Rad Geek People’s Daily

(I owe my awareness of this story to Martin Striz)

If you thought Auburn University was alone amongst schools with stupid-ass sexual assault policies, think again.

Now, at Auburn, the policy is no policy at all. That is to say, students can be brought before the discipline committee for sexual assault, but there is no clear definition of sexual assault and no procedures for addressing complaints. At Harvard, on the other hand, they have decided to institute procedures which specifically single out complainant women for victim-blaming bullshit.

Harvard is being investigated by federal officials over whether its new disciplinary policy violates federal civil rights laws. The policy requires that anyone filing a peer dispute, including sexual misconduct allegations, must provide witnesses or evidence before the University will even investigate the charges. The policy was adopted after a legal fracas over an alleged false complaint of sexual assault, in which the discplinary board was not properly following an investigative process.

Well, look. If the problem was that they weren’t talking to the boy’s witnesses, then the solution ought to be that they hold the board strictly accountable to conducting a good investigation, right? Not so, according to Harvard. The way to deal with faulty investigations is to do as much as possible to make sure you never investigate anything at all!

Look at it this way: if you’re presenting charges of sexual assault, they demand that you have witnesses or evidence. Apparently you, the survivor, don’t count as a witness, and unless your rapist is voluntarily going to confess without any investigation, he won’t be one either. So unless some third party who will stand up for you somehow managed to see you being raped, you have no witnesses that they’ll listen to. And evidence? The disciplinary board gets to decide whether or not you’ve given them evidence, so if they want to ignore your complaint they can just say that the rape kit only proves that you had sex. They’re under no obligation to actually investigate anything, and they have no incentive to. Why take on more work and risk the image of the school by dealing with the epidemic of sexual violence on every co-ed college campus in America, when you can just sit back and stick your fingers in your ears?

The See No Evil, Hear No Evil school of thought on college campuses has just got to stop. I am sick and tired of administrators who try to create a bullshit illusion of safety by simply refusing to acknowledge that rape happens on their campuses. I’m tired of policies which are blithely unaware that demonstrating evidence and witnesses to be credible is the end result of an investigation, and that you always start out with stuff you can’t be sure of—that’s the whole point of having an investigative process. It is simply immoral to tell a disciplinary board that they can disregard complaints without looking into them, and to impose the chilling effect that that will always have on survivors’ willingness to report crimes against them. Who’s going to report a sexual assault when they have no idea whether or not the disciplinary board is going to turn on them and call them a liar without bothering to look into the claim?

If Harvard is so damn concerned about the increasing number of reports of sexual assaults on their campus—they dealt with 7 cases in the 2000-2001 school year—;then they ought to get off their asses and do something about the structural problems on their campus that lead to epidemic rape, through measures like mandatory peer education on sexual violence, and improved safety measures outside. After all, whether they get a single report or not, there are still about 350 sexual assaults every year at a school of Harvard’s size (20,000 students). Refusing to investigate them may reduce the workload on the disciplinary board, but it won’t do a damn thing to make the campus a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

For further reading:

• GT 3/19/2002: Boston University Uses Red Tape to Cover Up Rape
• GT 10/25/2001: Cops refuse to adequately investigate rape in Austin
• GT 11/28/2001: Alabama Church Didn’t Investigate Charges of Misconduct, Pastor Sexually Exploits 14-Year-Old Girl
• GT 4/19/2001: Some EAMC Doctors Refuse to Give Emergency Contraception to Rape Survivors
• GT 9/24/2001: The Rape Blog documents pervasive terrorism against women