Carly Smith: helped create the campus climate survey that involved reporting of …

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Tucked on the other side of Franklin Boulevard, across from the Ford Alumni Center, sits the temporary home of the University of Oregon’s psychology department and clinic: the Franklin building. 

That’s where you’ll find Carly Smith. 

Smith is a lot of things: a Chicago native, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, an aspiring psychology professor, a researcher and one member of the trio responsible for developing the campus climate survey this September.

The survey collected data about UO students’ experiences with sexual assault. 

“This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do,” said Smith. Even as a graduate student in experimental psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, clinical psychology was always the goal. And being a psychologist had been on her radar for even longer. 

“I remember in third or fourth grade they’d ask us, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And even at that time I said that I wanted to be a psychologist. And the teachers were like, ‘What’s wrong with this kid?” 

Smith came to Oregon in 2010 after being accepted to work with UO psychology professor Jennifer Freyd. She was initially drawn to Dr. Freyd’s well-founded theory of betrayal: 

“If you are abused by someone you trust or depend upon, that is going to be naturally worse than if it’s someone you don’t know.” 

For the past four years, Smith’s been applying such a theory to her research of institutional betrayal.

Before even attending Oregon, she knew that sexual assault reporting on campus would be one of her primary topics of research. 

“I wish that students had more reason to trust in the process,” she said. “I wish reporting and justice were much more closely aligned.” 

According to the results of the survey created by Dr. Freyd, Smith and colleague Marina Rosenthal, 90 percent of survey participants responded saying that that they had received unwanted sexual contact at the University and chose not to report the incident.

The number drops to 86 percent for survivors of rape. 

In addition, one out of 10 women surveyed said that they had been raped while attending the UO. But for Smith — who’s been interacting with victims of sexual assault at the university for the last three years — said the survey’s results weren’t surprising. 

 Smith has been working with students through the psychology department’s clinic. She has been surveying undergrads while they fulfill participation requirements in psychology and linguistics classes

One question that appeared on the survey hadn’t been seen before. 

That was a question of individual knowledge of friends’ experiences with unwanted sexual contact and rape. It was a question that the team hadn’t posed before and Smith wasn’t expecting so many peers to be willing to answer on their friends regard. 

This question shows importance for survivors to know that they are not alone.

“It’s really mind-bending to hear people over and over say that they think they’re the only one that this has happened to,” she said. 

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