Our rock is the truth

October 24, 2018October 24, 2018

by Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director

It began with an email that several faculty members from a small liberal arts college shared with me. It was from their school’s Title IX Coordinator, shared with all faculty and staff of their school, informing them about the school’s mandatory reporting policy* for sexual violence. The pitch of the letter was pretty simple: “If you see something, YOU MUST REPORT. If you hear something, YOU MUST REPORT. If a student tells you something, YOU MUST REPORT.” That was the message to faculty and staff.

“Does this seem right to you?” they asked me.

***

One challenge with working in sexual violence advocacy in 2018 is that no matter what specific thing I’m trying to get done, 2018 just keeps happening. 2018 is the gift that won’t stop giving. As I processed my thoughts about that email and its injunctions, the backdrop was the brutal spectacle of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and the public treatment of the women who came forward with stories about their experiences with Kavanaugh’s sexual violence.

On the subject of reporting sexual violence, let me speak briefly about what has been done to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who truly had no good options. Her anonymous report to her congresswoman was leaked and ultimately reported by The Intercept; she came forward with her name only when it became clear to her that nothing meaningful would happen if she didn’t. She also came forward because she felt a responsibility to do so. She wanted to prevent further harm being done. In that latter quality, she reminds me of just about every survivor who has ever come to Into Account for help.

I saw that he had this job with kids and I knew he was going to hurt them.

I knew if I didn’t say something and he raped again, it would be on me.

I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else.

Ultimately, Ford testified in front of the Senate—and the American public—with far fewer legal and personal protections in place than would be tolerable in a courtroom, despite the attempts of her lawyers to secure them for her. And at the end of that, the Senate demonstrated how little they cared by burning through every chance for investigation and due process and confirming Kavanaugh anyway. The outcome she risked her life to prevent came to pass, and her life is still at risk.

Americans have endlessly debated her credibility. Her personal life has been made public. She receives hate mail and death threats, and at such a volume that she and her family have essentially been forced into hiding. Her story and her personhood have been cruelly mocked from pulpits, in news rooms, and most shamefully, by the sexual predator who currently occupies the Oval Office.

The collective laughter of vicious boys and men, the thing that Ford has testified most powerfully marked her trauma, is haunting all of us right now. My own survivor trauma involves such laughter. I was a child, and the boys who assaulted me were my age, not more than seven or eight. My memory is patchy and I have no clean narrative of these incidents. But I have clear memories of the laughter, of how amused they were by my anger and my efforts to fight them off. Indelible in the hippocampus.

***

Reporting doesn’t put a stop to the laughter. Ask Christine Blasey Ford. Ask some of our clients. Ask any woman who has gone public and then endured the taunting of men who debate the veracity of her story by assessing her perceived physical attractiveness.

There’s the laughter, and then there’s the outrage, the how dare she. Ford has been accused of ruining Kavanaugh’s life, of inventing her story to serve a nefarious political agenda. She’s been called a liar, but by the insidious abuser logic that grips so much of our public discourse, she’s also been accused of making too much out of a thing that may well have happened but that she should have gotten over. It didn’t happen, but if it did happen, it wasn’t a big deal. She’s a liar, but if she’s not a liar, she’s being oversensitive. Legions of conservative white women on social media endeavored to be offended by her on behalf of their boys and men, whose lives, they speculated, could be so easily ruined by conniving women like Dr. Ford. At the reeking floor of this cultural cesspit is the assertion that all boys do this, all men do this, and it’s the job of the rest of us to put up with it. If we can’t, there’s something wrong with us.

The day of Ford’s testimony, one of our former clients posted her story on social media, about her sexually abusive ex-boyfriend, whom she reported through a university Title IX process:

People I had always liked and admired, people I thought were decent and level headed, sided with my ex. I was “crazy”, “wanted to ruin his life”, and “why hadn’t I said anything earlier”?

It was devastating. I had been taken to the court of public opinion, then executed in the town square. Of course, some people did ask for my side of the story, and it was exhausting to have to retell and relive my personal hell over and over again. But I did it, I felt like I needed to.

So often, when we report, when we come forward, this is how it goes. Yet we’re told that we must report. The responsible thing to do is report. If we report, people can do something about it, and if we don’t report, we can’t blame people for doing nothing.

We’re told that it’s our responsibility to make people do something other than nothing. For that, we should be willing to risk being blamed for everything.

***

Which brings me back to that Title IX email. Which I hated.

It’s not that the policy itself was a surprise to me. I’m used to dealing with reporting policies like this, and they’re not the fault of the relatively inexperienced Title IX coordinator who wrote this email. She may well have had the fear of God put into her about the school’s vulnerability to lawsuits, should they not be able to prove that they are receptive to reports of campus sexual assault. At colleges and universities across the U.S., policies that require all personnel to report any suspected sexual violence to the school’s Title IX Coordinator have become standard. In defiance of the accumulated wisdom of professional victim advocacy in the fields of sexual, intimate partner, and domestic violence prevention, these policies require such reporting regardless of the actual wishes of victims.

I’ll put this in the starkest terms I can think of. Imagine you are a trusted faculty or staff member for a student who confides in you that her boyfriend is hitting her and raping her. She wants to leave him, but he’s threatened to kill her if she does. Like many abusers, he has isolated her from her friends and family, and she doesn’t know who she can trust. She’s terrified, and she needs to talk through her options with someone who can help her find resources without triggering an administrative process that she could lose control of.

This is a student whose life is in danger. This is a student who desperately needs help that doesn’t strip away her own agency or decision-making power. She likely knows better than anybody else what actions–her own or the school’s–might set off a fatal response from her abuser. This is a student that a lot of empathic women faculty have had in their offices. This is not an occasion for YOU MUST REPORT. It is unconscionable to ask a faculty or staff person sitting in front of such a student to make a choice between risking that student’s life and risking their own job.

Contrary to popular belief, federal law doesn’t technically require these blanket reporting policies. Reporting campus sexual violence involves two broad areas of relevant law: one is civil rights law (Title IX) and one is campus safety law (Clery Act). Title IX regulations require mandatory reporting from “responsible employees,” a category whose federal definition is so ambiguous as to almost be circular. The Clery Act requires it from “campus security authorities.” For a variety of reasons–the ambiguity in these categories, for instance, and the newly vast for-profit industry of products aimed at helping campuses achieve compliance with these federal laws–blanket mandatory reporting policies have become the default setting in higher education, even though they are not legally required.

I’ve read and heard many perspectives on these policies from people in academia. They aren’t popular policies with faculty, for instance. I have faculty friends who routinely receive reports of sexual or domestic violence and flat-out refuse to comply with the mandate to forward these reports to their Title IX office, because these faculty friends cannot in good conscience take away a victim’s agency and would rather risk their jobs. I’ve also heard multiple people–people who are probably less likely to receive reports of sexual violence–refer to these policies as a “sex panic.”

But this isn’t a sex panic. It’s a liability panic. From a legal perspective, blanket mandatory reporting policies at higher ed institutions make perfect sense. The most cynical interpretation, which I believe is operative on some level in pretty much every institution that has these policies, is that the policies help to legally absolve schools of responsibility for any sexual violence that isn’t officially reported, while at the same time making it less likely that survivors will talk about sexual violence at all.

YOU MUST REPORT. If you don’t, that says, you’re not our problem.

***

In the weeks after the client I quoted above went forward with her report of her abuser, the blowback against her was gut-wrenchingly awful. This is when my fortitude as an advocate is always tested: I see the suffering of our clients at the outcome of an action they’ve taken, and I fight off the temptation to fantasize about omnipotence. If I indulge that fantasy, then I can believe that there might have been an alternative I could have encouraged that would lead to justice without all the trauma. I wish I could learn how to be a better advocate from that fantasy, but I know I can’t.

