Kristin Jones stories from The Center for Public Integrity

An uncommon outcome at Holy Cross

Jordan — 2012-06-05T11:34:06-04:00

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.

Expulsion rarely results from college disciplinary actions in sexual assault cases, making the Holy Cross case a notable exception. In interviews the Center for Public Integrity conducted with 33 students who reported being sexually assaulted by another student, four said their alleged attackers were expelled — two of them only after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. It was far more common for the alleged victim to drop out or transfer, while the accused student remained on campus.

Melandy credits her faith in God, among other things, for the outcome in her case. But she also relied heavily on the school’s unusually detailed sexual assault policy and its comprehensive set of procedures for responding to sexual assault.In preparing her testimony, she frequently consulted a peer advocate at the school, as well as Colby Bruno, an attorney at the Boston-based Victim Rights Law Center. And both Melandy and the accused student cite the role of the college’s public safety officers as key players in the case outcome — particularly their description of the dark bathroom where the incident occurred. That image seemed to resonate, Melandy recalls, with the hearing board members.

“The school had a policy, they enforced the policy, they found her credible and they expelled the guy,” said Bruno, who advised Melandy free of charge. She added that the outcome was unusual even among other cases she had seen at Holy Cross. “That’s the way it should work.”

College administrators sometimes cite the difficulty of acquaintance rape accusations as a reason that so few disciplinary hearings result in tough penalties. But this case was every bit as complex as many other college rape reports: The two students were friends, they were drinking, and the victim waited months to tell the college. It happened on a night in May 2008 when they were hanging out in a group. She says she was a virgin, was drunk for the first time, and was too unaware to resist when he led her, she says, to a public bathroom for the purpose of raping her — locking the door and turning off the light behind them. He says he was also drunk, that she never said no, and that she seemed upset only that he had a girlfriend. It wasn’t until the fall semester that she reported the alleged assault to Holy Cross public safety officers at the urging of a counselor. There was no rape kit performed, and no obvious physical injuries.

At many other schools, the Center has reported, similar reports were ignored or dismissed for lack of evidence. Instead, Melandy’s case ended up before a Holy Cross hearing board.

Brett Sokolow, a well-known consultant to college administrators, was commissioned to help Holy Cross overhaul its sexual assault policy a decade ago. He recommends that schools frame sexual assault as an offense without consent, rather than an offense against the will of the victim. The difference, he says, shifts the responsibility from the victim having to prove refusal to consent, and requires the initiator of the sexual activity to demonstrate that consent was given. He recommends too, that colleges be specific about what constitutes incapacitation by alcohol, a common factor in college rape cases.

“Holy Cross is one of the schools that gets it right, as far as I’m concerned,” Sokolow says, noting in particular the college’s thoroughness in implementing its own policy. It trained residence hall staff, public safety officers, faculty, and anyone else who might come in contact with victims. Members of campus judicial panels also receive about three hours of training on sexual assault, according to the dean of student conduct.

In preparing her testimony against Jordan, Melandy highlighted the parts of the policy that seemed to back her up:

[I]t is the responsibility of the initiator … to make sure that he/she has the consent from his/her partner(s).
Consent may never be given … by one who is incapacitated as a result of alcohol.
Silence … may not … be taken to imply consent.

Too uncomfortable to tell a professor about the accusation against him, Jordan did not bring a faculty advisor to the hearing in mid-December 2008. On the other side of a partition, Melandy sat beside a trusted statistics professor, as well as the dean of student conduct and two public safety officers. A male friend of Melandy’s told the campus panel that he could see how intoxicated she was on the night in question.

Colleges are obligated to conduct their own investigations into sexual assault reports. But they often don’t. Here, again, Holy Cross proved to be an exception; the two public safety officers — trained in sexual assault investigation — testified about what they found. Jordan had said the bathroom was not that dark, but the officers said that with the light switched off, it would have been pitch black. Their testimony also differed from his on the size of the bathroom.

