Sexual Assault Charges Stigmatize Innocent Men

Men punished in sexual misconduct cases on college campuses are fighting back

Men punished for sexual misconduct in the wave of cases sweeping college campuses are fighting back against what they call unfair student disciplinary systems and publicity that threatens to shatter their reputations.
The current and former college students describe themselves as victims of false accusations amid a national campaign — led by the White House — to stamp out sexual violence on campuses. While the federal push to increase awareness of sexual assault is aimed at keeping students safe and holding the nation’s colleges and universities accountable, some of the accused say the pressure on their schools has led to an unfair tipping of the scales against them.

They fiercely dispute the validity of internal investigations that rely on a lower standard of proof for determining misconduct than what is required for a conviction of a sex crime. They also contest accounts circulating on campuses and the Internet that label them as sexual assailants or rapists.
Joshua Strange, 23, of Spartanburg, S.C., said he was stunned that Auburn University expelled him in 2012 for sexual misconduct even though an Alabama grand jury found insufficient evidence to prosecute him for a sex crime. The internal disciplinary proceeding began, he said, after an ex-girlfriend falsely accused him of sex assault.

A bipartisan group of senators announced the introduction of the Campus Safety and Accountability Act, designed to curb sexual assaults on college campuses and increase accountability and transparency. (AP)

“The way that universities are handling the entire situation is terrible,” Strange said. “It’s kind of a broken system.”
Strange, who graduated this year from the University of South Carolina Upstate, said he is speaking out in the hope of preventing future injustice.
“I want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” he said.
An Auburn spokesman declined to comment on Strange’s case, citing privacy laws. Bobby Woodard, Auburn’s associate provost and vice president for student affairs, said federal requirements from the U.S. Department of Education mandate that all public universities follow a process that differs from the judicial and law enforcement systems in many ways.
“Those requirements are very clear and come with severe penalties for noncompliance,” Woodard said. “We at Auburn take these requirements very seriously, and that is reflected in our Code of Student Discipline.”
A student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, who was found responsible this year for sexual misconduct after an internal investigation he called biased, said: “I wasn’t given a fair trial or anything. It’s sad that this process can be abused and that the university can totally change somebody’s life, with very little evidence. . . . In the real world, rape and sexual assault are crimes punishable by going to jail — and rightfully so. Why is this left up to schools?”
Debate over campus sex assault has exploded as college students and officials nationwide confront questions about what constitutes consent for sex and what behavior fuels a culture that tolerates or trivializes rape. The issues play out in an arena of young people living on their own for the first time and learning to make choices when alcohol and drugs are often in the mix. When details of disputed sexual encounters are injected into that debate, especially those that identify the accused, the situation intensifies. Individual reputations can be torched.

