Dozens of sexual assault survivors and their allies gathered outside the Education Department on Thursday to urge Secretary Betsy DeVos not to roll back federal protections for victims of sexual violence, and to decry what they view as the Trump administrations lack of commitment to enforcing federal civil rights law.
On the concrete plaza outside the agencys D.C. headquarters, activists read the stories of survivors from across the country while, inside, DeVos began a series of meetings with college administrators, assault victims and men who said theyd been wrongly accused.
DeVos has declined to say whether she intends to continue the Obama administrations approach to cracking down on campus sexual assault. But her meeting schedule troubles victims advocates, who argue its wrong for the education department to give equal time to hearing from survivors and the wrongly accused. Only a small fraction of reported rapes are found to be false.
Survivors want to make it very clear that we deserve to be listened to, said Mahroh Jahangiri of the advocacy group Know Your IX, one of the events organizers.
Education Department officials have said they are weighing whether to keep or reject Obama-era guidance that laid out how schools must meet their obligations under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at federally funded institutions. Critics of that guidance, issued in 2011, said it was an executive overreach that set too low a bar for campus administrators to find a student guilty of assault.
Victims rights activists argue that the guidance is firmly rooted in existing law and makes clear how schools must ensure fair and equitable treatment of both accusers and the accused. They fear that DeVos intends to jettison the guidance, and that remarks this week by Candice Jackson, the acting head of Educations Office for Civil Rights, seemed to confirm that fear.
Speaking to the New York Times, Jackson argued that college investigations have often been unfair to accused students, in part because of undue pressure from the federal government. She claimed that 90 percent of accusations 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.
In a letter to DeVos on Wednesday, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) urged her to keep the 2011 guidance in place and decried her decision to meet with advocates for the accused, including the National Coalition of Men and Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE), which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called misogynistic. Instead of catering to organizations that want to sweep sexual assaults on college campuses under the rug, the Department of Education should confront this challenge directly by coming to uphold the protections currently in place, Casey wrote.