“At that point, I said, OK, wow, I know I’m going to lose,” said Jordan.

Holy Cross did not provide records of the outcomes in previous sexual assault cases. Bruno, the victim rights attorney, said that other cases she had seen at Holy Cross resulted in findings of “not responsible.” An administrator said expulsion was the most common outcome when students are found responsible for rape, reflecting a philosophy that the school has an obligation to protect its community.

“I think there’s certain conduct on a college campus that’s just not acceptable,” says Paul Irish, dean of student conduct and community standards. “And if someone does it, they can’t be a community member any more. Period.”

After the hearing, Jordan finished his finals and packed his bags, leaving behind what he couldn’t fit in two suitcases.

He believes it was unfair that the school exacted such a punishment without giving him the due process that a criminal trial would have afforded. “The whole process is fundamentally flawed,” and “ridiculous,” says Jordan, now a law student in Kingston. In a letter to the Holy Cross president, he appealed the board’s decision, saying that Melandy initiated the sexual contact. The appeal was denied.

The school defends its process, saying that attendance at Holy Cross is a privilege, not a right.

The campus panel’s decision to expel Jordan brought Melandy to tears — of joy and relief, this time. A year later, she was preparing to graduate from Holy Cross, and studying for the GRE.

“I guess you never really forget — not just the rape, but you don’t forget the process, either,” she says. “But I feel like I’m at peace right now, and that’s what I wanted.”

Staff writer Kristen Lombardi and reporting fellow Claritza Jiménez contributed to this article.

Sexual assault on campus: Margaux J. Interview Part II

2013-01-28T16:25:17-05:00

Margaux discusses her reaction to the penalty recommended for her alleged assailant; who was found responsible for sexual contact with another person without consent.

Sexual assault on campus: Margaux J. Interview Part III

2013-01-28T16:25:38-05:00

Three years after the incident, Margaux reflects on the process experienced by victims of sexual assault.

Barriers Curb Reporting on Campus Sexual Assault

2012-06-05T12:08:00-04:00

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.

McGrath is now suing Dominican College administrators, including Hicks, saying they refused to investigate or take Wright’s complaint seriously. “All I wanted from the school was to know that she was going to be safe, that these guys were not going to be on the campus,” says McGrath.

Administrators at Dominican College, including Hicks, would not comment for this story; their lawyer Philip Semprevivo cited pending litigation. But Semprevivo denied McGrath’s allegations and said the College is “aggressively defending” itself in court.

“No conduct [of Dominican College] has been alleged which is in any way shocking or extreme,” the school has previously argued in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. However, in late November, a judge denied the college’s motion.

A Disappointing Response

For many college students who allege they’ve been raped each year, disappointment may indeed be the norm. One national study funded by the Justice Department found that one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But students reporting sexual assault routinely say they face a host of institutional barriers in pursuing the on-campus remedies meant to keep colleges and universities safe, according to a nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. The result, say experts, is a widespread feeling that justice isn’t being served, and may not even be worth pursuing.

In conducting its probe, the Center interviewed 48 experts familiar with the college disciplinary process — lawyers, student affairs administrators, conduct hearing officers, assault services directors, and victim advocates. The inquiry included a review of hundreds of pages of records in select cases, and examinations of 10 years worth of complaints filed against institutions with the Education Department under Title IX and the Clery Act, as well as a survey of 152 crisis services programs and clinics on or near college campuses. The Center also interviewed 33 women who reported being sexually assaulted by other students. Sexual assault includes not only rape, but also a variety of sexual offenses.

Crisis counselors and service providers who work with college students described barriers as overt as a dean expressing disbelief. These counselors cited institutional barriers on campus more often than any other factor as a discouragement to students pursuing complaints of sexual assault, according to a Center survey of 152 on- and off-campus centers that provide direct services to victims.

