Bartholet writes that Harvard’s sexual harassment policy omits “entirely all issues of substance” and is “guilty of gross overreach.”
www.businessinsider.com By Peter Jacobs
Among the many institutions facing due process lawsuits none, perhaps, is more deserving than Duke, a university that all but defined hostility to due process in the lacrosse case.
www.mindingthecampus.com By KC Johnson
One of the challenges of defending the falsely accused is that falsely accused college boys have many incentives to stay silent. Their entire future is at stake. Colleges demand confidentiality, and aren’t willing to advertise outcomes even in aggregate. So any report that provides hard data is helpful. EduRisk, part of United Educators, produced a report in 2011, titled: “Student Sexual Assault: Weathering the Perfect Storm.”
From 2006-2010, United Educators (UE) received 262 claims of student-perpetrated sexual assault, which generated more than $36 million in losses for UE and our members. The claims data show that students accused of perpetrating a sexual assault are just as likely to sue the institution as accusing students.
Colleges are doing such a bad job adjudicating that the accused are bringing half of the law suits. Even more surprising, is that they are costing the schools a lot more than that:
In UE’s five-year study, 96 percent of the student-on-student sexual assault claims involved acquaintances. Students accused of assault brought 54 percent of the claims and comprised 72 percent of the financial losses—composed of legal fees and payments to claimants.
The accused are winning their cases when they have a reasonable shot at due process.
But many are ending up in court after a botched adjudication:
Three-quarters of the student sexual assault claims resulted in litigation. Claimants argued that educational institutions:
- Did not follow their policies and procedures
- Had confusing or unclear policies and procedures
- Did not respond promptly or reasonably to an assault report
- Treated the victim or the perpetrator cruelly or unfairly
These four issues translated into the following causes of action (in order of frequency): negligence, breach of contract, Title IX violations, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and fraud. Less commonly alleged causes of action included defamation, due process violations, and breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.
source: https://www.edurisksolutions.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=378
This is an impartial report coming from a school insurer which addresses the financial impact of lawsuits related to campus sexual assault. It should be noted that this was before the current set of unreasonable campus policies with a ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard and other directives that radically increased the likelihood of kangaroo courts doling out biased results. But it still shows the many problems with campus adjudications.
This seems to me to be as hard evidence as you can find that these case (at least up until 2010) are not getting resolved by schools, and that schools are incapable of resolving them in a way that doesn’t just end up in the courts anyway: making for a terrible experience for the accusers and the accused.
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Update: news story that relates to this insurance issue for colleges:
This week SOS received these thoughts from a mother of a falsely accused son.
As parents, we can’t help but keep trying to salvage something out of the emotional wreckage – we are wise to sidestep details of the incident itself because we know that our sons won’t benefit from rehashing any of it. It’s their deeper, more difficult emotional quagmire we keep trying to see into.
Sharing their (and our) emotional struggles, awkward and hard as it can be at times, brings to light the deep dimensions and commonality of our (and their) plight. Our mutual support pushes the darkness back and offers a hand up to surviving this ordeal.
I smile to realize the truly brave, good, and wise warriors we have become and how powerful a group we are – FACE, (http://www.facecampusequality.org/) gives us the anchor and support we need to push for resolution while we deal with our current challenges.
– Name Withheld
I am Joshua Strange. I am a survivor of false accusations of sexual assault and criminal domestic violence.
In the Spring of 2011, I had just completed my second year at the school of my dreams: Auburn University. I had a large group of friends, I was Chaplain of my fraternity, and I had just watched the Auburn Tigers win the National Championship in football and Cam Newton win the Heisman trophy. It was an amazing time to call myself a Tiger. In late May of 2011, I began dating a girl I met at a friend’s party. We dated through the Summer of 2011 and seemed to be doing very well – she even moved into my apartment. Toward the end of the summer, however, I ended our relationship due to her continued close relationship with her former boyfriend. I was hurt and disappointed – she was my first serious girlfriend – but I had no idea what was about to happen to me.
A couple of months after we broke up, she decided to accuse me of sexual assault/rape both through the legal system, as well as through Auburn University. It was completely untrue and absolutely devastating.
Over the course of the next few months, my world rapidly unraveled. My fraternity deactivated me. I lost most of my friends, and although I was completely cleared of all criminal charges through the legal system, my beloved Auburn University expelled me from school. They gave no care or consideration for the truth, having systematically denied me the opportunity to present my side in a fair and equitable manner.
My world was destroyed by a false accusation from a bitter ex-girlfriend. I lost my self-confidence and I fell into a deep depression as I struggled to come to terms with the injustice of my circumstances. I had committed no crime but I suffered 100% of the consequences.
Things really do get better and with the support of my family and close friends, my life is improving every day. I now realize that I am the only person who can define who I am and what I do with this experience. I am Joshua Strange and I am not a rapist.
If you are a student who has been falsely accused, please feel free to contact me at strange.joshuac@yahoo.com. I am here to listen. Anything you tell me will always be completely confidential. If you would rather talk on the phone, we can set that up anytime.
If you only take away one thing from my story, please let it be this: you do not have to make this journey alone. I have been there. I get it.
Sincerely,
Joshua Strange
In the race to dismantle due process on campus… The OCR threatened universities with the loss of federal funding if they did not further weaken already weak due process protections for those accused of sexual misconduct.
www.realclearpolitics.com By Peter Berkowitz
There is hope on this day before Christmas! This story from RealClearPolitics expands on the our hopeful Save Our Sons blog post: Media stories: a lot has changed in the last few weeks.
December has not been a good month for the feminist crusade against the “rape culture….”
… for at least three years, these stories been accorded virtually uncritical reception by the mainstream media.Now, in what may be another sign of turning tides, the accused in another high-profile case is getting his say. The New York Times has previously given ample coverage to Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student famous for carrying around a mattress to protest the school’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. Now, it has allowed that man, Paul Nungesser, to tell his story—a story of being ostracized and targeted by mob justice despite being cleared of all charges in a system far less favorable to the accused than criminal courts. No one knows whether Sulkowicz or Nungesser is telling the truth; but the media have at last acknowledged that there is another side to this story.
Will 2015 see a pushback against the anti-“rape culture” movement on campus? If so, good. This is a movement that has capitalized on laudable sympathy for victims of sexual assault to promote gender warfare, misinformation and moral panic. It’s time for a reassessment.
The fact that the New York Times is finally presenting our side of this issue is hopeful indeed. Full article here: realclearpolitics.com by Cathy Young
It wants to reject all previous experience of relations between the sexes and substitute a new status for women in our society unknown in any previous society. Universities are now responsible for maintaining the happy situation in which a woman never receives a proposal that offends her because it is unwanted and thus makes her feel vulnerable.
www.hoover.org by Harvey C. Mansfield
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has dropped an increasingly disputed sexual assault statistic from her website…the change on Sen. Gillibrand’s website comes in response to a new DOJ study.
Winston’s attorneys have maintained for months that their client was falsely accused and that the sexual encounter that night was consensual.
www.usatoday.com By Rachel Axon