The New York Times has a lengthy in depth article about what is very regrettably a classic recurring story. A newly arrived freshman woman goes to a party and consumes alcohol. She is raped by football players in the presence of witnesses. The college conducts a hurried disciplinary proceeding and clears the football players. In this instance the victim has the courage to go public with her experience and the Times gained access to records and information that the college was attempting to keep secret. It provides a particularly detailed look inside a process that plays out over and over on college campuses.
Reporting Rape, and Wishing She Hadn’t
She was 18 years old, a freshman, and had been on campus for just two weeks when one Saturday night last September her friends grew worried because she had been drinking and suddenly disappeared.
Around midnight, the missing girl texted a friend, saying she was frightened by a student she had met that evening. “Idk what to do,” she wrote. “I’m scared.” When she did not answer a call, the friend began searching for her.
In the early-morning hours on the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in central New York, the friend said, he found her — bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cellphones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.
It took the college just 12 days to investigate the rape report, hold a hearing and clear the football players. The football team went on to finish undefeated in its conference, while the woman was left, she said, to face the consequences — threats and harassment for accusing members of the most popular sports team on campus.
Whatever precisely happened that September night, the internal records, along with interviews with students, sexual-assault experts and college officials, depict a school ill prepared to evaluate an allegation so serious that, if proved in a court of law, would be a felony, with a likely prison sentence. As the case illustrates, school disciplinary panels are a world unto themselves, operating in secret with scant accountability and limited protections for the accuser or the accused.
At a time of great emotional turmoil, students who say they were assaulted must make a choice: Seek help from their school, turn to the criminal justice system or simply remain silent. The great majority — including the student in this case — choose their school, because of the expectation of anonymity and the belief that administrators will offer the sort of support that the police will not.
Yet many students come to regret that decision, wishing they had never reported the assault in the first place.
I can't do justice to this lengthy article with a few quotes. I strongly urge people who are concerned about this issue to read the entire article. The fact that a major newspaper is devoting this amount of resources and space to it, is definitely a positive development.
There are some real problems with allowing academic institutions to operate as a law unto themselves. They have an inherent conflict of interest in their desire to present themselves as places to which parents can entrust their young adult children with confidence. There is no question that the public criminal justice system is generally ill equipped to deal with sexual assault investigations. But, it is the place for criminal investigations. Colleges have disciplinary responsibilities for issues with their students in various matters that don't constitute criminal behavior such as cheating on exams. There is an argument to be made that they lack both the legal competence and necessary objectivity for conducting criminal investigations.
The federal Dept. of Education has attempted to use its authority under title IX of the 1972 educational amendments to establish standards for college disciplinary proceedings. While stories such as this one reveal a process that generally has almost unlimited potential for improvement, there are questions to be raised as to whether it can ever provide a satisfactory alternative to the structured arrangements of the legal system.
The ultimate problem is the rape culture. We still live with many of the vestiges of the Victorian age in which at least middle class girls and women were given protection from assault. However, the protection came at the cost of being treated as the property of their fathers and husbands. We now live in an age where women seek independence and empowerment, but are left strangely isolated and powerless when forced to confront the realities of brutal male aggression. A very essential part of dealing with this culture which enables rape is finding a better approach to dealing with the crime of rape as a crime and not as a youthful indiscretion.