National attention has focused mainly on accounts of students who have stepped forward in growing numbers to report sexual violence, most of them women. From 2009 to 2012, federal data show reports of forcible sex offenses on campuses rose from about 2,600 to more than 3,900, up 50 percent. The victims often say that campus judicial processes are skewed in favor of the accused, allowing sex crimes to be hidden, victims’ voices silenced and campus reputations protected.
Often, those who file reports are seeking not to press criminal charges, but simply to push schools to enforce rules that guarantee an educational environment free from threat and intimidation. The federal government, citing a 1972 law called Title IX of The Civil Rights Act that bans gender discrimination, requires schools to resolve these reports promptly and equitably regardless of whether police become involved.
(NOTE: None of the Service Academies are named on the Department of Education's quickly growing list of colleges under investigation for mishandling cases of sexual assault. The five federal service academies -- the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, the Merchant Marine Academy, the Naval Academy, and the Military Academy in West Point -- are exempt from both Title IX and the Clery Act.
As both laws are increasingly used as the federal government's weapons of choice in combating campus sexual assaults, women's groups and victim advocates are questioning why the military academies continue to be exempt. END of NOTE)
In June, attorneys for a former Brown University student wrote the federal government to rebut “unsupported allegations of strangulation and violent rape” that they said had “forever tarnished” the name of their 21-year-old client. The man, who had been suspended for a year after the university found him responsible for sexual misconduct in connection with a 2013 encounter with a female student, was not charged with a crime. But he was identified in April in a student newspaper article about the controversy over whether his punishment was too lenient.
Soon afterward, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) weighed in on a cable television program, saying the woman in the case had been “brutally raped” and “nearly choked to death.” The man’s attorneys say he denies any violent behavior or sexual misconduct toward the woman. He ultimately withdrew from the Ivy League university in Rhode Island.
Under President Obama, the issue has drawn increased scrutiny. This year, Obama named a White House task force to study how to combat campus sex assault. His administration published a list of dozens of colleges under federal investigation for potentially mishandling sexual violence reports in violation of Title IX. The number listed, 55 on May 1, has grown to 76 as of Wednesday, August 20, 2014. The administration also told schools in 2011 that they should rely on a standard known as “preponderance of the evidence” to decide their sexual violence cases.
For a student to be found in violation of school rules under that standard, which is regularly used in civil litigation, the school essentially must determine that it is more likely than not that wrongdoing occurred. Previously, some schools had used a more demanding threshold of “clear and convincing evidence.” In criminal trials, the burden of proof for a guilty verdict is even higher — “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Which leads both sides to the same question: Are college investigations fair to accusers and accused?
Some lawmakers say survivors of sex assault too often face institutions that are indifferent or even hostile to their plight. They cite schools that report no sex offenses in a given year, an improbable statistic, they say, given studies showing that the issue touches huge numbers of undergraduate women.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) is teaming with Gillibrand and others on a bipartisan bill that would require colleges to provide more support for students who report sex offenses.
McCaskill, a former prosecutor, said she wants as many cases as possible to be handled in criminal courts. The bill would require schools to coordinate with law enforcement agencies in solving sex crimes. But she said it is important to remember that college disciplinary inquiries do not put accused students in jeopardy of going to jail.
“I don’t think we are anywhere near a tipping point where the people accused of this are somehow being treated unfairly,” McCaskill said.
Many who have faced disciplinary sanctions disagree. They question the fairness of closed-door, internal proceedings that don’t follow the same rules of evidence and procedure as criminal courts. Usually, accused students must speak for themselves, with little or no help from an attorney. Some are filing lawsuits against schools.
Charles B. Wayne, a Washington attorney for a plaintiff in such a case in a 2011 trial in federal court involving Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee, said colleges are not equipped to adjudicate sex assault allegations.
“The people involved in the process are not properly trained and don’t have the necessary expertise,” Wayne said. “In addition, the assumption that a 19-year-old can defend himself without counsel against rape charges is absurd.”
In June, debate flared over resolution of the Brandeis case, which involved two male students. One accused the other of various nonconsensual sexual acts during a relationship of nearly two years. The student found responsible for sexual misconduct and other offenses received a disciplinary warning and was ordered to complete an educational program on sex assault prevention. He was not charged with a crime.
His ex-boyfriend called the sanctions “laughable and ridiculous.” He posted on Facebook a May 30 university letter reporting the case’s outcome, arguing that the university was protecting an attacker.
“With this letter, they are telling our campus community: ‘Go ahead, rape somebody,’ ” he wrote. “ ‘Sexually harass them. Physically harm them. Ruin their life. We’ll give you a freebie.’ ”
The disciplined student denied any wrongdoing and said he worries that the episode could hurt his career prospects. He disputed the university’s investigation, which he said sought to weigh the credibility of differing accounts from the two men of situations that had no eyewitnesses.

Brandeis said privacy rules barred comment on the case. University spokeswoman Ellen de Graffenreid said Brandeis follows federal law and goes to great lengths to determine appropriate sanctions for misconduct. “This is a tremendous challenge, and unlikely to ever satisfy either participant unless the finding is either exoneration or expulsion,” she said in a written statement.
Many students and graduates — mostly women, some men — have come forward recently to provide public accounts as survivors of sexual violence. These advocates for victim rights have become influential on Capitol Hill and at the White House.
In July, three mothers announced an organization that will stand for due process in sexual misconduct cases on college campuses. Among the founders of Families Advocating for Campus Equality is Allison Strange, mother of the former Auburn student accused of misconduct, and Sherry Warner-Seefeld, mother of a man kicked out of the University of North Dakota in 2010 after what he called a false allegation of sex assault. The man was never charged with a crime. A year later, the university reversed its sanctions against him after an appeal pointed out that authorities had issued a warrant for the arrest of his accuser on suspicion of making a false report to police.
“We hope to reach out to people in positions of power to get their ear, to have them hear our stories, to convince them there is another aspect to the situation that needs to be considered,” Warner-Seefeld said.( By Nick Anderson )

Coast Guard Academy Is Exempt From Title IX, Civil Rights Act

Being a woman at a military academy is a risky thing.

