Combat campus sexual assaults
Good for the federal government and student groups for pressuring colleges and universities to do much better at preventing and properly responding to sexual assaults.
For far too long, such assaults have been minimized or ignored on far too many college campuses.
Schools are required to address sex crimes and sex harassment under the federal Title IX statute, and the federal Clery Act requires them to report data on assaults to the U.S. Department of Education. But according to a national survey released this summer, many schools – large and small, public and private – aren’t following those requirements.
For example, most schools had no protocol for how to work with the local police, and 21 percent of the schools provide no training on sexual-assault response for members of faculty and staff. More than 40 percent of schools surveyed had not conducted a sexual-assault investigation in the past five years, even though recent research indicates that 1 in 5 women is the victim of an attempted or completed sexual assault during college, Time magazine reported.
And this isn’t just a problem somewhere else. The University of Kansas, Kansas State University and Washburn University are being investigated by the Education Department for how they handled sexual assaults.
A Wichita State University student allegedly was raped last month in a college dormitory. Some students are concerned that they didn’t hear about the alleged assault until it was reported this week in the WSU student newspaper, the Sunflower.
KU students also are upset about reports that a student there was raped in 2013 and that her alleged assailant was given a lenient punishment. They are circulating a petition calling on chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little to order an investigation, the Lawrence Journal-World reported.
To its credit, the White House formed a task force earlier this year to combat campus sexual violence. It released recommendations this summer and unveiled new resources including notalone.gov, which provides students with information on how to file a complaint with the Education and Justice departments.
Several bills also have been introduced in Congress. Proposals include requiring schools to conduct surveys on the scope of sexual assault and to increase federal fines and sanctions for reporting and investigation violations.
Vice President Joe Biden, whose office headed up the federal task force, recast the problem to try to put its scope and severity in perspective.
“If you knew your son had a 20 percent chance of being held up at gunpoint, you’d think twice before dropping your kid off,” Biden said. “Well, my God, you drop a daughter off, it’s 1 in 5 she could be raped or physically abused? It is just outrageous.”
And intolerable.
For the editorial board, Phillip Brownlee
This story was originally published September 10, 2014 at 7:08 PM with the headline "Combat campus sexual assaults."