Forget whether a sexual assault accusation is actually true, the real goal of campus Title IX investigators is to “validate the experience” of the accuser. That’s at least according to Rosemonde Pierre-Louis, New York City’s commissioner of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence.
Pierre-Louis made the remarks on Huffington Post Live amid a discussion about what college campuses can do to combat sexual assault.
“I think it’s extremely important, first and foremost, regardless if you’re the Title IX coordinator or the friend, is to validate the experience,” Pierre-Louis said. “To not interject your own perceptions about it.”
It could be suggested that Pierre-Louis was referring to finding out if the claim was true, but that’s unlikely given her position and the rest of the conversation. The inclusion of “the friend” in her statement about validation also negates this idea, as no one would suggest an accuser’s friend needs to investigate the claim to determine its validity.
Pierre-Louis said that the “worst thing” a Title IX administrator could say to an accuser is to ask “What did you do … to cause this?” Sure, flat out asking if someone caused their own assault is wrong, but not every question should be seen that way. Sadly, on college campuses today, any questioning of an accuser is seen by some as victim-blaming.
I’ll refer again to feminist and former judge Nancy Gertner, who said that “Blaming the victim can’t mean that there are inconsistencies in her account, [that] there are things that she is saying which are not true to the other witnesses.”
But based on what Pierre-Louis said to the Huffington Post’s Zerlina Maxwell, such an approach would be wrong in the first place because an accuser’s “experience” must be “validated.”
Psychologists define such validation as the understanding and acceptance of someone else’s experience. For an allegedly impartial observer to do this, it would create a bias against accused students — a bias that already exists when the office in charge of investigating accusations is the same office that is supposed to support an accuser.
Pierre-Louis did not respond to a Washington Examiner request for comment prior to press time.
