Haven’t we established in the Boermeester and other cases, colleges have an obligation to pursue assault cases even when the victim chooses not to file a claim. The fact the university failed to do so against Sandra would demonstrate the university acted with gender bias in how it handles sexual assault, even if it doesn’t match the exact fact pattern you were asking about.
But who reported to the school that she assaulted John Doe? Not him, certainly not her and as far as I know no third party. Who is contending he assaulted her? Where is the reporting?
In the hearing and to the investigators, all parties(Sandra, Doe, and third party witnesses) testified to how extremely drunk Doe was. It should have been obvious to the panel and the investigators Doe could not have consented to the act that Sandra told the panel and the investigators she initiated. The panel and the Title IX investigators all had obligations to act on that knowledge, which they failed to do.
The assault by Sandra Jones only became obvious to me after I read all the text messages and pieced it together. Those texts came to light after he was expelled. Without those text messages all they had was two allegedly drunk students. You cannot expect the college to make or file your case for you – someone has to offer something that causes them to investigate.
In Boermeester they had the testimony of 2 students and then found video. Very different scenario.
That, and the undisputed testimony of multiple eyewitnesses to the drunken state of Doe and that same testimony about Doe being blacked out was influential in the hearing board’s finding of guilt.
So colleges don’t need to act without irrefutable video evidence? It sounds like you’re trying to read a beyond reasonable doubt standard into Title IX.
And many people think the bar is too low and should be beyond a reasonable doubt. Plus if you start with two drunk kids…you have already discriminated before even beginning by assuming one party “should have known better.”
“Am I understanding correctly he has to sue the accuser for the Title IX documents in the case to be made public? Otherwise Amherst won’t release them?”
Schools pretty much never release them to the public unless forced to in court. It makes sense, because they are supposed to be confidential to protect everyone involved. The crazy part is that often the ACCUSED can’t have the documents. In a typical Title IX case, the accused/their attorneys/their parents can’t have copies of the complaint or witness statements. “Seeing the evidence against you” means sending an 18- or 19-year-old kid into a secure room to look at the documents, forbidden to take notes or pictures, with a university proctor watching over to make sure the rules are followed. Then this teenager is supposed to prepare for a hearing based on their memory of who said what, and parents/attorneys can only know what’s going on to the extent the kid accurately remembers everything in a thick file of documents that he saw once.
“My response was that men had to file a claim of assault with theTitle IX office in order to get the same protections.”
As pointed out above, this is wrong. If men have to file a claim in order to be protected, then they aren’t getting the same protections. Many cases with female victims are initiated by third parties, sometimes over the alleged victim’s objection. I see many cases initiated by college officials like RAs, investigators, and counselors, as well as by friends. Now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case where a third party initiated a complaint on behalf of a male student OR against a woman – though I can’t know if it happens outside of my cases.
"I believe they do investigate when men report and have found little evidence to the contrary. Can I prove that is true in every single case? No I can not. "
Who said every single case? You can’t prove that they investigate in the majority of cases. You can’t prove that they investigate in more than a handful of cases. You certainly can’t prove that the investigations are pursued equally. Of course, you can’t prove the opposite, either. We can’t know.
What does that all say. What some have been saying since 2012. It was a crappy, grossly discriminatory, ill conceived process at many universities.
It sounds like we can’t really know what is happening overall with the investigations as regards fairness of outcome. It doesn’t seem unfair outcomes, to males, are the norm, but we don’t know how unusual they are. On balance, has Title IX been a positive for campus culture? or a negative? I very much like how the discussion around consent has changed and that has been very recent. I want women and men to have options other than reporting to police.
Hanna: What is it you want to see happen?
Isn’t it the case that if a man, such as Amherst’s John Doe, initiated his own complaint after having been accused–remember, he was black out drunk and presumably had no memory of the event–that it would be dismissed as retaliatory? Even though he may not even have known what happened before that?
I seem to recall reading about that having happened.
It would seem that perhaps his only recourse would be to file a police report or a civil suit. (Alleging what, I do not know.)
Yes some colleges have called it retaliatory…there is also one in federal court regarding this (retaliation reporting) with Yale. I think there are currently several lawsuits that Yale is involved in at least right now…The problem is that men for some reason tend not to report these types of evenings and tend to be blindsided by reports from months and months earlier, so I would think it would do zero good to turn this into a “first who gets to the reporting office” type game. Sometimes these accusers don’t even know who did the accusing…which tells you alot about the evening and that in probably more than one case thought the whole evening was consensual when they do figure out “who” did the accusing like Drew Sterrett and others. Here’s the Yale news article…about 1/2 through it the article talks about the retaliation case. But interesting is this point…and one I wonder why a university would not immediately refer both parties to counseling, an abusive relationship before it becomes a retaliatory situation.