The United States Air Force Academy has ordered a probe of its athletics department after a report in The Colorado Springs Gazette detailed numerous violations of academy rules, including several instances of sexual assault.
At a 2011 party, according to the newspaper, players offered women a "girls-only" drink laced with a date rape drug, and allegedly committed gang rape later that night. An investigation into that party led to the disenrollment and prosecution of several cadets, Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson, the academy's superintendent said in a statement last week.
It's the second high-profile sexual assault scandal at the academy in a decade. A 2003 investigation -- prompted by an anonymous email sent to lawmakers that described the academy's alleged apathy toward a growing rape problem -- found that 20 percent of women enrolled at the academy said they had been sexually assaulted. A 2004 survey that included responses from every woman at the Air Force, Navy, and Army academies found that 302 women (about 10 percent) said they had been raped. Only 54 cases of sexual assault were officially reported the entire decade.
But the the Air Force Academy is not named on the Department of Education's quickly growing list of colleges under investigation for mishandling cases of sexual assault. And those 54 reported cases can't be found in Clery Act statistics, either. That's because the five federal service academies -- the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, the Merchant Marine Academy, the Naval Academy, and the Military Academy in West Point -- are exempt from both Title IX and the Clery Act.
As both laws are increasingly used as the federal government's weapons of choice in combating campus sexual assaults, women's groups and victim advocates are questioning why the military academies continue to be exempt.
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no good reason, no fair or logical reason, that the academies are exempt from Title IX and the Clery Act," Anu Bhagwati, executive director of the Service Women's Action Network, said. "If you’re a 17-, 18-year-old student and you’re looking at your future, you are concerned about the risk of sexual harassment or assault or discrimination at your next place of learning. You’re far more likely to experience those things at military academies. There’s really no question about that.”
The academies contacted for this article either did not respond to a request for comment or they referred questions to the Department of Defense. The department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office did not reply.
When Title IX first became law as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, the admission of women to the service academies was still three years off. But now, nearly 35 years after the graduation of the service academies’ first female students, there are many women who need Title IX's protections, said Neena Chaudrhy, senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center.
“The exemption is built into the statute, but you should have to show that you still need that,” Chaudrhy said. “We certainly see now that there are a number of issues that Title IX could help address in military academies that were not issues then, including pregnancy discrimination, and of course sexual harassment and assault.”
The prevalent argument now is that military academies are different enough from colleges that it doesn’t make sense to put them under the same umbrella.
The students, like all members of the armed services, are already subject to the uniform code of military justice (UCMJ). As the code is the foundation of military law, academy cadets can face much harsher punishments than typical college students. Colleges can suspend or expel a student they believe committed a sexual assault. Academy cadets can be court-martialed.
And it does sometimes happen: a Naval Academy football player faced a court-martial in 2013, after he was accused of sexually assaulting a female midshipman, though he was found not guilty. Late last year, Congress approved changes to the code to toughen sanctions even further.

But, while the number of sexual assaults reported at two of the three major military academies has fallen in recent years, according to annual reports that the academies must provide to the Department of Defense, sexual assault remains a serious issue in the military and at its academies. Across the academies, 70 cases were reported last year, but surveys have shown that instances of sexual assault at military academies are still widely underreported. In 2012, 26,000 service members said they had received unwanted sexual contact.  
“They say, ‘We take care of our students and you need to leave us alone to do that,’ ” said Beth Hillman, a former Air Force Academy history professor and current provost of the University of California Hastings College of Law. “But we’ve left you alone for a long time, and you have not fixed this problem."
The problem is not that sanctions for offenders are weak, said Kristine Newhall, a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts and contributor to the Title IX Blog, but that too few sanctions exist for service academies who mishandle or fail to enforce sexual assault policies.
“They can say that they have policies in place that are already effective," Newhall said. "The issue in saying that is, who oversees how effective they really are? Every school, whether military or not, will say their policies are effective. But we have the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights that can come in and say, 'No, they’re not,' and in a very public way. That isn’t the standard that military academies are being held to.”
College and universities that mishandle sexual assault cases on their campus are subject to investigations by the Office for Civil Rights and any student can file a complaint to prompt such an investigation. The names of institutions under investigation are displayed on a publicly available list. If they don't comply with Title IX laws, institutions can lose federal financial aid funding. At a summit about campus sexual assault organized by Dartmouth College in July, Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary who oversees Office for Civil Rights, said she has already threatened to pull federal funding at four colleges.
Lhamon has no such power over service academies. There are no Title IX officers for a sexual assault victim to turn to, nor can they file a complaint with state and federal offices if they believe their case was mishandled. The power for sending offenders to a court-martial remains with commanders, not prosecutors. Furthermore, victims cannot bring civil action against their academies because of the Feres Doctrine, which bars service members from suing the military in civilian courts.
Without Title IX, women have very few civil rights protections at military academies, Bhagwati, of SWAN, said.
"Both within the academies and the broader military, there’s very little legal deterrent to enforcing good policy and protecting students," Bhagwati said. "Your institution has no incentive to do the right thing, so you’re just counting on the character of your leadership. This makes being a woman at the service academies a very, very risky thing.”