Lawyers pointed out failures as subtle as an institution’s neglecting to provide access to a professional victim’s advocate to guide students through a complicated and intimidating process. Students cited fears that their friends would get in trouble for drinking or drug use, or that their names would not be kept confidential. Many alleged victims told the Center they had encountered roadblocks from their schools. Of those students who said they’d met discouragement, most transferred or withdrew from their schools, while their alleged attackers were almost uniformly unpunished.

Some of the most fundamental obstacles to students pursuing sexual assault complaints are also illegal, say lawyers. Colleges and universities may be flouting federal laws like Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education, and the Clery Act, which is intended to document campus crime. (See our companion story for more on the laws that govern how colleges and universities respond to sexual assault.) These laws require that institutions investigate and take action to end sexual assault, and mandate policies for addressing complaints on campus.

Together with the personal and social barriers to reporting — some of them unique to college — these institutional hurdles help explain the silence that often envelops sexual assault on campus. College students report sexual assault even less often than the general public does, a 2000 Justice Department-funded report found. That report concluded that more than 95 percent of students who are sexually assaulted remain silent.

Mike Segawa, president of the national organization Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (NASPA), says most colleges and universities want to be “responsive and supportive” to students reporting sexual assaults. He says schools are also acting to address perceived roadblocks.

But for rape survivors who believe that their college stood in the way of pursuing a sexual assault complaint, the experience of dealing with the school can be traumatizing. “They feel like someone they trusted their lives with has betrayed them,” says S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy at the college safety advocacy group Security On Campus Inc. “It’s as life-altering — if not more so — than the rape or sexual assault itself.”

Feelings of Self-Doubt

Wright’s memory first failed her, then it tortured her.

“Drinking in a dorm room w/ people I know,” Wright wrote in her report to the residence life office. “I then do not remember what happend [sic] after 1:00 am. I do remember a little of the incident. I then went to the hospital the next morning w/ [her friend] Kelly Rocco b/c I knew that I was raped.”

All she remembered of the incident was being in a dorm bed, terrified, trying to tell a man she didn’t know to get off of her. The blood in her underwear, and the pain, told her the rest.

Before a college woman who has been sexually assaulted even gets to a dean’s door, she often has to get past herself — her own self-blame, or her own memory lapses, experts say.

Less than half of college women who are raped identify it as rape, even privately, to judge from the sample in the Justice Department report. In Center interviews, many alleged victims described intense doubt about what had happened. It conflicted with what they thought they knew about violent rape — a stereotypical image of a stranger in the bushes with a knife. The alleged assailants were, in some cases, people they considered friends. They described trying to push it to the back of their minds, just wanting to get on with their lives. Or they blamed themselves for drinking too much, or for failing to protect themselves.

Wright was by no means immune to self-doubt. But she did something that experts say is crucial. She told a supportive friend first.

“She kept saying, ‘It’s all my fault, I let this happen,’” says Kelly Rocco, who was an 18-year-old freshman when Wright pulled her out of the dorm hallway to tell her she had been raped.

Rocco drove Wright to White Plains Hospital, stayed with her for hours while nurses administered a rape kit and forensic exam, and took her out to eat. But Rocco admits that her first reaction was disbelief.

“I was trying to find questions to prove her wrong,” says Rocco, “because I was like, this doesn’t happen.”

A Lack of Support

Colleges rarely spend much time educating students on how to respond appropriately to a friend who has been sexually victimized, according to a follow-up Justice Department-funded report in 2002. It found that almost 60 percent of schools provided no response training at all to students. And when they did, they often directed it toward students who were residence hall advisers or security officers rather than the general student population. (Rocco says she received no rape awareness or response education during freshman orientation; Dominican College’s lawyer says both she and Wright did.)

Away from their parents from the first time, female college students tend to rely on the structure of a close-knit residence hall, a sports team, or a sorority; their friends’ response is crucial. To complicate matters, say on-campus advocates, accused and accuser may be separated by just a few degrees.

“If they do go forward and make a report, do they lose that group because of the so-called problems they are creating?” says Roberta Gibbons, a victim’s advocate on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota, describing the concerns of students she encounters. “Or are they going to split that group?”