I remember one particular phone conversation with this client and Into Account co-founder Jay Yoder. Jay recounted to her the mantra that carried Jay through a similarly grueling period of communal attacks. It went like this: What happened is real. What happened is true. I am standing on a rock, and that rock is the truth.

It’s this mantra I come back to when I sit in the pain of all my collected experiences and observations about what happens after survivors come forward, whether through formal processes or informal disclosure. There is all that pain, and then there is the reality that I still want survivors to speak, when they can. I still want survivors to come forward and say what has happened to them.

Because truth is a rock. That’s why. Not because I believe that individual survivors bear the responsibility to protect their communities from their perpetrators, or because I believe that the legal and bureaucratic processes available to survivors are truly designed to produce justice. It’s not because I believe I can save anyone from the re-traumatization that these processes so frequently deliver.

It’s because I’ve seen the power of the truth to heal. Lies may spread like wildfire, but truth is like a geological miracle. When survivors tell the truth about what happened to them, even as the flames burn around them, they’re standing on rocks that are expanding, searching, merging. Our rocks become a mountain range. We become summits, together.

I categorically refuse to concede the power inherent in the truth. I can’t control any community’s collective denial about its own sickness. But I can stand with you on your rock. I can bring you water. If you’re too tired to stand, or don’t have standing legs, we’ll sit. If you need to lie on the ground, we’ll lie on the ground. We’ll feel the solidity beneath us. We won’t know what comes next, but that’s okay. That’s the way of things.

What we will know, what I will remind you of when you need to hear it, is that all of our truths together have more power than we can fathom.

*What we call “mandatory reporting” at a college or university is materially different from mandatory reporting laws for child abuse. When you are a mandatory reporter as a result of a job that puts you in regular contact with children, you’re legally obligated to report any suspected child abuse to law enforcement, and failure to do so puts you at risk of arrest. When you’re a mandatory reporter at a college or university, you’re required to report any suspected sexual violence against a student to your school’s Title IX Coordinator, and failure to do so puts you at risk of losing your job.

Action Alert: Tell Goshen to Listen to Survivors

July 11, 2018July 11, 2018

Consecutive Abusive Soccer Coaches Demonstrate Goshen Must Invite Survivors to Share Experiences

Take Action!

Current and past members of the Goshen Women’s Soccer Team have shared their experiences of abuse headed up by two separate coaching teams – reports include sexual abuse, food and housing deprivation, financial deception and manipulation, and racist and homophobic verbal abuse. The abuse was enabled by a negligent, dismissive, and sexist response on the part of Athletic Department personnel and Human Resources. Misconduct reporting procedures were violated or ignored.

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Why Abuse Survivors Still Think Twice Before Telling their Stories: Retaliation At Goshen College

by Stephanie Krehbiel and Hilary Scarsella

ACTION ALERT: We’re asking folks to send email of support for survivors to Goshen College’s president and board. It can take a little as 30 seconds to amplify survivors’ voices.

Documentation:
Introduction to May 5 event from Anneliese Baer
Victim Impact Statement from Anneliese Baer
Victim Impact Statement from Rachel Stoltzfus
Update Statement from Erin Bergen (July 2018)
Goshen Signed Resolution Agreement with U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights
Facebook Live Stream video of statements by Anneliese Baer and Rachel Stoltzfus, recorded at Goshen College, May 5, 2018

“There are many survivors who would like to be present today, but are restricted by time, financial burden, and the ever-present weight of Goshen College’s past inaction and silence surrounding our abuse. Let us not forget the voices that are not present today, and the implications of who has the most access to this space. As we take in these stories, remember that this meeting is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening after 6 years of constant silencing, and that affects how the information is presented today.”
–Anneliese Baer, May 5, 2018, Goshen College

On May 5, two courageous women who were abused in the Goshen College women’s soccer program, Rachel Stoltzfus and Anneliese Baer, spoke on the Goshen College campus about their experiences. Their stories included testimony about sexual harassment, racial misconduct, homophobia, stalking, financial manipulation, emotional abuse, housing and food deprivation, and life-threatening physical conditions. The stories began with the 2011-2012 school year, spanned the tenure of two different coaching teams, and implicated multiple current and former members of the Goshen administration and Athletic Department. Rachel and Anneliese spoke in front of Goshen President Rebecca Stoltzfus, a select group of students, the president’s cabinet, and other invited members of the larger Goshen community.

At the behest of other victims of abuse in the Goshen athletic department who could not be present or were legitimately fearful of retaliation if they showed up at the May 5 meeting, Anneliese and Rachel made their statements accessible to fellow victims and their supporters through a public Facebook Live video. In the time since that meeting, a number of Goshen leaders have tried to discredit the survivors who spoke, focusing on their decision to do so publicly. These survivors agreed to a physical meeting with a restricted guest list, but contrary to some of the recent assertions made by administrators and Goshen board members, there was never any agreement about containing these victim impact statements behind closed doors. Accusing these women of wrongdoing for publicly streaming their own words has operated as a convenient pressure valve for an administration that is clearly facing the heat from multiple directions.

We are sympathetic to the pressures administrators and board members face when confronted with the failure of their institution to adequately respond to abuse, but managing such pressures is well within the job description for administrators, and well within the expected commitments for board members. These women are not asking Goshen leaders to do anything but their jobs, and even that request, they make at great personal risk to themselves. It’s the responsibility of Goshen’s board and administrators to negotiate the difficult dynamics of their positions without passing the burden of that difficulty on to survivors calling the college to account for abuse they experienced at Goshen as students.

One of the most harmful things a college president can do, after revelations of systemic abuse in an athletic department, is to attack the integrity of survivor whistleblowers in front of all the students and personnel in that same department. When administrators and boards try to take pressure off of themselves by criticizing victims, the only people who really benefit, ultimately, are abusers.

And yes, that has already happened at Goshen, since May 5.

Survivors’ fears of retaliation have not been unfounded. As Into Account has continued to work with survivors at Goshen, they have brought us extensive documentation and evidence of recent retaliation. Due to confidentiality and our concerns about further retaliation, we are not sharing all the details we have at this point. However, it is our confident opinion that Goshen administration and Board of Directors share responsibility for responding to abuse revelations and May 5 victim impact statements with tactics that have fomented further abuse against current students.

On a related note, Goshen College is currently in a mandatory agreement with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, due to multiple failures in Goshen’s Title IX protections against sexual harassment. Those failures were found by OCR investigators after our client, Erin Bergen, filed a federal complaint against Goshen for mishandling her own case of sexual assault.

Title IX forbids retaliation against students who report abuse. Title IX also demands that schools take preventive action to protect students from hostile environments. Since May 5, in our opinion, Goshen has already failed on both counts. Those failures have caused terrible harm in individual lives. Furthermore, these failures are undermining what we had dearly hoped was some concrete progress in Goshen’s approach to race and sex discrimination.

As victim advocates representing current and former students who have experienced both, we are in the difficult position of receiving multiple reassurances from Goshen officials that we feel unable to trust, due to duplicitous actions that have intimidated and retraumatized our clients.

Not only are administrative attacks on victims unethical, immoral, and frequently illegal, they are also ultimately self-defeating. The past fifteen years of revelations about sexual assault cover-ups and high-profile administrative resignations at colleges and universities across the country should have taught this to all of us by now. The repressive tactics that worked for previous generations of leaders in higher education do not work any more. Social media is a large part of the reason why.

