“If you knew your son had a 20% chance of being held up at gunpoint, you’d think twice before dropping your kid off. Well, my God, you drop a daughter off, it’s a one-in-five (chance) she could be raped or physically abused? It’s just outrageous.” With this quote, Vice President Joe Biden drew attention to a serious problem on college campuses. 20 to 25% of all college women will fall victim to sexual assault or attempted sexual assault while attending college. While the statistics for male victims remain unclear, it is evident that sexual assault can affect anyone regardless of gender. Thus, the potential risk of sexual assault on college campuses brings a desperate need for a solution. There are currently several prevention and awareness programs in place to avoid sexual assault entirely, but since sexual violence still exists, it becomes necessary to further investigate a way of handling the aftermath. When cases of sexual assault occur on a college campus, they are often handed over to college officials rather than law authorities. My question is: why?
In allowing colleges to handle cases of sexual assault, both the victim and the accused are mistreated and lose rights. Several of you reading this are probably saying “you’ve got to be kidding me. Are you actually defending the accused?” The answer is, I am defending both the accused and the victims in legal terms. Believe it or not, the accused lose legal rights in this process. Under Title IX, a key law in dealing with sexual assault cases, a school is accused of gender discrimination if they intentionally demonstrate “indifference” to a claim of sexual violence. By contrast, universities are not faced with these charges if this same “indifference” is applied to determine the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Thus, the defendants receive little protection from this crucial law. Another law that applies to these cases is the Due Process Clause of the fourteenth amendment. This law only requires that the accused be given “some kind of notice” and “some kind of hearing.” With such general guidelines, there is no guarantee of a fair trial.
Within the trials themselves, there are a number of factors that create an unjust atmosphere for the accused student. One such error is that most universities do not allow the defendant to have a lawyer. Additionally, on the rare occasions, the defendants are granted the right to a lawyer, the lawyer is not usually allowed to speak; the accused is instead expected to speak on their own behalf. This violates the sixth amendment, which guarantees the right to legal counseling throughout a criminal trial. Furthermore, the defendant is not expected to speak for him or herself when the case is presided over by a legal authority.
Finally, the amount of evidence required for a college to declare a defendant guilty was significantly lessened in comparison to criminal cases. Basically, so long as “it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred,” the accused can be found guilty. This completely opposes the legal system, as in a legal trial the defendant would have to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before being convicted for sexual assault.
The latter information is by no means to imply that all defendants are innocent. In fact, many accused persons are guilty-they just are not always convicted for it. So, in addition to having people wrongly labeled for sexual assault, there are people who have actually committed an act of violence with little to no punishment. When punishments are given out to those found guilty, they seem unjustly light. Take the case of victim Audrey Logan, for example. When Logan reported being raped by a classmate, the case was taken on by her campus disciplinary board, and her alleged rapist was found guilty. However, the young man only faced expulsion. Audrey attended Occidental College in California. The young man, therefore, would have faced felony charges and up to eight years in state prison had he been convicted in accordance with California law. By comparison, expulsion does not seem like a harsh enough punishment.
Despite this, expulsion is actually one of the harsher punishments faced by those found guilty of sexual violence. In a 2009 study from the Center for Public Integrity, 33 victims were interviewed, and just over half of their attackers were found guilty. Among those convicted, only four were actually expelled. The rest faced relatively minor punishments including one year suspension, social probation and academic penalties. So, while rapists and sex offenders outside of college campuses are facing several years to life in prison, those on campuses are being sentenced with social probation. In legal terms, this is truly unjust.
In addition, this study reports that two of the four expelled were repeat offenders. So, it took a second act of sexual violence to give the college grounds for expulsion. The statistic of being a repeat offender is far from uncommon; a 2002 study from the University of Massachusetts to enforce this ideas. Researchers interviewed a general sample of men on campus and found it was a very small percentage actually committing acts of sexual violence. However, over half of these men were repeat offenders, the average being six rapes per year. Thus, allowing perpetrators off with such easy punishments is deleterious to the safety of a campus as a whole. The majority of offenders in these cases are allowed to stay on campus, and if they are not, most are simply sent away from the college. If so many offenders are likely to repeat the crime, they are dangerous to others. So, for the safety of everyone involved as well as for legal purposes, the assailants should be put behind bars. The punishments given by colleges are not typically strong enough to protect people or be considered just, whereas legal authorities take on a more powerful punishment that is both advantageous to the safety of others and within the confines of the law.
Sexual assault is a crime and a legal issue and it should be handled by legal authorities. By giving colleges the power to handle sexual assault cases, sexual violence is being treated as misconduct instead of a crime. There is no reason to continue to deal with criminal behavior, or the accusation of such, so lightly. The mistreatment of the victims and the accused in this process makes a mockery of legal justice and lessens a serious crime. It is for these reasons that colleges have no business presiding over the legal matter of sexual assault cases.
