The Center for Public Integrity

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.

Starting in February 2009, the Center for Public Integrity fielded a team of reporters and researchers to lift the curtain on how colleges and universities respond to reports of sexual assault.

Reporters Kristen Lombardi and Kristin Jones began by surveying crisis services programs and clinics on or near college campuses across the country; 152 of these facilities completed the survey. The Center’s team then interviewed nearly 50 current and former college students who say they were raped or sexually assaulted by other students and, in some cases, professors. The journalists also interviewed students accused of sexual assault, as well as dozens of student affairs administrators, judicial hearing officers, victim advocates, sexual assault scholars, and lawyers.

Three federal laws that govern the way colleges and universities respond to sexual assault complaints became a topic of intense focus: Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Center compiled a database of 10 years’ worth of complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Education against colleges and universities for allegedly violating Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in federally funded education. The Center culled documents from lawsuits filed against schools for alleged Title IX violations, and built a second database of complaints filed with the Education Department against schools for allegedly violating the Clery Act, which requires that schools provide key rights to victims, and that they collect and retain statistics of crimes occurring on or near their campuses.

Buried in the pages of the 2006 student handbook for Dominican College, a small Catholic institution in the northern suburbs of New York City, were five dense paragraphs about what would happen if a student reported a rape.

The college would investigate. That much is required by law. Evidence would be collected and preserved. And if the alleged rapist were another student, campus disciplinary proceedings would ensue, allowing both sides to speak before a hearing board.

The policy was tested in May 2006, with Megan Wright, 19, a freshman from New Jersey. After drinking heavily with others in a friend’s dorm room, she woke up in pain on a Sunday morning, with blood in her underwear. On Monday, she elbowed through a lunchtime rush of students to the glass office of director of residence life Carlyle Hicks to report that she had been raped by a man — or men — she could not identify.

But Wright found cold comfort in Hicks’ response.

“He didn’t seem to have a clue,” says Wright’s mother Cynthia McGrath, who attended the meeting. Hicks didn’t mention a word about a campus disciplinary process, says McGrath, or even ask if the shy redhead was okay. “Just a lack of concern, like he couldn’t be bothered.”

McGrath describes the meeting as the first of many discouraging encounters with Dominican College as Wright sought some sort of action from the school against the fellow students she suspected of gang-raping her. By late summer, Wright had withdrawn from Dominican and enrolled in a local community college to avoid running into her alleged attackers. By late fall, the police investigation had dead-ended. And on a Saturday afternoon in December, Wright kissed her mother on the cheek, went upstairs, and suffocated herself with a plastic bag.

A sexual assault prevention program documented 46 sexual assaults at West Virginia University in a recent academic year. But those 46 incidents didn’t show up in the university’s annual security report.

A counseling and victim advocacy program at the University of Iowa served 62 students, faculty, and staff who reported being raped or almost raped in the last fiscal year. Those incidents didn’t show up, either.

A victim advocate program at Florida State University compiled statistics on 57 sexual offenses both on and off campus in 2008. Only a fraction of those incidents appeared in the school’s official crime statistics.

Three hours into deliberations by the University of Virginia’s Sexual Assault Board, UVA junior Kathryn Russell sat with her mother in a closet-like room in sprawling Peabody Hall. Down the corridor, two professors and two students were deciding her fate. Russell was replaying in her mind, endlessly, details of her allegations of rape when, she remembers, Shamim Sisson, the board chair, stepped into the room and delivered the order: You can’t talk about the verdict to anyone.

That stern admonition was a reminder of the silence Russell had been keeping since, she says, she struggled to break free from a fellow student’s grip in her dorm. That’s the account she gave local authorities, who declined to prosecute. And that’s what, in May 2004, she told the UVA Sexual Assault Board, whose decision she’d considered “my last resort.”

Russell stands among the tiny minority of students who have pursued rape complaints in the college judicial system — 33 at UVA, a school of 21,057 students, since 1998. She became well-versed in the confidential nature of the process as described in the school’s 2004 written procedures. Deans repeated the blanket stipulation to her “ad nauseam,” she says, throughout her three-month proceeding. The school later defended its mandatory confidentiality policy before the U.S. Department of Education even while softening the language.

Relating the gag order back in the room, Sisson, Russell says, provided a strong incentive to keep quiet: If you talk of the verdict, you’ll face disciplinary charges.

The Center for Public Integrity is launching a series of pieces on how sexual assault complaints are handled on college campuses. After nine months of reporting, the Center has reached some troubling conclusions about how certain institutions collect and report sexual assault statistics, and how sexual assault cases are adjudicated in campus judicial systems. This toolkit serves as an introductory guide on how to investigate the ways your school deals with sexual assault allegations. Click the tabs below to learn more, or download the full toolkit as a PDF by clicking here.

These three laws have had a dramatic effect on the way sexual assault claims are adjudicated on America’s campuses: