The list of prominent liberals questioning the campus disciplinary system for investigating and punishing sexual assault continues to grow.
In an article about the University of Virginia rape scandal subtitled “The confidential sexual assault investigation system has failed,” Slate legal writer Dahlia Lithwick goes over the school’s peculiar historic response to rape allegations.
That includes its sexual misconduct board’s chief, who “seems to suggest” in a video interview that a student who admits guilt has done “enough to avoid expulsion or serious sanctions,” as Lithwick says:
The interview perfectly reflects the problem UVA has constructed: [Nicole] Eramo was tasked with handling sexual assault in a non-criminal, survivor-centered, confidential, internal setting, and she is now on the hook for not having run a crack Special Victims Unit.
The question I have been asked a hundred times since the Rolling Stone piece appeared [which created the scandal] is: How is it possible that a crime as serious as an aggravated, premeditated gang rape can be funneled into an internal disciplinary process? How can a felony offense be kept out of the police’s hands, and how can victims be presented with a menu of choices that includes, and even encourages, doing nothing?
Lithwick then faults Title IX itself for making schools use “administrative conduct processes”:
At UVA, that system appears to have resulted in a systematic process of deflecting cases out of the criminal justice system, leaving perpetrators undisciplined and the campus unaware of what looks to be a repeated pattern of vicious rapes. Victims were given so many options, and even a violent gang rape went unreported to the police. …
The real question is whether, having crafted an internal system that either masks or exacerbates many of the worst features of the systems it seeks to replace, do we want to stand by it?
h/t Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
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