure that this 
conversation actually includes survivors with 
disabilities and students with disabilities. 

>> SPEAKER: Thanks, Kaitlin. Are there any 
other questions for Kaitlin today? I'm not seeing 
any additional questions right now, Kaitlin, but 
thank you so much for this very informative webinar 
today. We really appreciate you taking the time to 
talk about this subject and to start getting people 
thinking about how they can begin approaching this 
or continue to approach this on their campus. We 
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