When Christine Carter met this dilemma as a transfer student at Towson University in Baltimore, she chose to tell the group that a newcomer — a friend of a friend — had reached into her pants while she was sleeping. To her utter mortification, they laughed and said she must have imagined it.

“I was the butt of my friends’ jokes,” said Carter. “Before we’d go out, my friends would say, ‘Oh Christine, don’t drink too much. You’ll sexually assault yourself.’”

They stopped laughing at her only when the same man did it again, Carter said, to another friend in the group. This time, Carter reported to police that she had been assaulted, and says she encouraged her friend to do the same. The man agreed to serve probation on assault charges but did not plead guilty, according to Maryland court records.

As for Wright, she didn’t even know whether she was accusing friends or strangers at first. Her family would accuse both, in the end. Their lawsuit alleges that Terrell Hill, a Dominican College student whom she knew, was one of two men who physically led her from her dorm room to an all-male floor. There, the school’s hallway surveillance camera catches two Dominican College students, Isaiah Lynch and Richard Fegins, along with Fegins’ visiting cousin Kenneth Thorne — none of them friends of Wright’s — going in and out of the room, according to documents obtained from the Orangetown, NY, Police Department. The lawsuit alleges that all three raped her, and adds the detail from the surveillance video that they were snatching high-fives from onlookers as they went. At one point, Fegins emerged from the room holding up a sign that read “I WANT TO HAVE SEX,” signed Megan Wright — an artifact the school gave to police, along with part of the video, and information about the students in it.

Hill says that he has been unfairly accused for being in the “wrong place and wrong time.” He strongly denies the family’s allegations that he conspired in Wright’s assault.

She was a friend, he says: “My friends — and our friends — know that I’m not that kind of person.”

Like Hill, the other three were never charged with a crime, and through their lawyers, they declined to comment for this story. In court documents, they deny raping Wright. Lynch told police that he was in the dorm room surfing the Web. He says he left when he saw Wright kissing Thorne. When he returned, he says, she was putting her shirt back on. He denies having any sexual contact with her. Police dropped the investigation — and the Rockland County District Attorney declined to prosecute — after a handwriting expert said that Wright’s signature was on the sign, and her sexual assault examination showed no trace of sperm. Nonetheless, a nurse’s notation says that her vagina was visibly cut, swollen, and red.

Wright broke down when she first saw the video, according to Orangetown police department notes. Her mother says it showed her things Wright hadn’t known, and that she began having flashbacks.

The Campus Judiciary Process

At the center of many schools’ stated policy of responding to sexual assault is some form of disciplinary or judicial hearing process, like the one Dominican describes in its handbook. The Campus Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights, a 1992 amendment to the Clery Act, mandates that schools publish policies for preventing and addressing sexual assault, including “procedures for on-campus disciplinary action.”
Schools don’t always comply. Justice Department reviews in response to 26 complaints in the past decade found that four institutions — Eastern Michigan University, St Mary’s College (Indiana), Clemson University, and Salem International University (West Virginia) — violated the Clery Act by failing to have or disclose policies for sex offenses. Several other on- and off-campus service providers surveyed by the Center reported that their local colleges had no policy for adjudicating sexual assault on campus.

Victims’ advocates say these formalized disciplinary procedures serve as a vehicle for colleges to remove suspected predators from their campuses, and have different standards than a criminal justice system that rarely prosecutes rape. A failure to have disciplinary procedures in place constitutes a fundamental barrier to justice on campus, advocates say.

Even so, students are unlikely to get as far as a campus hearing, even at apparently well-intentioned colleges.

