ORIGINAL ARTICLE Centering Minoritized Students in Campus Interpersonal Violence Research L. B. Klein 1 & Nathan Q. Brewer 2,3 & Annelise Mennicke 4 & M. Candace Christensen 5 & Adrienne Baldwin-White 6 & Cherita Cloy 3 & Leila Wood 7 Accepted: 12 November 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Campus interpersonal violence - defined as sexual assault, sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and stalking - is a social problem that has received widespread attention due to its high prevalence and devastating consequences, especially for students facing multiple forms of minoritization. Research on campus interpersonal violence prioritizes certain types of institutions; violence; victims, perpetrators, and bystanders; and intervention goals. This prioritization fails to challenge underlying systems of oppression and makes invisible minoritized students who are most affected by campus interpersonal violence. Historically, there has been an emphasis on acquaintance sexual assault against White heterosexual women at residential four-year predom- inantly White institutions. Far less studied are other types of violence and harm; violence experienced by gender and sexual minorities, and students of color; and students in online or commuter programs. In this commentary, we propose centering minoritized students to better situate campus interpersonal violence research within broader systems of oppression. We describe challenges to centering minoritized students in researching the problem, prevalence, and risk, as well as prevention and response interventions. We also provide recommendations for overcoming these barriers. Keywords College . Interpersonal violence . Minoritized groups . Prevention . Sexual assault Introduction The high prevalence and devastating effects of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, stalking, and sexual harassment (hereafter interpersonal violence) at institutions of higher ed- ucation (IHEs) have drawn increasing attention over the past decade. Due to the demands of students, federal administra- tors, and the public, IHEs have developed and implemented policies to prevent and respond to this violence. While there has been a corresponding increase in research efforts over this period, existing literature has yet to meet the unprecedented speed of change in IHE policies and programming (Klein et al. 2018). Several recent commentary authors have called for creatively challenging the current approach to campus inter- personal violence (Bonomi 2019; Harris and Linder 2017; McMahon et al. 2019a; McMahon et al. 2019b; Rothman 2019; Sharoni and Klocke 2019). They collectively argue that campus interpersonal violence research must better address the needs of all members of IHE communities to end campus interpersonal violence. Current research on campus interper- sonal violence has critical limitations in how the problem, prevalence, and risk are conceptualized and how research is conducted to develop and evaluate prevention and response efforts. Many of these limitations are rooted in approaches that do not adequately consider diversity and cultural context. As researchers in the field of campus interpersonal violence, we believe that centering minoritized students in all phases of the research process would address many of these limitations. * L. B. Klein lbklein@unc.edu 1 School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 325 Pittsboro St CB #3550, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA 2 School of Social Work, Simmons University, Boston, MA, USA 3 Sexual Assault Response & Prevention Center, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA 4 School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA 5 College of Public Policy, University of Texas San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA 6 School of Social Work, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA 7 University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, USA Journal of Family Violence https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-020-00223-8