As of today, that Facebook live video of victim impact statements delivered to Goshen on May 5 has received nearly 3500 views. For a school as small as Goshen, that is a lot of views. There will be more. And these will not be the last Goshen survivors to come forward on social media and say #metoo.

Goshen owes these women. We need to be clear about that: the debt is flowing in one direction. There are far more victims from these soccer teams than those who spoke on May 5, and Goshen can never begin to repay them what they are owed. We are not going to entertain talk of our clients owing yet more gratitude to Goshen leaders for their willingness to listen to stories of abuse that happened in the recent past at Goshen. These women have been more than courteous. They deserve far better than to be treated like naughty children by officials from a school that is still struggling to meet minimal compliance standards related to the kinds of abuse that they suffered.

Survivors use social media because social media is the best way to reach other survivors. With the international #metoo movement, this is more the case than ever before. Social media allows us to organize while at the same time protecting us–albeit imperfectly–from physical and psychological peril. It gives us tools to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics we encounter from institutions. Survivors’ power is amplified through the people that we reach with our stories.

And thus, when college officials decry survivors’ use of social media, it’s time to pay extra attention to the content of what has been posted. To that end, we’re sharing the Facebook live video here, as well as printed versions of Anneliese’s and Rachel’s comments from the video.

We’re going to keep sharing their words. Into Account makes no apology for our role in disseminating their stories. Goshen cannot afford to attack these women; the news they carry is too important. When student athletes make up half of the student body, and when the bulk of recruiting of students of color happens through the athletic department, nothing is more important than making sure that the leaders and coaches of that department are people whose first priority is the health and safety of students. Not administrators’ egos. Not institutional reputation. Not fundraising goals. Right now, holding the health and safety of students as the first priority means practicing nondefensive solidarity with those who are asking for accountability, apology, and change.

To quote the refrain of thousands of wise activists over many years of struggle: People are more important than institutions. We understand the loyalty that can lead people to want to believe the best of their alma maters, particularly when they had good experiences there themselves, or know people who work there and work hard. But a college that builds its economic survival on the backs of abused students is undeserving of such loyalty. If you want the colleges and universities that you love to survive in a way that is worthy of your support, hold them to these high standards. Anything less is a betrayal of your trust.

ACTION ALERT: We’re asking folks to send email of support for survivors to Goshen College’s president and board. It can take a little as 30 seconds to amplify survivors’ voices.

Let’s Have a Locker Room Talk

January 31, 2018February 1, 2018

by Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director

Exposing the Abusive Underbelly of College Athletic Departments

Last week, ESPN’s Outside the Lines did an investigative story on the culture of secrecy and self-protection around sexual abuse in the Michigan State University athletic department. While the story’s impetus was the heinous serial sexual abuse committed by physician Larry Nassar, much of it on the Michigan State campus, ESPN’s reporters found a widespread pattern of concealing sexual violence in the MSU athletic department. Among the many discoveries they made, one was the degree to which the athletic department contained and managed reports of sexual violence, without accountability from the rest of the university.

The insularity and secrecy that ESPN found at MSU is more common than we’d like to think. At Into Account, we work with athletes from departments at small, religious liberal arts schools who tell us versions of the same story: secrecy, insularity, and complaints of serious abuse being handled, or simply minimized and ignored, by unqualified athletic department personnel.

Public conversations about sexual assault and college athletics tend to focus on student athletes as perpetrators. What the Nassar trial has made apparent, however, is that abuse is systemic in athletic departments. When student athletes perpetrate abuse, it’s a symptom of a wider university and athletic culture. To address the problem in full, we also have to turn our attention to abuse as it is perpetrated and enabled by coaches, trainers, team doctors, and administrators.

Size Matters: But Not in the Way You Might Think

At large universities, athletics are big business, full of mass pageantry and ritualized playgrounds for the wealthy. (A fragile big business, though; most “Power Five” conference athletic departments are just breaking even, or operating at a loss.) At many small liberal arts colleges, however, athletic departments have a more direct relationship with the lifeblood of their colleges: they function as recruitment machines, and without them, some colleges wouldn’t have high enough enrollment numbers to stay open.

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Better Reporting for Bethel: Student Leaders Discuss Their Resolution to Promote Callisto

November 28, 2017November 28, 2017

For too many college victims, reporting an assault to campus authorities is a scary, obstacle-laden process. At small colleges, where it can seem like everyone knows everyone, reporting can be particularly fraught.

What if, for instance, your rapist is related to the Title IX Coordinator? (Yes, unfortunately, we’ve seen that.) What if someone on the investigative committee goes to your church? What if your abuser has threatened to retaliate if you tell anyone? What if your abuser is popular and has lots of friends? What if your college has a real “we’re all one big happy family” vibe going on and you’re worried you’ll be punished for raining on the parade with your rape story?

Most victims don’t report. At big schools and small schools alike, that’s still the reality.

There’s no reporting system that is a panacea for these problems. But the best online system we’ve seen so far, in terms of its sensitivity to the reporting issues faced by survivors, is Callisto, a platform designed by sexual violence survivors in the tech industry. Callisto does several important things that other systems do not. For instance, Callisto allows victims to make time-stamped reports of their assaults that they can wait to submit until they are ready—a feature that is particularly useful for victims fearing retaliation. They can also choose to submit their report only on the condition that another person names the same perpetrator. Reports can be anonymous. (Watch Callisto’s founder, Jessica Ladd, describe the system in this Ted Talk.)

Callisto has only been around since the 2015-2016 school year, but at the thirteen colleges where it has been adopted, the results are astounding. In the 2016-2017 school year, survivors who used the system were five times more likely to report their assaults than survivors who did not. Ninety-seven percent of Callisto’s users say they would recommend it to other survivors. Even during the pilot year of the project, when they worked with only two colleges, the sexual assault reports on those campuses quadrupled. (That’s a good thing, by the way. It doesn’t mean that the rate of assaults is increasing; it means that there’s a reporting system in place that victims are finding more approachable.)

On October 29, the Student Government Association of Bethel College (North Newton, Kansas) unanimously passed a resolution in support of Bethel adopting Callisto as its online reporting system for sexual violence. Into Account spoke with Kiley Varney, a senior biology major and the Bethel student body president, and Rebecca Schrag, a junior graphic design major, student government representative, and president of Bethel’s feminist collective Femcore, about the reasons for the resolution, and the current state of sexual violence reporting and education at Bethel.

If you’re part of the greater Bethel community–an alum, faculty or staff member, parent, and/or donor–Bethel students need your help right now. There’s one simple thing you can do to help student government bring Callisto to Bethel: Go to the Callisto website and fill out the form entitled “Bring Callisto to Your School.” You can fill this out as a student, alum, parent, staff/faculty/administrator, or “other.” Let Callisto know you’d like to see them at Bethel. And watch this space: we may have more actions related to Bethel and Callisto for you to take in the coming months.

If you’d like to advocate for Callisto at another school you’re connected to, you can also fill out the form for that school. Student activists interested in Callisto can download Callisto’s activist toolkit. Contact us here at Into Account if you need help getting started.

Into Account: Tell us about the reporting system that Bethel has right now. What options do students have for reporting? What are the issues with that system?

Varney: Bethel currently has a platform via our online campus infrastructure (ThresherConnect) that allows students to report student life-related concerns. When a student fills out this form, there is space for them to describe the event they are reporting as well as a space to describe their desired outcome of the situation. There is space for students to fill out their name and contact information if they wish to, but this section is optional.

I see a few problems with this system.