Each year the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women awards grants to colleges to combat on-campus stalking and sexual and domestic violence against women. Many schools use this money to boost reporting and improve adjudication of rape on campus, to mixed results. During fall 2008, the most recent semi-annual reporting period available, 26 institutions whose progress reports the Justice Department provided to the Center reported only 25 sexual assault cases that resulted in any finding in a campus disciplinary proceeding. Another 16 were dismissed before they ever reached that point, with more than half of the dismissals at the victim’s own request. The schools had a combined female student population of about 270,000 the previous year. By way of comparison, if that Justice Department-funded study was correct, an estimated 6,450 of these students were actually sexually victimized during that six-month period.

The reports give little clue as to why so few on-campus resolutions were reached. But students interviewed by the Center described encountering processes that seemed intimidating, unsympathetic, or unlikely to result in punishment for the accused students. Anna Babler, a former student at Arizona State University, says a judicial affairs administrator in 2008 urged her to “speak up” against a fraternity with a history of rape reports, without assuring that her name would be kept confidential, or telling her precisely how the campus process would work. (An ASU representative said that privacy rules prevented it from commenting on specific cases, but that it takes sexual assault reports seriously.) Mary Chico, a former student at Miami University in Ohio, describes meeting with a school official in 2001 who made her feel that she was at fault by asking her questions like what she was wearing when she was assaulted. Chico believes a dean pushed her to take a medical leave from the school, accusations the school has dismissed as “baseless.”

Carter, of Security On Campus Inc., said that colleges and universities dissipate students’ confidence in their adjudication systems by failing to coordinate between offices, or by failing to provide access to a single, well-trained point person who can lead them through the process. “The most pervasive problem for students victimized by sexual assault on campuses,” he says, “is a lack of support structures for victims to come forward.”

Title IX, the anti-discrimination statute, is best known for its application to women’s sports, but the regulations implementing it require grievance procedures that provide for “prompt and equitable resolution of student and employee complaints.” The law leaves room for interpretation, and in 2001 the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights issued additional guidance. If a school knows — or even if it should know — of possible sexual harassment, including assault, it must take “immediate and appropriate steps to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred and take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end any harassment, eliminate a hostile environment if one has been created, and prevent harassment from occurring again.” It is also this guidance that mentions that schools must designate a coordinator for Title IX responsibilities — the point person Carter describes.

A school’s failures to comply with Title IX can place daunting obstacles in the paths of students who wish to pursue disciplinary proceedings. A measure of the problem came in the Center’s review of 214 investigations in the past decade by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights into suspected Title IX violations involving sex discrimination in admissions or grading, as well as cases of harassment and assault. The Center found 16 cases involving allegations of perceived institutional barriers to pursuing sexual assault complaints. According to its own published guidelines, the Office of Civil Rights avoids finding schools in violation of the statute when it can find a way to cooperate with schools to fix problems, but it found institutions with no coordinator, no clear policy for handling sexual assault complaints, or alleged victims who were not informed of their right to pursue disciplinary complaints.

The roadblocks to campus justice, however, are often more subtle than that, says Diane Rosenfeld, a Harvard law professor who specializes in Title IX law. They can come in the form of a dean’s apparently innocuous suggestion to get counseling, or take a semester off, rather than risking a campus judicial process that won’t succeed.

“As I see it,” she says, “that’s a way of silencing victims and keeping these cases quiet.”

Troubling Tale at SUNY New Paltz

In December 2007, Elizabeth Ryan, who was finishing up her first semester on the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York, was summoned to speak to the Dean dean of Students students in the austere Haggerty Administration Building. The dean’s office had just learned she filed a police report alleging that she was raped by another freshman at an off-campus fraternity house. (Elizabeth Ryan is not her real name; she has asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy.)

Ryan says she immediately knew that what had happened to her was rape. The nurse who administered the rape kit, and others who heard her story, seemed shocked, Ryan recalls, by the trauma that she conveyed, and by the bruises on her breasts. But when she told the story to the dean, a veteran student affairs administrator named Linda Eaton, it was Ryan’s turn to be shocked. One of her options was to “do nothing,” she says the dean told her.

