STORIES SHE HEARD FROM other students persuaded Zoe Ridolfi-Starr to go public with her own. An undergraduate at Columbia University, Ms Ridolfi-Starr says that she was sexually assaulted at the end of her first year. But it was not until she heard other women students claiming mistreatment by their universities for reporting alleged sex attacks that she was finally persuaded to put the issue centre stage.
.gif)
“A personal story is a lot more compelling and gripping than a policy proposal,” says Ridolfi-Starr, the leader of a new group at Columbia called No Red Tape and one of 23 students who have filed a federal complaint against the university, contending that it has failed to protect victims of sexual assault.
Organisations such as No Red Tape have cropped up on campuses nationwide, connected by social media and often led by students who claim to have been victims of sexual assault, and whose stories have led to demonstrations and widespread media attention. The resulting wave of anger has been as intense as it has been sudden. It has made sexual assault on campuses the hottest issue in US higher education and backed top universities into a thorny thicket of damning publicity, not to mention lawsuits and investigations, over how they have handled a problem that was previously under radar.
The White House is now involved and is calling for changes in how institutions respond to allegations. In an unprecedented move, the US department of education has publicly released the names of all universities under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assault complaints. “Colleges and universities can no longer turn a blind eye or pretend rape or sexual assault doesn’t occur on their campuses,” Joe Biden, the US vice president, said in April.
The 55 institutions on the list include Harvard, Harvard Law School, Princeton, Dartmouth College and the University of California, Berkeley. The department of education also took the equally unusual step of accusing at least one, Tufts University, of violating the law, and threatened to cut off its government funding. Under the spotlight, Tufts relented and agreed to change its policies for handling sexual assault claims.
But critics say that a rush to judgement, and calls to streamline the process by which students can file formal complaints that they were sexually assaulted, risk denying equal protection to another class of students: the accused. The federal government’s proposals allow for “only the most meagre sense of the rights necessary to secure fundamentally fair hearings”, says Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
“It’s a really delicate dance,” says Bisi Okubadejo, a lawyer who focuses on civil rights and employment issues in higher education and who previously worked in the department of education’s office for civil rights. “On the one side, certain actions could negatively affect the complainant, and on the other side there are legal issues relative to the accused.”
The controversy has exposed the complex and often conflicting demands that universities face from well-intentioned but confusing policies and regulations governing how they handle claims of sexual assault, and local laws that – to make matters worse — differ from one part of the country to the next.
But universities in the US are required to become involved in such cases, even if they are not reported to police, thanks to a federal law governing gender equality in education — known as Title IX — that requires them to ensure that students are safe from sexual assault.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)