First, the form is called a “Student Life Concern Form”. This wording does not make it clear that the system can be used to report issues of sexual violence. Nowhere on the form does it explicitly say that it can be used to report sexual violence cases either. Even though this system is set up to handle reports of sexual violence, it is also used for a variety of other things such as roommate issues. The form even includes specific instructions for what to do if the concern is related to a class/professor. If a student were going to use this form to report a case of sexual violence but then saw these instructions for reports about a class, they might be deterred from reporting, for fear that this would not be the right place to do so.

Second, when a student does submit a concern via this system, it is unclear what happens to the information afterward. Based on the information given on this platform, a student would not know who their report got sent to and whether or not the information would be kept confidential. Not knowing who would see a report and what actions would be taken because of it might keep someone from reporting a case of sexual violence.

The third problem I see with this system is that a large number of students on our campus do not know that it exists. If students do know that it exists, they may not know that it exists to serve as a reporting system for issues of sexual violence among other issues on our campus. The system is not well-advertised a place to report sexual violence cases. Sexual violence is an issue that deserves its own reporting system that is separate from other student life concerns, and students should be better informed of what the system is for and how to use it.

Into Account: What are some of your biggest concerns about sexual violence on the Bethel campus?

Varney: My biggest concerns would be: 1) we don’t have an adequate reporting system, and 2) we do not do enough to educate students on issues of sexual violence and how to prevent them and report them. I am pleased with some of the work being done at Bethel to provide resources for survivors. We have a local organization called SafeHope with trained professionals that come to campus once a week and provide a space for people to talk about things that have happened to them or someone they know even if the occurrence was a long time ago. We also have a licensed counselor on campus that can provide regular counseling services to students. We are making progress in providing these services to survivors, but there is still more that can be done to improve education, awareness, and resources available to students.

Into Account: Tell us about your interest in getting the Callisto reporting system. How did the student government association get involved in promoting Callisto at Bethel? What led to your resolution? What are you hoping for?

Varney: This summer, I was informed about Project Callisto by Dwight Krehbiel (Professor of Psychology at Bethel, father of Stephanie Krehbiel, Into Account’s Co-Founder/Executive Director). Dwight also introduced me to two community members who are willing to put forth resources to help implement Callisto at Bethel. I learned about what the Callisto is and brought it to the entire student government to discuss.

At first, I was hesitant for SGA to support Callisto because of its high cost. It seemed like there would be better ways to use the money that the community members were willing to put forth to implement multiple educational/awareness tools and resources for students regarding sexual violence, instead of spending it all on a reporting system. After discussing these concerns at length with the Senate and seeing that many Senate members felt that Callisto would be worth the money and worth our support, I wrote a resolution that established official SGA support. The resolution, which states that SGA officially supports the college to pursue the implementation of Callisto, was passed by the Senate a few weeks ago.

With the passage of this resolution, we hope to continue to be in contact with everyone involved in influencing the College to implement Callisto. We have also reached out to the Title IX Coordinator and hope to meet with her and possibly other members of the committee after the new year to discuss Callisto as well as SGA’s other goal of implementing Bystander Training on campus. The resolution establishes SGA’s support (and by extension, the student body’s support) for the College to actively pursue Callisto, and we hope that that support will have a lot of influence on those making decisions about the implementation of Callisto. The resolution also lays the foundation for SGA members to continue to encourage the implementation of Callisto in whatever ways we may see necessary in the future.

Schrag: What I really love about Callisto is its emphasis to empower survivors of sexual violence. It would help resolve issues that our reporting system currently faces by giving victims options and support as well as a match system that safely connects victims of the same perpetrator together to validate each other’s experience and take action.

Into Account: Besides a better reporting system, what kinds of changes would you like to see in the way that Bethel approaches sexual violence?

Varney: I think that education about sexual violence and issues surrounding it can be improved. SGA is actively working on trying to bring Bystander Training to our campus. Bystander Training would be a great start to educating people about situations of sexual violence and how to intervene when they see dangerous or potentially dangerous interactions occurring. I would like to see Bystander Training implemented by next fall, and I hope that more education and awareness programs, as well as more availability to resources for survivors can be increased in the future too.

Schrag: I would like to see Bethel prioritizing these issues more. Last year, Bethel released a video spreading awareness of sexual violence and assault that specifically college students face. It was a step forward for Bethel to be aware that we have a problem but now it is time for us to create programs that combat this epidemic.

Jay’s Story (Education is Power, Part III)

October 23, 2017October 23, 2017

whistleblower ETHICSLINE When I sketched out the shape of our Education is Power series, I envisioned a three-part release of informative articles that could help people understand what is at stake for sexual violence survivors in an attack on Title IX. That was back in July. I had it planned out so neatly. And then the news kept coming, and between keeping on top of the news, responding to an increase in communication from survivors, and answering lots of questions from concerned people in our communities, it was hard to know where to focus my Title IX-related energy.

Hilary, Jay, and I have had a lot of conversations in the past three months about our personal investments in what’s happening with Title IX. All three of us have had experiences with campus sexual assault or harassment. A previous installment of this series described the result of one of Jay’s experiences: a successful Office of Civil Rights complaint that, in 2004, changed the standard of evidence in Title IX hearings at The Ohio State University, from “clear and convincing” to “preponderance of the evidence.”

(Civil rights cases are generally tried on the preponderance standard, and Title IX is civil rights legislation. Using the “clear and convincing” standard effectively treats the complainants in sex-based discrimination claims as less credible than complainants in other civil rights-related cases; see part II of this series for more background on this.)

When Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced on September 22 that the ED was rescinding the guidance in the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, she took aim specifically at the preponderance standard. Her clear intent is to undo what a succession of survivors, advocates, and lawyers spent the early 2000s fighting to achieve: the uniform use of the preponderance standard in Title IX hearings.

The new guidelines give schools the option of choosing the “clear and convincing” standard. Again, this is the standard that the courts had already established, through years of precedent, to be too high to ensure the equal educational access guaranteed in the Higher Education Act.

I know that all this talk about standards of proof can make the eyes glaze over, particularly for those of us who aren’t lawyers. DeVos and her supporters have exploited that confusion. But the core issue at stake in this debate about evidentiary standards is whether people who claim to be sexually assaulted and/or harassed deserve a fair hearing, one that isn’t biased in favor of the person or persons they’re accusing. If we choose to believe that sexual violence claims are inherently lacking in credibility (and many people do believe this), we’re easier to sway towards a standard that puts a higher burden of proof on accusers than it does on the accused. But that isn’t consistent with what we know about sexual assault accusations, and it certainly isn’t how civil rights law is meant to be enforced.

Which is why we suspected, from the outset, that this whole mess would hit the courts before long. (And as of last week, it has, in a suit filed by the same civil rights lawyer who represented Jay in 2003-2004. I expect more such suits in the future.)

We decided to issue a moral challenge to the higher education administrators we know best: the ones who run Mennonite colleges, universities, and seminaries. We published an open letter to those administrators on October 6, in the denominational magazine of Mennonite Church USA (The Mennonite), asking them to publicly commit to maintaining the preponderance standard in their Title IX hearings. The Mennonite’s editor, Hannah Heinzekehr, seized on the opportunity to ask for responses from all the schools we addressed. You can read those responses here.

I interviewed Into Account Co-founder Jay Yoder about their Title IX experience in 2003-2004, and how they feel about that experience in light of what’s happening now. The first part of that interview, in Jay’s words, is below. (Content warning for general descriptions of sexual assault.)