Even now, Ryan, 20, has a hard time rationalizing that response. “If I wanted to do nothing, I would have kept my mouth shut,” she says. “I wouldn’t have gone to my RA, or to the campus police, or to the New Paltz police, or to the hospital. I wouldn’t have said a word to anybody right from the start,” she says. “It was insulting. This guy had just raped me … and that’s her answer?”

Insulting or not, the dean’s response — which Eaton does not dispute — may have been illegal, say lawyers familiar with Title IX. “You never say your option is to do nothing, because the institution doesn’t have the option of doing nothing,” says Kate Clifford, a partner in the law firm Schuster & Clifford, LLP, which provides training to universities on compliance with the anti-discrimination law.

Investigation is the school’s first responsibility, regardless of whether a student demands it, or whether police are conducting a criminal investigation, according to the 2001 Office of Civil Rights guidance.

The dean went on to list other options, each no more satisfying to Ryan. Dean Eaton could bring the alleged attacker into her office, to let him know that what he had done was wrong. Or the two freshmen could participate in a mediation.

Though not illegal, mediation for resolving sexual assault cases is strongly discouraged in official recommendations from the Justice and Education Departments. Eaton denies pushing mediation, citing school statistics showing that no student has chosen to resolve a sexual assault case through mediation in the past decade. But the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights guidance calls it inappropriate “even on a voluntary basis.”

“You never, ever, ever have any kind of mediation in sexual assault cases,” says Clifford, echoing what counselors, advocates, and lawyers told the Center repeatedly, explaining that mediation presumes an equality of power that is missing in domestic and sexual violence cases.

Ryan felt discouraged from pursuing the two options she most wanted — campus judicial proceedings and criminal charges. “She made everything I’d wanted to do seem … like a hassle,” she says, referring to Eaton, and recalling that the dean cautioned her that campus hearings would be difficult for her, and that they would have to wait until the following semester, after winter break. The dean told her to take time to think about it, and come back again the next day.

Instead, Ryan canceled their meeting and withdrew from SUNY, convinced that her school would not help her.

“How could you not want someone who did this off your campus?” asks Ryan. “Why would she be pushing mediation, pushing me to do nothing? It finally dawned on me that this was about protecting the school’s image.”

In an interview with the Center, Dean Eaton said she gave Ryan the same standard list of available options she gives to all alleged victims. The dean did not remember the student saying she wanted a campus hearing.

“Part of not re-victimizing the victim is to lay out all of the options that are available to them,” says Eaton, who adds that she could not have predicted Ryan’s response. By giving options, “you’re giving them the power and the choice to make a decision in terms of what they would like to do.”

Eaton seemed unaware that Title IX obligated an investigation into sexual assault reports, and said she had not been trained on the legislation. The school’s director of media relations, Eric Gullickson, stresses that the school was in compliance with Title IX, and says that coordination was left to the associate athletic director because “[o]ur work with Title IX has been with respect to athletic participation by women.”

New Paltz maintains that faculty and staff did what they could to keep Ryan safe, by issuing a no-contact order between the two students and directing her to counseling, and could do nothing else without her participation and her continued attendance at the school. Eaton vigorously denies the contention that the school was more concerned with its own reputation than with a student’s well-being.

“I get every single police report that’s initiated on this campus. I contact students. I reach out to them,” says Eaton. “I feel as though if I had an alternative motive, I wouldn’t have reached out to her.”

Few of the roughly 8,000 students at SUNY New Paltz have admitted an interest in pursuing disciplinary proceedings in sex offenses, according to statistics the school provided to the Center. Since 1998, only six students have reported a sexual assault to the office responsible for initiating those proceedings. Of those, three cases resulted in a campus hearing. Just one punishment has resulted from a sexual assault case — an expulsion in 2002.

From the Justice Department-funded study, a college the size of SUNY New Paltz could estimate that more than 1,700 of its female students were victims of rape or attempted rape in that 11-year period.