Anyway this article is pretty thoughtful regarding process but it still illustrates what can go wrong when accusers are not allowed to defend themselves appropriately and how these “adjudication” committees can simply ignore things.
http://features.yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/10/13/yale-targeted-in-federal-title-ix-investigation/
“that it would be dismissed as retaliatory?”
Yes, that can happen. The first student to complain has an advantage, independent of gender.
“Hanna: What is it you want to see happen?”
We need to address relationship violence and assault as a public health problem and focus on prevention and harm reduction rather than adjudication after the fact. This means we need widespread, well funded, and politically difficult research into prevention strategies. We can’t arrest and punish our way out of this problem, just as we can’t with drug abuse and sales.
In the meantime, I’d like schools to establish more careful, formal procedures that improve truth seeking, but a ruinously expensive perfect system would still only be a band-aid.
It was and still is controversial to give heroin addicts free needles. But it turns out that needle exchanges are a cost-effective way to stop the spread of HIV when nothing else worked. We know that because of rigorous research that only happened over political objections. That’s the solution.
I couldn’t agree more Hanna.
The difference between drug abuse and sexual assault it that with drug abuse, barring DUI or something of that nature, the abuser is only harming themselves not someone else.
It’s a difference that means we should work HARDER to prevent it than we do with drugs, not less hard.
Sure we should prevent it. I’m cool with that. But, when it does happen, it sure shouldn’t be ignored. And not ignoring it and what happened to the victim means punishment will be necessary.
Who suggested ignoring it? I suggested that we can’t arrest and punish our way out of the problem, which is true. Even when rape was punishable by death, there was still a lot of rape. There are new solutions out there waiting to be discovered.
I’d like to see it this way, if you divide the reports into criminal and not-criminal, the police can take care of the criminal complaints, most non-nigher education involved people wonder why that doesn’t happen anyway and the uni can take care of the non-criminal. If there is a victim or if there are two victims as can be the case in abusive relationships chances are the new laws, when implemented will have a mediation and restorative justice component for the non-criminal. I’d like a stronger focus on alcohol on campus and how that contributes to risk.
Advocates could take a strong lesson from MADD, they did an excellent job of “teaching” no drinking and driving. It would be good for parents, too, because I guarantee you there are parents who have no idea their kids are sexually active and there are kids that maybe weren’t in high school, but have every intention of becoming active in college.
Again the freshman class is a strong, strong target about drinking (they are underage), and managing sexual relationships and pressures. I think colleges are doing a better job about sexual activity but not so sure that is true around the alcohol. Every college that I’m aware of has some entering freshman and transfer student online module about relationship management and conduct they are required to take,
I bookmarked this statement because I like it and it helps me through the “everything is assault” environment we’re being pounded with. It’s from an interesting paper by a Canadian in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia called Sex under Pressure, Jerks, Boorish Behavior and Gender Hierarchy and it discusses coercion vs. pressuring, the differences and the differences between men and women in today’s society. The below quote is someone other than him and he goes on to discuss it but I liked the quote.
…it’s an interesting read,
I cannot understand why anyone continues to advocate that sexual assault should just be left to the legal system, when you consider the time frame for legal cases to be handled. Here is the one for the Brock Turner case:
Assault took place on January 18, 2015
Turner was arrested that day, but released the same day after posting $150,000 bail
Turner was indicted January 28, 2015
Turner was arraigned on February 2, 2015, and pled not guilty to all charges
Two rape charges were dropped on October 7, 2015 (California seems to distinguish rape from sexual assault–not all states make the distinction in this way)
The trial began March 14, 2016. Notice that this is more than a year after the arrest.
The trial concluded on March 30, 2016. Turner was found guilty of three charges of felony sexual assault.
Sentencing did not take place until June 2, 2016.
According to reports from June 2016, Turner planned to appeal his conviction. I have not seen the outcome of that.
If you look at this timeline, it took about 14 months from the indictment to the conclusion of the trial. Turner was free on bail. If the victim had been a Stanford student, do you really think that Turner should have been on campus with her, and able to take classes that she might be in, would that be fine with people? Really?
Restraining order?