–Stephanie Krehbiel

Jay: For me personally, for Betsy DeVos to take back this guidance that was issued in 2011, as if the guidance issued in 2011 was new information that she could just take back–it was really offensive. For a long time, there has been movement of people bringing attention to sexual violence on college campuses. When I was at Goshen College, I had at least three friends who were sexually assaulted, off-campus and on-campus. They had difficulty reporting, because alcohol was involved in one way or another. Goshen had a longstanding practice of getting students in trouble for drinking alcohol when they reported sexual assault. So often the girl would get in trouble for drinking alcohol, and the guy wouldn’t get in trouble. So for reporting her rape, her reward is to be disciplined by the college. For decades, we’ve been working on–as more and more women attend college–and right now I think we’re at the point where more women are seeking higher ed than men–how do we integrate women into what was originally men’s educational opportunity? All of that is to say, there’s been a movement in place for a long time.

I participated in Take Back the Night at Goshen, which is an event bringing attention to sexual violence on college campuses. I led and put together a Take Back the Night movement for several years at Ohio State. Thousands of people attended those events. Then, way back then, in the early 2000s, some of us survivors were talking to each other, exchanging resources, trying to figure out how we could continue our college educations when the people who had raped us were at the same schools with us, oftentimes in the same programs as us. How could we get the education we needed to get when we were faced with our perpetrators, and/or their friends and enablers, or the professors who had enabled them, on a daily basis? When we were just trying to get our degree?

So there were two big cases when I was at Ohio State: mine, and another woman who I will call Jane Doe. Shout out to my friend Jane Doe. A student raped her, and he had been moved to her dorm because he had raped someone else in another dorm before hers. After that he was moved to off-campus student housing. So he had raped multiple people on campus, and was just being shifted around from one housing situation to another. You can see how that would be a Title IX violation, right? How are you having safe access to education when there’s a repeat rapist moving around from housing situation to housing situation? So she pursued a Clery Act complaint. She also sued the university for putting her in danger. I’m calling her Jane Doe because her information can’t be disclosed; part of her settlement was a non-disclosure agreement.

Almost right away when I transferred to Ohio State, one of the few people I knew there was this young Mennonite man who I went to high school with. I didn’t have the greatest high school experience. I was a young, queer person in a tiny, Mennonite-majority town. It’s not that he and I were close friends, but he was one of the only people I knew at Ohio State. He kept pushing alcohol on me one night. I kept trying to say no thank you, like a good Mennonite, but he kept pushing it into my hand, that kind of thing. And then he raped me. I didn’t know how to get home from the place where I was; he walked me home and raped me in my own apartment. It was a former hotel room, a very tiny room that I then continued to live in for the rest of the year.

So it was a really difficult experience. I had lived in this tiny little town, Archbold, and then I moved to Goshen–not much bigger. And then I went to Columbus, Ohio, and Ohio State, and a campus of 50,000. This young man was in my program, too. I was a music major at the time. It made life really complicated.

I got a rape kit, which is a terrible name for it–we can talk about that another time. And I went to the advocate–there was an advocate on staff at Ohio State. She listened to me and gave me my options, and I decided to both pursue a rape report to the police and go through the campus judicial system, so that I could go through my degree without having to be in multiple classes with this person.

So I went through the hearing. It was a really difficult process. They found him in violation of providing me with–at his count–sixteen alcoholic beverages over the course of the night. It was more than I had even counted, because I couldn’t remember. They did not find him in violation of the rules on sexual assault. They agreed that I had consumed at least portions of sixteen alcoholic beverages, and that I had then consented to sexual activity. That was pretty devastating to me. I struggled with, how are these people sleeping at night, what kind of training did they have and why isn’t this system working the way it’s supposed to work? And a lot of things were at play that we always talk about. Caring more about “ruining a young man’s future,” than the impact on the life of the person who was assaulted, that kind of thing.

Jane Doe, who had filed the Clery Act complaint, connected me to Daniel Carter, whose name you’ll see a lot in articles about what Betsy DeVos is doing to give rights to accused individuals that accusers do not have. He was at the Clery Center at the time. He’s been instrumental in writing legislation, he’s been in the campus safety movement for a long time, and he’s a really well-respected advocate. He connected me with Wendy Murphy, a civil rights attorney. She had recently helped students at Harvard file a complaint about the evidence standard, and she assisted me in filing a complaint about the evidence standard.

I remember talking to Wendy Murphy at one point in a stairwell of an OSU building between classes. She told me, “You’re legally allowed to do this, and they’re not legally allowed to retaliate against you, but I’ve seen it over and over. You could get kicked out. You’re putting your college education at stake. I just want you to know that, when you make this decision.”

It was important enough to me that no one else go through the pain that I went through. Because of the complaint that I filed, it was so much more likely that a Title IX panel would feel empowered to find someone in violation of the policy [on sexual assault], based on the preponderance of the evidence: it’s more likely that it happened than that it did not happen. Which is different from the “clear and convincing” standard, which is the one in between preponderance and the standard that we’re all familiar with from criminal courts, “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

It’s about education access and safety. It’s not a criminal hearing. Everyone who’s talking about it now doesn’t seem to understand that. This isn’t a criminal process that puts someone in jail; this is a process that makes sure that people who have survived violence have access to education, and are not forced to interact with their perpetrators constantly while trying to recover and go to college. So I made the choice to file the complaint. I got really involved in campus anti-rape activism, and sat on a panel to revise the code of conduct. We were ultimately successful in our civil rights complaint with the OCR, and OSU agreed to change the standard of evidence.

Again, this was 2003, and until 2004. We’re under George W. Bush. This is not an aggressive “using identity politics and civil rights to change everything for men” situation, this is a totally standard, normal decision, one that the Office of Civil Rights continued to make consistently, from that Harvard decision, to mine; survivors across the country kept filing these complaints, and one by one schools were changing their standards of evidence to come into compliance with federal law. And then the Office of Civil Rights issues this guidance in 2011 that says, essentially, “hey, reminder: rather than doing this one by one, let’s just tell all of you at once: time to change your standard of evidence to preponderance of the evidence.”

I don’t think I can express–I put my my college education at risk, I struggled through literal blood, sweat, tears, pain, chaos; I took a semester off of classes; this took up all of my time.

It was a really important time in my life, and I feel that the best thing that came out of it–I knew that survivors at Ohio State were better off because of what I sacrificed. And to watch her take it away, I can’t express how painful and infuriating it is. Having not ever achieved any justice in my personal case, I get asked all the time, was it worth it? Would I do it again? It’s been one of my personal rocks, that I did everything that I could do. I may not have gotten justice for myself, but I fought back as much as I could fight back and I made things better for the people after me. And with a stroke of her pen, she can just take it away. She has no idea what she’s doing.

To pretend that it’s somehow undoing “Obama activism” is just ignoring history. That’s not what happened. The Office of Civil Rights under George W. Bush repeatedly held up the same standard. To say that now schools can do whatever they want, it’s turning back the clock to before schools understood what was expected of them under federal law. And changing the expectations at the same time.

So yeah, it’s really personally painful for me. It’s really hard to watch. And I know it is for all the survivors and advocates who have worked so hard. We’re the ones who enforced those federal expectations. Things like the Clery Act, the Campus SAVE Act, and Title IX, they’re passed, they’re written into law, and they’re not funded. It’s not like they fund a huge staff of people that then scatter all over the nation and make sure that everyone’s in compliance. It’s a backwards enforcing model, where schools do the wrong thing, and then survivors and advocates step up and say, no, you’re not following the law. And then they ask someone to come in and investigate.

So the people who have been enforcing this are survivors and advocates, who alert investigators to schools that aren’t following the guidelines. DeVos just undid decades of work, with no understanding of the process.

