New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to bring California’s new “yes means yes” law to New York to combat sexual assault on the Empire State’s colleges and universities.
Cuomo, a Democrat, said during a press conference Thursday that he wants to being the process of overhauling the state’s campus sexual assault policies with the State University of New York and all of its 64 campuses.
“This is Harvard and Yale and Princeton, Albany and Buffalo and Oswego. It is not SUNY’s problem by origination. I would suggest it should be SUNY’s problem to solve and SUNY’s place to lead,” Cuomo said.
The new policy for SUNY campuses would include the same affirmative consent definition – also known as “yes means yes” – recently imposed in California state schools.
That definition of consent requires an “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement” that must be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.” The definition also states that a “lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.” A past history of sexual activity does not equal consent either, according to the California law.
Cuomo, in his prepared remarks, called for a uniform definition of consent across all of SUNY’s campuses.
“[A] woman’s consent in Oswego should be a woman’s consent in Buffalo and should be a woman’s consent in Albany,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo’s reform would also include an “immunity policy” that would protect students who came forward to report sexual assault. This typically refers to overlooking crimes committed by the accuser – such as underage drinking – if a sexual assault has occurred. That’s good, but a lot of times that immunity also allows accusers to be free from charges of false reports.
Cuomo also said his reform would allow accusers – which he exclusively referred to as women – to have the choice to report to campus police or local police or state police.
One good thing in Cuomo’s reform was the acknowledgement that rape is a crime and should not be handled by campus administrators.
“This is not subject to a college campus determination or a college campus policy. It is a crime,” Cuomo said. “And a campus cannot define what is a crime as something less than a crime, and can’t be imposing and adjudicating what should be adjudicated as a crime.”
This could be a double-edged sword. Allowing the police to handle these crimes would be a big win for the due process rights of the accused. But if, as Cuomo indicated, this policy becomes state law, that would mean affirmative consent could be applied to the general population. This could lead to many more men being accused of rape when they did nothing wrong.
Cuomo also called for statewide, uniform training of SUNY police to ensure all campuses are applying the same measures and policies to investigate and adjudicate campus sexual assault.
Cuomo said his hope was to eventually make the new policies at SUNY the law of the land in New York.
“[W]hile SUNY is implementing the policy, learn what is right, what is wrong with the policy, or should there be any tweaks to the policy, because my goal would be to make this a law eventually and to use this implementation at SUNY as a way to be testing the policy to see if there should be any refinements,” Cuomo said.
New York, if it passes a statewide law, would be the second state to adopt the affirmative consent standard for college campuses.
