Freitas taught at Boston University in the Department of Religion, St. Michael's College in Religion, and Hofstra University in the Honors College.[3][6] She has lectured at over 200 college campuses about sexual assault.[7]
She currently serves as a research affiliate at the University of Notre Dame's Center for the Study of Religion and Society.[8]
Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses (2008) addresses the connections between sexuality and spirituality/religion at seven U.S. universities and colleges, including non-religious public, secular private, Catholic private, and evangelical private institutions. Her research included numerous interviews as well as an online survey, with more than 2,500 responses.[9][10] 111 students were interviewed: 48 men and 63 women. Freitas concluded that the largest conflicts between sexuality and spirituality are between evangelical and non-evangelical institutions, rather than between religious and non-religious ones. She notes how students enrolled in Catholic institutions responded similarly to those at non-religious institutions. Overall, students did not find that their sexuality and spirituality/religion informed each other very much. On the other hand, she discovered that students in evangelical institutions made conscious efforts to reconcile their sexuality with their spirituality/religion, perhaps because they more often self-identified as religious and spiritual.[10] Sex & the Soul was the first major study to investigate young people's attempts at reconciling spirituality and sexuality.[11]
In Consent on Campus: A Manifesto (2018), Freitas explores the widespread problem of sexual assault on college campuses, which she mainly attributes to a failure of colleges and universities to adequately educate students about sex, consent, and "hookup culture". She aims to provide comprehensive training about consent, and proposes ways to have constructive conversations on the subject. She argues that consensual sex must be communicative.[12] Despite her focus on the inability of large, tradition-bound universities to quickly respond to problems, she is optimistic "that institutions can implement policies to help their students navigate sex responsibly and safely."[13]
In a follow-up book titled Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention (2019), Freitas offers a personal background for why she became interested in the problem of consent on campuses. In the 1990s at Catholic University of America, a professor and priest ("Father L") sexually harassed Freitas. This book details how his mentorship changed into harassment and stalking, and how her university's administration did little to help her.[7]