(To be continued)

An Open Letter to Administrators

October 22, 2017

On October 5, Into Account’s staff sent the following letter to the administrators of U.S. Mennonite colleges, universities, and seminaries. The list of schools includes our personal alma maters, as well as schools attended by some of the survivors for whom we have advocated (both publicly and privately). The Mennonite, the denominational publication for Mennonite Church USA, published the letter on their website the next day, and solicited responses from the recipients. All of the schools that received the letter responded. You can read their comments here.

October 5, 2017

An Open Letter to the Presidents and Title IX Officials of Bethel College, Goshen College, Hesston College, Bluffton University, Eastern Mennonite University, and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

Dear Educators,

On September 22, the U.S. Department of Education announced the decision to rescind the Title IX guidance in the 2011 “Dear Colleague” Letter, issuing interim guidelines in its place. As advocates and survivors, we have watched these changes unfold with grave concern.

We recognize that this action has produced a great deal of confusion, frustration, and anxiety for school officials. Perhaps, like us, you are concerned about the harm that these actions will likely cause to your students. You may well be frustrated by the lack of clarity in popular media coverage. We know that the interim guidelines have created uncertainty over what, if any, actions you should be currently be taking, and what you should expect from the Department of Education in the future. We understand that these are trying times to be in your positions.

While there are many issues in the interim guidelines that we could address, our purpose with this letter is simple: We respectfully ask that you continue to employ the “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof in Title IX hearings at your schools.

Much of the current media coverage perpetuates the false notion that Title IX hearings are equivalent to criminal trials, and that their verdicts are similarly consequential in the lives of accused individuals. But the role of Title IX is to make the privileges of education accessible to those who are subject to discrimination in the form of gendered harassment and violence. It cannot, and should not, put anyone behind bars. For it to be effective and fair, it needs to operate under the same evidentiary standards that are used in other civil rights complaints (the preponderance of evidence standard).

Many Anabaptist schools have a faith-informed tradition of speaking truth to the power of the federal government when that power threatens the vulnerable. Anabaptist schools are also known for striving to maintain a Christian commitment to welcoming and offering refuge to those who are unjustly harmed or marginalized. Title IX ’s strongest and most ethical interpretations combine community-based accountability measures with rigorous protections for those who are at risk of victimization. We see this as is a moment of opportunity for you. In tangible ways, the federal government is attacking some of your most vulnerable students. This is a chance to show that you stand with them in both word and action, and it’s important that you do.

The new guidelines give you the option of moving to a higher standard of evidence, “clear and convincing.” Doing so would effectively remove freedom from sexual violence as a protected civil right for your students, because the nature of sexual violence is such that this kind of evidence hardly ever exists. The student populations most negatively affected by such an action are likely to be those who face the most educational access barriers and who are already most vulnerable to sexual violence: students of color, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, international students, undocumented students, childhood sexual abuse survivors, and women. And of course, these are not discrete groups. They overlap and intersect, and students who occupy those intersections are already at a disadvantage when it comes to navigating educational systems not intentionally designed with their social locations in mind.

For all the media attention devoted to the dramatic increase in Title IX complaints under the Obama administration, we know that the majority of campus sexual violence victims do not report their experiences to campus authorities or law enforcement. Because Title IX is enforced through victim complaints, the burden of its success already falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the most vulnerable members of a campus community. Secretary DeVos has repeatedly stated her concern for campus sexual violence survivors, but those reassurances are belied by actions that pull resources away from schools.

DeVos has largely succeeded in spreading the perception that Title IX protections have enabled a widespread problem of false accusations and have victimized scores of young men who are wrongly disciplined by their schools for offenses they did not commit. The existing data shows again and again that the kind of false accusation that DeVos is portraying as common–women claiming that a consensual sexual encounter was rape–is extremely rare, and it is rarer still for such an accuser to pursue the matter with authorities.[1] The anecdotes that DeVos and her colleagues have relied upon to spread this perception are almost all taken from Title IX cases in which the Obama-era guidelines were not adequately followed. The procedural issues in these cases could likely have been prevented by closer adherence to the 2011 guidelines.

Title IX needs care and investment in order to be just and equitable, not deconstruction.

By any existing standard of evidence, sexual violence is a notoriously difficult offense to prove. Intimidation, humiliation, and toxic masculinity frequently succeed in keeping victims of all genders from seeking justice when they are violated sexually.

We fear a far more realistic scenario than the floods of false accusations that DeVos and her supporters are claiming. Changing the evidentiary standard to “clear and convincing” will almost certainly cut down on the overall numbers of survivors who are willing to make TItle IX complaints related to sexual violence and harassment that they have, in fact, experienced; it will also make it less likely, in reports that are made, that those who commit sexual violence face any real consequences for what they have done. A Title IX enforcement system with an evidentiary standard that is too high to recognize the majority of sexual offenses runs a high risk of inadvertently teaching those individuals who commit such offenses how to do so more skillfully and less visibly. It allows them even more opportunities to successfully deploy the arsenal of behaviors that sex offenders use to keep their victims silent.

Shaming and discrediting one’s victims, targeting vulnerable populations; grooming one’s community through charm, manipulation, and displays of virtue: these are learned skills, and frighteningly common ones among perpetrators in faith communities. They are particularly horrifying skills to encounter in young people, but those who work with offenders will tell you readily that youth is when such behaviors are most easily changed. It is depressingly difficult to alter the behavior of a person who has been getting away with sexual violence for decades. In offenders who are the age of the majority of your students, the opportunities for transformation are far greater. But only if those behaviors are truly recognized for what they are: violent, destructive, and intolerable.

Anabaptist colleges have an opportunity to lead the way in ethically and faithfully addressing this violence by maintaining the preponderance of the evidence standard. We have written you this letter in a spirit of sincerity and hope. We ask you to publicly commit to the preponderance standard, and to speak openly to your communities about the principles of just faithfulness that require that commitment.

Should you need further resources or counsel as you make this decision, we welcome hearing from you.

With care for your campus, your students, and the road ahead of you,

Stephanie Krehbiel, Ph.D.
Executive Director and Co-Founder, Into Account, Inc.
Bethel College 1994-98

Hilary Jerome Scarsella, M.Div.
Director of Theological Integrity, Into Account, Inc.
AMBS 2008-12

Jennifer Yoder
Advisory Committee Chair and Co-Founder, Into Account, Inc.
Goshen College 2001-2003

[1] For those interested in a thorough review and assessment of existing studies, including a 10-year study of college rape reports, we suggest this 2010 report in the journal Violence Against Women: “False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases.” https://icdv.idaho.gov/conference/handouts/False-Allegations.pdf

Title IX, Due Process, Standards of Proof, and…what was the question again? (Education is Power, Part II)

September 12, 2017September 27, 20172 Comments

by Stephanie Krehbiel

(Read Part One of this series here.)

There’s one question I hear again and again when I’m talking to people about Title IX and sexual violence: Why are schools involved in this at all? Sexual assault is a crime, so why not leave it solely in the hands of the police?

I never know how to respond to that specific question without launching into the much broader question that is at the heart of my answer. Which is the following: Who do you believe deserves to get an education? And what do you believe that we, as a society, should be doing to make that happen?

So in service to my larger question, here’s the short version of an answer to my opening one: The purpose of Title IX is to ensure equal opportunity access to education. The presence of sexual violence in the lives of students is an impediment to that access. Title IX proceedings do not serve the same purpose as criminal courts. A verdict in a Title IX hearing cannot create a criminal record, or send a person to jail. A criminal verdict in the courts cannot take the place of measures that are designed to protect the civil rights of students.