Overcoming Perceptions, Fighting Roadblocks

Segawa, president of the student affairs administrators group, and dean of students at the University of Puget Sound, says that college and university administrators are increasingly aware of perceived roadblocks for students reporting rape and are doing what they can to address them.

“Most institutions want to be very responsive and supportive, but there may be reasons that perception exists,” he says.

Segawa suggested that a lack of visibility of the available resources and ignorance of the avenues available for students accounts for some of that perception. He disputes the idea that it is in the interest of the school to keep barriers in place in order to keep rape statistics from going up. Puget Sound often reports zero sex offenses, an “absurd, very low number” he has trouble explaining to parents. “The reality is we know it isn’t zero, but we don’t have another number we can give them.”

Colleges and universities’ efforts to produce more accurate numbers also can backfire.

Char Kopchick, assistant dean of students at Ohio University, says that her university’s efforts at increasing sexual assault reporting rates several years ago achieved just the opposite effect. The university put in place a mandatory reporting requirement — meaning that all faculty and staff were obligated to report a sexual assault to police, unless they were counselors or health care providers specifically bound by privacy rules. As a result, Kopchick says, students stopped showing up.

“Now they know there’s going to be an investigation,” she says. “What we find with a lot of survivors, they’re not ready for that. … Sometimes it takes a person six months before they’re willing to go forward. Sometimes they never want to do anything.”

Carter, the public policy director of Security On Campus Inc., cautions schools against tipping the balance too far toward either ignoring victims’ wishes by pushing them to take action, or, conversely, blithely assuming a victim would not wish to move forward with campus disciplinary charges without giving her all the information needed to make a decision.

“If victims know they’ll be supported and believed, they’ll come forward,” Carter says. He points to successes at places like Harvard, where a coordinated effort to improve response to rape victims following a 2003 investigation of alleged Title IX violations resulted in a distinct rise in rape reports. “If they want counseling or to pursue disciplinary action or criminal charges and the school supports them, they’ll do it,” he adds.

Struggling with the Aftermath

Elizabeth Ryan, who now lives back at home with her mother, still struggles with panic attacks, and has had a hard time regaining her footing since leaving SUNY New Paltz.

Her alleged attacker, meanwhile, is back in New Paltz living the life of a typical college student. Visited by a reporter one Thursday last fall, he was just getting out of bed at 3 p.m. to make himself bacon. To this day, he says, he has never told his parents or his frat brothers that New Paltz town police questioned him about the reported rape. The investigation is still officially open, but inactive. Detective David Dugatkin, who was assigned to the case, says that after speaking to both alleged victim and perpetrator, there were enough “ambiguities” about the issue of consent that he referred the case to the District Attorney’s office rather than making an immediate arrest. Ryan did not pursue it. Kevin Harp, the Ulster County assistant district attorney who spoke with Ryan, said he invited her to meet with him, but that he never heard back from her. He says he presented her a realistic account of the steps involved if she decided to pursue charges, and said he did nothing to discourage her.

The accused student firmly maintains that sex was consensual, adding that he kissed Ryan goodbye at the end of the night. He thinks the cops believed him. “At first I was nervous and scared, because nothing like that had ever happened to me before,” he says. “But after I was questioned by the police, nobody ever contacted me about it again, and that was it.” His only gripe, he says, is with the school. He believes it was unfair of SUNY New Paltz to issue him a no-contact order forbidding him from entering the dorm where Ryan lived. After all, nobody from the school ever bothered to ask him what happened.

That’s a complaint his accuser shares.

In Megan Wright’s case, it appeared initially that the school would investigate. Dean John Prescott met her within half an hour, was polite, asked questions, and suggested that Wright receive counseling. He said that someone from the school would watch the surveillance video, leaving the impression that he would take action.

As they walked out of the office and peered into a sea of young male faces, Wright’s mother remembers thinking, “Is it you? Is it you?”

