An awful, reality-denying campus sexual assault bill is being pushed for in the Senate for the third year in a row, and there is much in the bill that should give congress pause.
The deceptively titled Campus Accountability and Safety Act would create new resources on campus for accusers, ensure minimum training standards for campus personnel who deal with accusations, require a memorandum of understanding with law enforcement, require schools to survey students annually about their experiences with sexual violence and create harsher penalties for schools that don’t comply.
The bill was reintroduced in the 114th Congress last year, but thankfully went nowhere (except for a one-sided hearing held last July). When the bill was first introduced in 2014, in the 113th Congress, I sent six questions to the bill’s original co-sponsors. I asked about due process and services for accused students, and how the surveys could remain free of bias and politics.
I received responses from three sponsors — all Republicans — none of whom had a good answer for why due process was absent from the bill. When the bill was reintroduced in the 114th Congress, it contained the words “due process” three times, but also referred to accusers as “victims” throughout the bill, which shows a bias toward a “guilty until proven innocent” mentality.
That same mentality permeates the bill. It appears none of the sponsors have stopped to question whether false accusations ever happen. Sexual assault happens, but so do false accusations, and the policies being implemented across college campuses and in bills like CASA would create a culture where false accusations not only flourish, but are also acceptable. We’re already seeing situations where schools — so eager to prove to the federal government that they take sexual assault accusations seriously — ignore any evidence that negates an accusation in order to punish the accused.
As for the other parts of the bill that seem fine on the surface, knowing the current climate on college campuses is helpful. Creating “support services” for accusers but providing no help for accused students is not only biased, but might violate Title IX’s claim to provide “equitable” resolutions.
Expecting a frightened 19-year-old who had a drunken one-night stand with a woman a year ago who is now claiming it was rape to be able to act as a trained and adequate attorney is absurd. Activists would like to brand this young man a rapist just because he has been accused — and that is exactly why the truth in these cases is so important and the ability to defend oneself is essential.
The “minimum training standards” alluded to by CASA’s sponsors are “victim-centered” training standards, which presuppose all accusations as true and seem designed to ensure the accused is found responsible — no matter what the evidence shows.
Activists can claim that’s not the case, but when “investigators” are taught that false accusations are so rare that they shouldn’t be considered, a perfect atmosphere for false accusations is created. At the University of Texas, police officers were taught “victim-centered” approaches to investigating that involved conducting interviews in such a way as to ensure the accused has no exculpatory evidence — like failing to keep reports of follow-up interviews so that it can’t look like accusers are contradicting themselves.
The “memorandum of understanding” with law enforcement was something I liked about this bill, but as we’ve seen from the UT example above, if police are “trained” the way those at UT were, then there’s no difference between them and trigger-happy campus administrators trying to prove to the federal government they take sex assault seriously by railroading anyone accused.
Beyond the lack of due process in this bill, the annual survey is sure to be a faulty measure used to beat schools into submission. We’ve seen from survey after survey reported on by the media that a flawed, self-reported, broadly defined questionnaire creates headlines but doesn’t actually capture the level of danger on campus. There’s no reason to believe that the survey created by this bill and required of universities won’t follow the same model that lead to the debunked “1-in-5” myth.
The surveys will show women answering in the affirmative to broad definitions of sexual assault that include stolen kisses to forcible rape, and media and campus administrators claiming those affirmative answers prove “rape culture.” They will ignore the broadly worded questions that turn every encounter that doesn’t follow an impossibly narrow definition of consent into rape and they will certainly ignore the fact that more than 70 percent of women who answer in the affirmative say they didn’t report the alleged assault because they didn’t think it was serious.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Telling someone they are a victim of something when they do not see themselves as such is cruel. Why would you want someone to feel the trauma when they wouldn’t have otherwise? That seems abusive, especially when it’s being done to further an agenda.
This bill also includes harsher penalties for colleges that don’t comply. Colleges are already forced to railroad accused students for fear of an investigation (which will happen if they don’t find the accused responsible, or if they find him responsible but not quickly enough, or for any number of other reasons) and loss of federal funding. Right now those threats from the federal government are included in “Dear Colleague” letters that are not supposed to be legally binding. CASA would make those threats legally binding and further poison relationships on college campuses.
There are rumors that if CASA can’t get passed on its own, lead sponsor Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., will attempt to have it included in the Higher Education Reauthorization Act — perhaps making it easier to pass, as congressmen often don’t read big bills. That would be dangerous for college campuses, even worse than current policies.
There’s one good thing in this bill, and it’s a sad commentary on how terrible this issue is being treated on college campuses. The bill requires schools to inform accused students of the charges against them. Think about that for a minute. Right now, schools aren’t required to do this, and they can still brand accused students as rapists. Schools shouldn’t need CASA to start doing this, and they certainly don’t need the rest of CASA.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
