The Trump administration on Thursday urged a federal judge to reject claims that gender bias drove Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ decision to rewrite an Obama-era directive on campus sexual assault. “It’s not reasonable to suggest that groups that advocate for accused students are biased against survivors or against women,” Justice Department lawyer Steven Myers argued in court. Myers was responding to claims that the Department of Education gave preferential access to accused students’ rights groups before it decided to revamp its sexual misconduct guidelines. Three victims’ rights groups, led by SurvJustice, sued DeVos over the new policy in January 2018. The groups claim the policy “disproportionately burdens women and girls” and was motivated by sexist stereotypes that women frequently lie about sexual assault and harassment. The victims’ rights lawyer cited a July 2017 NY Times article in which Jackson is quoted as saying “the accusations – 90 percent of them – fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’” Thurston insisted that this and other statements by Education Department officials show the policy change was “at least in part based on the stereotype that women tend to make false accusations.”
Women? See what she did there? Not victims. Not the survivors of rape and sexual assault. Women. And whether Candace Jackson’s 90% statistic is accurate, her assertion is not wrong. The ballooning of claims of rape and sexual assault have nothing to do with men suddenly running around campus raping women with abandon, but the untethering of the concepts of rape and sexual assault from cognizable definitions and reducing them to whatever the women feels about it after the fact. When rape has no meaning, then any claim of rape is seemingly legit. What infuriates the advocates isn’t that Jackson said it out loud, but that she’s largely right.
Finally, there is agreement that this is not, and never was, a battle between victims and perpetrators, but women against men. The deprivation of due process wasn’t a matter of being pro-victim, but pro-woman. They say so. They swear it. Now that we’ve finally come to the point where the lies are admitted and the truth of the matter revealed, we can have a real discussion about why due process is so horrifying to women.
simplejustice.us By S. Greenfield courthousenews By N. Iovino
