Investigation finds systemic failures in confronting sexual assault on US campuses

Today, top officials from the Department of Justice are visiting college campuses across the nation to address the issue of violence against women. The visits to twelve college campuses are part of the Justice Department's commemoration of the Violence Against Women Act, passed 15 years ago.

Justice Department figures show that one in five women will experience rape or attempted rape before the time she graduates. But perhaps even more astounding, says Kristen Lombardi from the Center for Public Integrity, is that this figure has been around for more than a decade.

"Well, I think that is an issue that many researchers are still trying to tackle and to understand."

Lombardi and the Center for Public Integrity did just that. They've recently concluded a 12-month investigation into college campuses, looking at how officials respond to allegations of sexual assault. The study interviewed 50 college officials and 33 female students who were survivors of sexual assault. It also looked at 10 years of complaints filed against schools. Lombardi, who is the lead author of the report, had one word to describe findings from the investigation:

"Troubling. In this latest series we found that students who have been deemed responsible for sexual assault on campus, and that term responsible is the equivalent of guilty in the college judicial system often face little or no punishment from the school administration, while their victims lives are frequently turned upside down."

Even in the cases of repeat offenders, university authorities rarely used expulsion as a punishment, says Lombardi. This leads some survivors of sexual assault to drop out or transfer from the school themselves.

One of those interviewed as part of the investigation was a former student at Indiana University named Margaux. She said that the lack of action, even when survivors of sexual assault come forward and identify the perpetrators, discourages women from reporting violence. Margaux spoke on a video posted on publicintegrity.org.

"When somebody does come up, like me, not every women is going to report it and when somebody does finally report it, this is the way they treat it. It’s just going to become much bigger problem. Because these people are still going to be allowed to come back to the schools and continue to do the same things to more girls that probably won't report it."

Under Title IX, schools that receive federal funding must investigate allegations of sexual assault. The federal law bans sexual discrimination and guarantees students' right to education in an environment that isn’t hostile.

When schools fail to investigate cases adequately, students can file a suit with the Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with determining if the schools are complying with federal law. But Lombardi says that even in the cases brought to the Office of Civil Rights, or OCR, the results often do not lead to action.

“The issue of lenient punishment really speaks to how administrators view the campus judicial process generally. The Justice Department’s office on violence against women gives campus grants to help institutions improve their response and adjudications of sexual assault and that database includes about 130 colleges and universities receiving federal funds from 2003 to 2008. So these are schools that are aware of the problem of campus sexual assaults and are taking proactive steps or want to take proactive steps to combat the problem, but even these schools we found, by analyzing this database, rarely expel students who are found responsible for sexual assault."

Lombardi says there is a growing effort by advocacy groups to bring the issue before congress. Organizations like Security on Campus are pushing for legislative reform to close the loopholes in Title IX so that allegations of sexual assault are properly and fully investigated. The report, Sexual Assault on Campus, a Frustrating Search For Justice, released by the Center for Public Integrity is available here: http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/campus_assault/