 (By Jack New, Aug 12, 2014)

Coast Guard Academy Must Maintain Momentum In Recruiting Blacks

Keeping the momentum [Commentary]

The U.S. Coast Guard Academy must sustain gains it's made in admitting Blacks

Every so often, there is reason to cheer a little louder both within the gates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and 350 miles down Interstate 95 at the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.
This year, the Academy had a banner admissions class, enrolling 256 highly qualified, bright-eyed cadets who took their oaths of office under a beautiful New England summer sky on June 30th. The group, not including international cadets, boasts an average GPA of 3.87 and includes 214 varsity letter earners, numerous class presidents and many other talented young people who will lead our great nation into the next generation.
Equally important, this pool of exceptional Americans represents one of the most diverse classes ever enrolled by the academy. Thirty-three percent self-identify as under-represented minorities. Parsing the data further, we find 31 Black/African-American students — 12 percent of the entire class. To put the significance of this number into context, last year, the academy enrolled just five Black students, with this total population comprising a mere 4 percent of the entire student body. Moving the enrollment needle from five to 31 is a noteworthy accomplishment.

http://www.seapower-digital.com/seapower/july_august2014#pg12

This shift connects to an area of concern shared among a variety of stakeholders within the Coast Guard and the halls of Congress. At Coast Guard Headquarters, the results have long-lasting effects on workforce planning, particularly within the senior ranks. Currently, the Coast Guard is the only military service without a Black flag officer, such as an admiral or general.
The uptick in Black admissions among the Class of 2018 is certainly promising, but the Academy has made progress in the past and then failed to sustain its diversity gains. In 2010, the Academy welcomed one of its most diverse classes ever. Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings, a Democrat and former chairman of the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, said at the time that he was "heart-warmed" with the results of the entering class. But he also emphasized that "maintaining such increased levels of minority applications and enrollment will require a concerted outreach effort and I'm eager to hear how it will be sustained."
In 2011 through 2014, the Academy focused on the total of under-represented minorities enrolling while struggling to enroll Black students. Only by separating the data by race can we determine whether admissions outreach is succeeding among all underrepresented populations.
The Coast Guard must stay the course in order to achieve continued mission success. This effort transcends the Academy's admissions office. It requires commitment — shared belief in this goal as well as dedicated resources — at all levels of the organization. It requires sustaining benchmarked strategies, like engaging alumni with a passion to expand access to their alma mater and a willingness to serve as extensions of the admissions office.
It also requires supporting new, innovative efforts, like shifting away from the Academy's institution-specific and outdated application toward the Common Application, an online form that allows students to apply to multiple colleges and universities simultaneously. Across 500 college campuses nation-wide, the Common App, as it's widely known, has demonstrated its value in increasing the diversity of applicant pools.
It is encouraging to see this year's progress. It is inspiring to know that this level of success is possible. Continuing this positive momentum is an organizational imperative. Doing so would help rectify an endemic injustice, strengthen the fabric of our country's premier maritime institution and enhance the service's capacity to meet its own workforce goals. It would deliver a powerful message to our ever-changing nation that America's Coast Guard values the people it serves and does its part to ensure equal access to opportunity and education.
But most importantly, sustaining this effort echoes the Coast Guard's remarks made to the subcommittee in 2010 that "Commitment is meaningless without actions and clear signs of improvement." The signs of change are here; now we must remain on course.
  (By Chris Soto, August 11, 2014)

Chris Soto is the executive director of Higher Edge, a college completion organization in New London, Conn., and vice chairman of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy Alumni Association's Board of Directors. His email is chris@higheredgect.org; Twitter: @MrChrisSoto.

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