President Obama’s sexual assault task force marked its one-year anniversary last week, and released new guidelines for colleges to develop with law enforcement.
Just asking colleges and universities to work with local law enforcement when dealing with claims of sexual assault is a step in the right direction, as the American justice system is far more qualified to handle accusations than schools. Still, as I’ve written before, there is a role for colleges to play when it comes to handling sexual assault — namely as a support service for accusers as they go through the legal system.
But the new guidelines, called a memorandum of understanding, still allow schools to have their own legal system. And although the guidelines say their purpose is, in part, to “respect the legal rights of those accused of sexual assault,” the document poses a bias to schools by repeatedly referring to accusers as “victims,” and the accused as “alleged suspects” or “alleged offenders.” This terminology muddies the waters, creating a “guilty until proven innocent” mentality.
K.C. Johnson, who co-wrote the book on the Duke lacrosse case, described this bias further.
“The message here is clear: a crime has occurred (since the accuser is either a victim or a survivor),” Johnson wrote. “An accused student is, according to the administration, the ‘alleged perpetrator’ of that crime. Under this definition of events, it would seem that an accused student could defend himself only by identifying the actual ‘perpetrator’; because of the MOU’s language, a defense based on a claim that an assault never occurred is off the table.”
Johnson also notes that the new guidelines give accusers the power to decide whether the sexual assault is also reported to police. This allows actual offenders to face only expulsion when they should be in jail, and innocent students to have no due process rights in trying to prove their innocence. If an accuser could almost guarantee the person they are accusing would be punished (as current activists and the administration seem to be pushing for) why even take the chance of reporting to police?
The new guidelines also require schools to conduct their own investigations even if the police are also investigating. As we’ve seen before, colleges just aren’t equipped to handle these investigations themselves. In the case of a he said/she said situation, the schools are under tremendous pressure to take the “she said” as fact, which put a lot of students at risk and opens universities up to a wave of lawsuits. And in the recent case at Vanderbilt University, the school, having no authority to subpoena, wouldn’t have had access the evidence to find the young men responsible.
The administration also suggests in its guidelines that, when developing an agreement between schools and law enforcement, that “critical partners” be included. They specifically name law enforcement, prosecutors’ offices and victims’ services. They do not mention anyone who may speak on behalf of the accused — it’s all about accusers.
Bottom line: Working with police is a step in the right direction when it comes to handling sexual assault, but creating a separate legal system with less-trained college administrators who are acting in the school’s best interest (which currently is to find people guilty, not adhere to a fair process) is still a bad decision. Police, rather than college administrators, need to investigate crimes.
