WUNRN
Direct Link to Full 23-Page April
2014 US White House Guidelines Report:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/report_0.pdf
WASHINGTON
— Reacting to a series of highly publicized rapes on college campuses, the
White House on Monday released guidelines that increase the pressure on
universities to more aggressively combat sexual assaults on campus.
The recommendations urge
colleges, among other measures, to conduct anonymous surveys about sexual
assault cases, adopt anti-assault policies that have been considered successful
at other universities and to better ensure that the reports of such crimes
remain confidential. The guidelines are contained in a report by a White House
task force that President Obama formed early this year, and the
administration is likely to ask Congress to pass measures that would enforce
the recommendations and levy penalties for failing to do so. The government
will also open a website, NotAlone.gov,
to track enforcement and provide victims with information.
Many
advocates for such a crackdown may see the proposals as an inadequate response
to a crisis, but the White House is hamstrung about what it can do without
congressional action and has just begun its own attack on the issue.
“Colleges and universities
need to face the facts about sexual assault,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr. said. “No more turning a blind eye or pretending it doesn’t exist. We need
to give victims the support they need, like a confidential place to go, and we
need to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
The task force says that
one in five college students has been assaulted, but that just 12 percent of
such attacks are reported.
Mr. Obama appointed the
panel after a number of recent cases — at Yale, at Dartmouth and at Florida
State — focused attention on the problem and led to accusations that college
and university officials are not doing enough to police sexual crimes committed
by students. The resulting furor has led to calls that Washington, where
Congress and the administration are already moving to crack down on sexual
assault in the military, take similar action when it comes to colleges and
universities.
“The American people have
kind of woken up to the fact that we’ve got a serious problem when 20 percent
of coeds say they’ve been sexually assaulted,” said Representative Jackie
Speier, Democrat of California.
Senator
Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said the recommendation for
mandatory sexual assault surveys “has been consistently the No. 1 request of
student survivors and advocates.”
“I am pleased that the
task force has recommended this important step to increasing transparency and
accountability, and look forward to growing our bipartisan coalition supporting
this and other much-needed reforms,” she said.
Lawmakers
and the White House have previously condemned the assaults on campuses, but the
federal government has largely left responses up to college officials and the
local authorities. Congress last year passed the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act,
which requires that domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and
stalking cases be disclosed in annual campus crime statistics. But victims’
advocates say that does not go far enough.
And
a federal law from two decades ago that requires colleges and universities to
disclose information about crime on and around their campuses, including sexual
offenses, is rarely enforced, critics say.
There have been some
high-profile instances in which the Department of Education has gotten involved
in an effort to raise awareness by imposing fines at universities where the
most egregious cases have been reported.
Last
year, the agency fined Yale University $165,000 for failing to
disclose four sexual offenses involving force over several years. Eastern
Michigan University paid
$350,000 in 2008 for failing to sound a campus alert after a student was
sexually assaulted and killed. The department also reached a settlement last
year with the University of Montana at
Missoula after investigating the university’s sexual-misconduct policies
and finding them woefully inadequate.
Under Title IX of the
Education Amendments of 1972, universities that violate student rights in
sexual assault cases also risk the loss of federal funding, but the punishment
has never been applied.
In the recommended
“climate surveys,” participants anonymously report their experiences with unwanted
physical contact, sexual assault or rape, and how their schools responded. Some
lawmakers would like to see such surveys be mandatory and to possibly make
federal funds like Pell grants contingent on their being carried out.
Ms. Gillibrand and Senator
Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who both spent much of last year trying
to legislatively police sexual assault in the armed forces, have now turned
significant attention to such problems on the nation’s campuses.
“After
a year of working hard to reform how the military handles sexual assault
cases,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an email, “the stories I have heard from
students are eerily similar.”
Ms. McCaskill said she
planned to conduct her own survey of 350 colleges.
In all, nearly a dozen
senators seeking new federal funding to battle campus sexual assaults.
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