Colleges should prioritize prevention, risk minimization, counselling victims, and supporting law enforcement.
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Dear Colleague is rescinded.
Colleges are completely free to design and implement whatever internal student conduct proceedings they deem appropriate with no federal oversight and no federal funding strings attached. Presumably all of the Bravo Sierra wrought by Dear Colleague immediately disappears once DOE OCR stops mandating it.
Title IX plaintiffs lawyers currently shaking down colleges move on to something else.
@dfbdfb, which states are those that make college administrators mandatory reporters of sexual assault? Does the rule apply to all colleges in those states, or public colleges only? Is there anyone at such colleges that a victim can talk to confidentially?
The good old days were the days when colleges swept sexual assault under the rug and never expelled anyone for sexual assault no matter how egregious the claim and how good the proof. If you don’t want to return to those days, and I don’t think you do, what would you do to eliminate the former problems?
Pretty easy - if the state brings charges against someone for sexual assault they are suspended. pending trial. If the state finds them guilty they are expelled.
I disagree with suspending someone simply because the state has brought charges against them. Innocent until proven guilty. If the state convicts them then the college can decide on suspension vs. expulsion depending on the severity of the crime. In other words no suspension for morning diddling after a hot night of consensual sex even if charges are brought.
Nope. Have to charge the guys for morning diddling. The guys have to be tried in criminal court because the schools are going to be out of the picture. The arrest is going to be a public record. Maybe the arrest will be in some newspapers. The accused’s picture right in the newspaper. Mothers will be so proud. That’s my son. Doesn’t he look good. The sexual abuser. Lol Then the picture is over the internet. Hopefully, the public defender will do a great job. Cathy Young will write about the guy. The guy had to use his fingers. He had no choice. Lol
No prosecutor will ever bring charges in a he said she said case over alleged non-consensual morning diddling after a night of consensual sex especially when the accuser kept having sex with the accused for days on and only cried rape when he dumped her.
Juries are not idiots. They can see what’s going on here. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned but the quality of mercy is not strain’d, either.
Take responsibility for her sexuality and not blame men for taking advantage of her when she is drunk or in love
Understand that rape happens when someone physically forces her to have sex or threatens to use physical force
Not expect that someone will be her boyfriend/soulmate/The One just because she is sleeping with him
Have a lot of toe curling sex with no strings attached
If I had a son I would teach him to
Not drink like a fish till he loses control
Not have sex with a drunk woman
Not have sex when he is drunk
To stay away from religious women or women with other hangups such as believing that he will be her boyfriend/soulmate/The One just because she is sleeping with him
Have a lot of toe curling sex with no strings attached
If my hypothetical sons and daughters listened to me 100% campus rape would virtually become 0.
We need a study in college campuses where men are asked how many times they were sloshed and the women had sex with them nevertheless. Then we should label all such sex as women on men rape. I think that will show 4 out of 5 college men were raped by women.
I am/have been a mandatory reporter as college faculty in both Florida and Alaska (in both cases at public universities). I know that private college faculty are not mandatory reporters in Alaska; I’m not sure about Florida, but I suspect that, given the way mandatory reporting works there, they may well be.
I believe there are a few states where mandatory reporting is being considered by the legislature - I think Virginia is one of them but I haven’t seen any news on that since the winter and the RS debacle.
@dfbdfb - The last time I looked at this mandatory reporting stuff, it was more complicated than it appeared to be at first glance. If I recall correctly, policies vary quite a bit and you have to dig into them to really figure out how they work.
IIRC, “mandatory reporting” (at colleges, where generally most sexual assault cases don’t involve young children) can be to the Title IX coordinator, the city police, or the campus police (who may or may not be “real” police). Most employees in a college who are “mandatory reporters” end up reporting up through the Title IX coordinator, and the vast majority of these reports are not passed on to the police for follow-up. (I think anonymous statistics are passed along). It works like this so that victims have a choice and aren’t forced to deal with the police unless they want to. Would you be able to check what the policy is at the college you work at?
In case it wasn’t clear, I was asking about mandatory reporting to the police. TItle IX requires that certain employees of colleges/universities report suspected cases of sexual violence to the college/university, but that is a very different thing.
Got it—I’d misunderstood. Faculty in Alaska are mandatory reporters to the designated contact person at their institution for the situation (the Title IX coordinator for sexual assault, the campus police for someone who’s a danger to others, the counseling office for those who are a danger to themselves, and so on), not to the police generally. Of course, one person can fall into multiple categories at the same time.
There’s been some discussion about whether we’re mandatory reporters to the city police department if we become aware of the possibility of child sexual (or other, actually) abuse; people in my department generally figure it’s safer to do so, but we haven’t gotten the official word from the university system’s legal counsel office yet.
I want to look up Florida’s laws/policies, though—like I said upthread, they had quite strong reporting requirements when I was there, but I don’t recall the specifics. (And, of course, the current legislature has done a lot of watering-down of even child-related protections the past couple years, so who knows what it is now.)
I think faculty everywhere are mandatory reporters to the Title IX coordinator at their school. Not sure about who at colleges is a mandatory reporter to the police about suspected child abuse, but that’s not relevant to our discussion here. At most places, the school can report suspected sexual assault to the police, but they would rarely do so.
I think there is a difference between the way I understand the term “mandatory reporter” and what is being advocated here. A mandatory reporter is someone who is under a positive duty to report certain suspected behavior even if the alleged victim does not complain about it. I think what some of us are talking about here is that if a student voluntarily brings a complaint to the school administration, and that complaint contains allegations that if proven would constitute felonious conduct, the school should suspend its proceedings and refer the matter to the police for investigation. I don’t think that the problems normally associated with mandatory reporting are really implicated in that sense. It seems to me that there are two objections being raised to the idea that colleges should report allegations of felonious conduct. One is straight up vigilantism, namely the idea that the police are ineffective so we should punish people ourselves. The other is an effort to proscribe conduct that is not, in fact, felony rape. While either of those points may be debatable, they don’t really deal with mandatory reporting.
We are not told officially that we must report any case of student violence or misconduct. We are told “officially” (without us signing off on it though) that we must report students who are a danger to themselves or others. I have rarely used that, and I believe the most recent case stopped at the Dean of Student Services and did not go further.
There is a mandatory reporting law for public school teachers in my state, and I and many other parents have been the victim of it. Generally, absolutely ANY word or phrase at all that indicates the remote possibility of child abuse must be reported or the teacher or school staff person would get a $1,000 fine no questions asked. There is no process to document the exact situation and exactly what was said by the child, and the parents do not have knowledge of it unless a staff member tells them. There needs to be no sign of physical or mental distress, a word is enough.
So for there to be mandatory reporting, there must be a hammer like the $1,000 fine. I believe in my state, the only mandatory reporting is concerning children under 18 (so you could construe it to college students under 18).
The critics say that forcing a victim to deal with the police instead of the college will have a chilling effect and lead to less reporting of sexual assaults. But I ask you, is this any different than reporting to your parents that you are a victim of a crime, and they said they’ll take care of it?
I’m not inclined to buy-into that “chilling effect”. If a student feels that a felony offense was not committed then they have every right not to report to anyone at all. The end run-around of letting colleges handle criminal complaints confidentially and presume guilt with suspensions prior to hearings and all that nonsense because we think adult women can’t stand up to alittle scrutiny is just too close to McCarthyism to suit my taste.
One evil of the DOE OCR mandated parallel system is that it drains away real criminal complaints. If a rapist is not reported to the real authorities, the conviction rate by definition is going to be zero percent.
The “kinder gentler” parallel system also creates false hopes/expectations for victims. Despite its federally mandated compromise of due process, the parallel college system fails to get many convictions (as is the case with the real court system). Because proof in these situations is usually lacking.
Because rape is so often impossible to prove (even if using a 50.1% standard), the effective thing to do is prevention. This is fundamentally not a problem that can be helped by adjudication process reform. That’s the essential mistake with the federal policy in this area.