And here’s an addendum to the short answer: The accuser in a Title IX hearing can also pursue a criminal case, or not. The complexities of concurrent Title IX and criminal investigations are many, but again, the purpose of Title IX is not to replace the criminal justice system.

Now for the longer answer, and eventually, the bigger question.

The false notion that Title IX hearings are somehow equivalent to criminal court proceedings is clouding the public debate about how to enforce Title IX at the federal level. Furthermore, this conflation has helped Trump-appointed Department of Education (DOE) officials to propagate the idea their Obama-era predecessors were engaging in systemic intimidation of college officials and promoting violations of due process, and to suggest that this happened to the overwhelming detriment of students who are accused of sexual assault.

Much of this alleged federal overreach is attributed to the enforcement of the guidance in the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter (see part 1 of this series for a more detailed description of that letter). Last Thursday, at a speech at George Mason University, DOE Secretary Betsy DeVos announced her intention to rescind the Obama-era guidance, proclaiming the current system to be “failed,” and claiming that the Obama Administration “weaponized” the Department of Education against schools. In so doing, she took specific aim at the “preponderance of evidence” standard used in Title IX hearings, suggesting that the standard unfairly favors accusers over the accused. (Here’s a quick primer on legal standards of proof.)

Into Account’s co-founder, Jennifer (Jay) Yoder, was part of an Office of Civil Rights complaint against The Ohio State University in the early 2000s, a complaint that successfully shifted the university’s Title IX process to the “preponderance of evidence” standard. Jay’s case was one of a series of similar high-profile university cases that led to the DOE’s increased attention to evidence standards. S. Daniel Carter, a campus security expert who advocated for Jay in her Ohio State case and consulted with the Obama DOE on the 2011 guidelines, points out that the “preponderance” standard has been required by the Office of Civil Rights for decades. The Obama administration did not impose the standard on Title IX sexual violence hearings, but rather stepped up enforcement after it became increasingly clear that many schools were using a standard more appropriate to criminal trials.

Why is the “preponderance” standard more appropriate in Title IX hearings? Carter puts it this way:

By its nature, a finding by more than 50% of the evidence, this is the standard that is the closest possible to treating the accuser and accused equally, and has long been upheld by courts that have evaluated the due process protections of educational conduct proceedings which aren’t criminal proceedings. It has also long been the industry standard for student conduct cases.

Likewise, Laura Dunn, director of the D.C. legal nonprofit Survjustice, also argued for the preponderance standard in an August 3 New York Times editorial, co-written with Missoula author Jon Krakauer. Dunn and Krakauer reminded readers that the newly-maligned preponderance standard is the same standard that accused students receive when they appeal Title IX rulings in civil courts:

“Preponderance of evidence” is the burden of proof used in almost all civil lawsuits, even those seeking compensation after violent crimes. Indeed, it’s the standard used in civil courts when male students expelled for sexual misconduct sue their schools under Title IX, alleging reverse gender discrimination. It would violate the principle of fairness at the heart of Title IX to allow accused men to win discrimination claims using the preponderance standard but require their accusers (who are mostly female) to prove they were victimized under a more stringent standard.

While there are certainly legitimate discussions to be had about the content of federal regulations and how best to enforce them, it’s almost impossible to have those discussions when the real issues at hand are covered in a haze of misinformation and, on occasion, lies.

Another case in point: Candace Jackson, the Acting Secretary of the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, was quoted in the New York Times on July 12 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.” Jackson later apologized for what she characterized as her “flippant” comments.

The backdrop to Jackson’s statement is the long-held cultural notion that women, as a gender, are intrinsically prone to lying about sexual assault, and that we do so specifically to exact retaliation on men who we regret having sex with or otherwise dislike. In the time that I’ve spent working specifically on sexualized violence in religious organizations, I’ve found that this idea is particularly persistent with some Christians. The argument usually follows the same general shape:

Real sexual assault is horrible, of course, and we should all be against it. (For those who recall, we might also call it legitimate rape.)
Because real sexual assault is so horrible, we must not be distracted by all of these lying and vengeful women who are making up stories about sexual assault because they don’t want to take responsibility for their poor decisions.
These measures that you are suggesting for preventing sexual assault must not be implemented, because they will make it easier for women to lie and ruin the lives of innocent men.

This argument is remarkably resistant to the steady stream of evidence on the rarity of false accusations (and the consistent traits present in the false accusations that do happen), the statistics on the frequency of sexual assault, and the low reporting rates for rape and sexual abuse.

A good portion of that resistance comes, I think, from deep-seated beliefs about who has the right to control access to their own body. At its core, the agenda of recently visible “men’s rights” organizations is belief in the right to dominance: certain kinds of men (many of them the aspirational descendants of slaveholders and colonizers) are entitled to sexual access to certain kinds of bodies (female, queer, trans, descended from enslaved and/or colonized peoples). By this logic, rape is simultaneously a thing that some people deserve as punishment (witness the phenomenon of retaliatory online rape threats), and a thing that doesn’t really exist, because some bodies are asking for it, regardless of what they say they want, or of the silences forced upon them. Some bodies are property. The more owned you are, the less right you have to not live under the continual threat of rape.

Yes, it’s sick. It’s old–as old as Western civilization. And unfortunately, thanks in large part to the current leadership at the DOE, groups that are mired in this ethos are being treated as legitimate advocates for due process in Title IX sexual assault hearings. Their presence in Betsy DeVos’s Title IX deliberations has aided in the resurgent media narrative that the Obama-era increase in campus sexual assault reports has created an epidemic of false accusations, that the preponderance standard enables lying women, and that schools are unjustly destroying the lives of scores of innocent young men.

In no way do I wish to dismiss the significant damage that can be done in the life of a person who is falsely accused. As rare as these occurrences are, they’re devastating when they happen. But by every rigorous measure out there, the problem of sexual violence is far, far greater than the problem of false accusations, and the damage done to the lives of sexual violence survivors is impossible to quantify when reporting rates are as low as they remain. Basing federal policy on a misogynist myth is the worst form of ideological governance.

Title IX requirements are not draconian. In fact, they were written quite intentionally to provide schools with significant latitude to respond to the cultural and educational dynamics within their own communities. Notably, Title IX is the legislative product of an era of government that was far less aggressively partisan than our current one. It passed through Congress with broad, bipartisan support; it was signed into law by a Republican president. DeVos is framing her critique of Title IX as a response to perceived overreach by the Obama administration, but her actions are consistent with what many educators see as her larger project: a multi-pronged, political attack against the legislative and judicial precedents of the past fifty years, on the very notion that the federal government should have anything to do with guaranteeing universal access to education.

The civil rights protections guaranteed by Title IX require the very resources that are currently under attack in Trump’s DOE: Funding for public education. Systemic attentiveness to educational disparities, and evidence-based responses. Fully staffed federal agencies, with enough personnel to provide necessary resources and to respond to needs and complaints from students and from schools. Title IX needs all of those things in order to work the way it is meant to work.

This isn’t about schools doing the work of law enforcement, or inappropriate standards of evidence, or women with regrets, or alcohol, or ruined men. This is about who we believe deserves to get an education, and how we’re going to make sure that they get it. Those are the questions we have to answer, together.

Education is Power: Your Three-Part Guide to Campus Sexual Violence and Title IX in a Time of Crisis

July 24, 2017September 27, 20173 Comments

by Stephanie Krehbiel

Series Introduction:

With all the drama to choose from in the news, a person could be forgiven for not following the latest Title IX developments in the U.S. Department of Education. A lot has been going on there, though, and unfortunately, none of it is very encouraging to those of us who are passionate about ending campus sexual violence.

