The Center for Public Integrity

The Obama administration took new steps yesterday to address one of the most common crimes on college campuses: sexual assault. Speaking at the University of New Hampshire, a school known for its proactive approach to combating sexual violence, Vice-President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveiled the first-ever explicit federal guidance on how colleges and universities must respond to student complaints of campus sexual assault.

In strongly worded remarks before a crowd of school administrators, victim advocates, and students, Duncan said he is troubled by the way some colleges and universities have been handling cases of sexual violence.

“The misplaced sense of values and priorities in some of these cases is staggering,” Duncan said. “As caring adults, as parents, and leaders we must deal with the brutal truth and the facts around these incidents can be shocking.” 

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Elton Yarbrough was a young man seemingly on his way up: An economics major at Texas A&M University; a member of the university’s military cadet corps; a musician in the marching band; the pride of little Palestine, Texas; and soon to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force.

But police say he was also one other thing: A serial rapist.

The one-time Texas A&M senior is now sitting in a Texas prison until at least 2015 for felony sexual assault. Five women, including four female A&M students, testified Yarbrough raped or sexually assaulted them between 2003 and 2006, although he was only tried on one assault charge. Yarbrough says he is innocent.

Yarbrough is one of six alleged serial offenders at colleges across the country the Center for Public Integrity found during its year-long investigation of sexual assault on college campuses. The six were accused of assaulting multiple women in court records, campus records or other public documents.

However, students who reported being raped by fellow students told the Center of at least five other men whom they suspected of, or had heard of, assaulting other women. Those men probably look a lot like Yarbrough did to Texas A&M administrators and to his fellow students: A promising young student with an outstanding resume of achievements. As one of his accusers would later write in a statement read at a university judicial proceeding, “If you cannot trust another student with a record which appears as impeccable as Elton’s, then who can we really trust in life?”

The number of serial offenders did not surprise psychologist David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts-Boston expert on campus sexual assault.

It took nine months in 2005 and 2006 for the University of Wisconsin at Madison to contemplate, then reject filing disciplinary charges against a crew team member accused of rape.

Enough time, too, for an enraged encounter with his accuser, Laura Dunn, at a fraternity party. “He started threatening me,” said Dunn. “When he hit the wall, he used his whole forearm, and just slammed within inches of my head.”Enough time for the accused student to start his fourth year at the university, compete in another rowing season, and glide into another spring as a celebrated college athlete.

The university said a police investigation and the alleged victim’s objections to one of her investigating officers accounted for the delay. The criminal investigation, too, ended without charges against the accused student, who said Dunn willingly participated in sexual activity.

Unsatisfied with the school’s response, Dunn hoped to find an ally in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The office, referred to as OCR, enforces Title IX, a federal law requiring “prompt and equitable“ action in response to reports like Dunn’s. The statute is intended to protect students’ right to an education without the hostility of sexual harassment or assault. But in a decision that left her feeling betrayed again, the enforcement agency said it found “insufficient evidence” that the University of Wisconsin had been less than prompt.

The way Melandy saw it, there wasn’t enough room for both of them.

The College of the Holy Cross has fewer than 3,000 students. Months after she says she was raped by another student, Jordan, in a men’s bathroom on campus, Melandy feared running into him on the paths of the Worcester, Mass. college, at parties, and at the dining hall where he worked. The sight of him would make her shake, cry, and lose her appetite.

“I was tired of having to change my whole life,” said Melandy, a slight, soft-spoken psychology major. (She asked that only her first name be used to protect her privacy; Jordan is a pseudonym.)

So when she undertook the often painful process of filing disciplinary charges against the other student, Melandy knew that one of two things would happen. Either he would be expelled, or she would leave the school.

In the end, it was his life that would be upended. The college hearing board found Jordan responsible for the school’s most serious charge of “sexual misconduct” — sex without consent — in December 2008. The school dismissed him, revoking his full-tuition scholarship and derailing his academic career and plan to study in Europe, he says. He went back to his native Jamaica, feeling betrayed by his former friend, and “traumatized,” his mother says, by the knowledge that college officials did not believe him.