But if education is power—and I know that it is—we have resources in abundance, and we plan to use them! One of our long-term organizational goals at Into Account is to help students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni be as well-informed as possible when they encourage/push/demand change related to the sexual violence in their schools. This post is the first of a three-part series on Title IX, sexual violence, and higher education. In part one, I’ll talk about why Title IX exists. In part two, I’ll walk you through the current threats to the movement against campus sexual violence, and how students and advocates are fighting them. Part three will discuss the particular challenges of Christian colleges, and how the conservative movement for “religious liberty” has made campuses less safe for students vulnerable to sexual violence (particularly LGBTQ students).

You don’t have to become an expert on landmark federal legislation to care about this stuff. But information about existing laws can give you the confidence to advocate from your deepest values. Here’s one of ours: regardless of who you are, your body belongs to you and you alone, and you deserve to go to school, and to learn, without having to live in fear that someone will violate it. If all the laws changed tomorrow, we’d still fight for that. Every bit of activism that Into Account does around Title IX enforcement stems from that unshakeable conviction.

Part One: When Freedom from Sexual Violence Became a Civil Right

Regular readers of our blog may remember Erin Bergen’s account of her own experience with the Title IX complaint process at Goshen College after she was sexually assaulted there as a student. In the fall of 2016, before the U.S. presidential election, Erin filed a complaint against Goshen with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. The OCR notified Erin in December 2016 that they would be investigating Goshen as a result of her complaint.

Before talking about what has happened with Erin’s case since December, it’s worth reviewing why Title IX is relevant to campus sexual violence, and why complaints like the one Erin made to the OCR are integral to enforcing it. Title IX became federal law in 1972, as an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965. (The HEA is a landmark bill that increased federal funding for colleges and universities and financial aid for students.). Title IX’s purpose is to prevent discrimination based on sex in all federally-funded educational institutions. In language and intent, it reflects the precedent set by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin,” in voting, public accommodations, public education, and employment. (I’m glossing over a lot of detail and nuance in that 1964 legislation. So your civics assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to go read the whole law. It’s a good thing to do in these times.)

With this federal protection against sex-based discrimination in place, the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence at colleges and universities became a civil rights issue. For the first time, the federal government recognized what many women in higher education already knew: that the prevalence of rape, abuse, and sexual harassment at colleges and universities constituted a serious educational access barrier. (Sexual violence isn’t just cismen* abusing and assaulting ciswomen, but when Title IX first became law, no one in government was talking about other forms of sexual violence in relation to campus policy. More on that, and Title IX’s particular relevance to LGBTQ students, later in the series.)

Title IX regulations stood in defiance of a mess of narratives reinforced by religion, institutional practices, and patriarchal logic: That women lie about sexual assault. That some women deserve to be raped. That men’s sexuality is beyond their own control and women are responsible for keeping it in check. That the sexual dominance of men over women is the natural order of things. That the education of women is less important than the education of men.

And yet as monumental as this defiance was, and as far-reaching as the implications were, the passage of Title IX did not lead to a glorious, new, violence-free era for women in higher education. For many women students, victim-blaming narratives and misogynist stereotypes have been more powerful than the protection afforded by the law. When I was a college student in the nineties, I had no idea that Title IX was related to anything but women’s athletics. In that era, my ignorance of its full reach was more the norm than the exception.

Today, almost two decades since I graduated from college, people know a lot more about Title IX. This is thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s attention to civil rights issues generally, and campus sexual violence in particular. Under Barack Obama and his appointees, the Department of Education aggressively promoted a proactive approach to sexual violence in colleges and universities. This meant reviewing and changing policies, and addressing weaknesses with education and training, rather than secrecy and intimidation. Being proactive even meant doing what was almost certainly counterintuitive for many administrators: encouraging victims to report, with the near-certain knowledge that their school was no dazzling exception to the dismal statistics.

A lot of positive change came out of those eight years. Had things remained as they were before then, it’s unlikely that either Erin or Beth would have had the resources to come forward and ask for accountability from their schools. The number of student victims who filed complaints about their schools with the federal government skyrocketed during the Obama administration. Some people look at this fact with suspicion, but as an advocate, I see it as a sign that something was giving victims hope, that the benefits of coming forward were finally starting to outweigh the risks.

In spite of all of that, one of the enduring challenges of Title IX legislation is its dependence on victims reporting their grievances. Unfortunately, the evidence still suggests that the overwhelming majority of victims do not. For victims, pursuing a Title IX complaint means submitting to a process that requires a great deal of faith in the school’s ability to listen without judgment, to maintain confidentiality, and to protect them from retaliation. If a school’s policies and culture are such that survivors can’t be assured of those things, they are likely to stay quiet.

That very silence can be used as evidence that the school doesn’t have a sexual violence problem. But when 23.1 percent of college women and 5.4 percent of college men nationwide experience sexual assault, the reasonable assumption isn’t that zero reports means zero assaults– the reasonable assumption is that something is wrong with the reporting system. A college that reports zero sexual assaults in its Clery statistics may as well be waving a red flag of warning.

Erin’s complaint went through the OCR in a moment of transition, between a U.S. administration with unprecedented interest in fighting campus sexual violence, and an administration led by a president with a storied history of sexually abusive behavior towards women and a general disdain for federal regulations. Perhaps that’s why, over seven months after hearing that the OCR was investigating her case, Erin still hasn’t heard anything new. Goshen College hasn’t heard anything new, either. According to Ken Newbold, the Title IX Coordinator and Interim President at Goshen, nothing has changed in relation to the investigation since Erin’s story came out in April, at which point Goshen made the following statement: “In regards to the current Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigation, we have already responded to the requests and are fully cooperating with the investigators.”

In an email to me, Newbold added the following, however: “Regardless of the OCR’s current approach to enforcement of Title IX, we are committed to campus safety for all of our students and continuing to improve the development of proactive initiatives related to sexual violence and misconduct education, prevention and response. One example I would like to highlight, is that by early September at least 75 percent of our student body will have received bystander intervention training — led by students in our Prevention Intervention Network — to be equipped with skills to respond when they observe unhealthy situations.”

The reforms that Newbold lays out here are straight out of the Department of Education’s 2011 guidelines for Title IX enforcement, issued in the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter that is now under considerable fire by Trump appointees. If Goshen is currently taking those guidelines more seriously than ever before, student activists like Erin deserve a large portion of the thanks. And while changing the campus culture through student-led initiatives is transformative and necessary, seeing a survivor-centered policy audit and subsequent overhaul of institutional policies and practices would be a tangible indication of a shift from business as usual.

Goshen has publicly committed to a policy audit in the past. They should follow through on that commitment–not because of any federal investigation, but because it’s the right thing to do for Goshen students and survivors.

We face a strong likelihood that the federal government is about to renege on its responsibility to survivors. If that happens, college students who are vulnerable to sexual violence are going to need their schools’ constituent communities more badly than ever, to apply some of the pressure that won’t be coming out of Washington anymore.

So this is no time to get complacent. Ask questions of your administrators. Push for concrete answers and follow-through. Support the students, faculty, and staff who you know are affected. Help your school live up to its best aspirations.

Part Two: Betsy DeVos and the debate over due process and standards of proof

*The prefix “cis” refers to people whose gender presentation and identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Into Account

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Category: Title IX

Action Alert: Tell Goshen to Listen to Survivors

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Jay’s Story (Education is Power, Part III)

An Open Letter to Administrators

Title IX, Due Process, Standards of Proof, and…what was the question again? (Education is Power, Part II)