But the lawsuit contends that instead of investigating, the school left the case entirely in the hands of a local police detective, a Title IX violation. The family alleges that the detective, James Nawoichyk, a part-time instructor at Dominican College, was “hopelessly conflicted,” and failed to conduct a thorough investigation. The police log shows that before closing the investigation around the time of Wright’s death, the detective did not question Fegins or Thorne, who had hired lawyers, or inspect the dorm room where the alleged rape had taken place.

Nawoichyk declined to comment because of the pending lawsuit against Dominican, but Orangetown Police Chief Kevin Nulty has told a local newspaper, The Journal News, “The department stands behind the officer and the integrity of the investigation.”
Never once in four meetings Wright’s mother had with Dean Prescott over the summer did the dean mention the possibility of the sort of on-campus judicial proceedings outlined in the handbook and required by law.

Unable to get any comfort from her school, or assurance that she would be safe from the alleged attackers, Wright did not return to the college in the fall. On her last visit, says McGrath, her daughter tried to see the college president, but was told she was unavailable. “They were making her feel like she wasn’t worth it — the police, the school. The people that you think you’re going to be able to turn to, to make things right,” says McGrath.

The lawyer for Dominican College, Semprevivo, says without elaborating that contrary to the allegations laid out in the complaint, the school did investigate. He says the school cannot comment on disciplinary action against students, because of privacy concerns. Certainly, Wright was never asked to testify in any hearing. Rocco, Wright’s friend, says no one from the school asked her any questions. Hill, the student accused by Wright’s family of conspiring in the incident, says he was never questioned or disciplined by the school. He returned to the school the following fall before dropping out for financial reasons.

The other two Dominican College students withdrew, too, for reasons that are unclear. One of them, Lynch, transferred to Ramapo College, where he plays on the basketball team.

In June 2008, the New York Office of the Attorney General, after an investigation initiated at the urging of the family’s powerhouse lawyer Gloria Allred, fined Dominican College $20,000 for fraudulently under-reporting crime statistics. Among other things, the school had failed to take appropriate account of Wright’s rape report. As part of a settlement, the college agreed to appoint a Title IX coordinator.

By the time she learned that criminal charges would probably not pan out, the light had left Wright’s eyes, her mother says. She had stopped singing around the house and goofing off like she used to. In the modest home where her daughter lived and died, McGrath sits beneath an outsize photo of Wright as a baby, and beside others of her in a prom dress, and as a kid — photos she talks to before bed.

“No wonder why so many girls don’t come forward. They see what happens. They see,” says McGrath, “how they are attacked all over again.”

Staff writer Kristen Lombardi contributed to this article.

Campus Sexual Assault Statistics Don’t Add Up

2012-06-05T11:47:42-04:00

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.

Across the higher education community, such discrepancies are not unusual. A nine-month investigation by The Center for Public Integrity has found that limitations and loopholes in the federal mandatory campus crime reporting law, known as the Clery Act, are causing systematic problems in accurately documenting the total numbers of campus-related sexual assaults. The most troubling of these loopholes involves broadly applied reporting exemptions for counselors who may be covered by confidentiality protections. Confusion over definitions of sexual offenses, as well as the law’s comprehensive reporting provisions, have created additional problems. “When you talk to 10 different institutions,” explains Marlon Lynch, president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, “you almost find 10 different ways of reporting under the law.”

Available data suggest that, on many campuses, far more sexual offenses are occurring than are reflected in the official Clery numbers. A Center survey of 152 crisis-services programs and clinics on or near college campuses requested incident numbers over the past year: 58 facilities responded with hard statistics. Clery totals from higher education institutions are theoretically supposed to include information from such service providers, but confusion remains over exactly who must report. A comparison of the survey data with the schools’ previous five-year average of official Clery totals shows that the clinic numbers are considerably higher, suggesting a systematic problem with Clery data collection.

Responses to the Center’s survey found that 49 out of those 58 crisis-services programs and clinics recorded higher reports of sexual offenses in a recent one-year period than the average yearly figure submitted by their schools in Clery statistics from 2002 to 2006 — the last five years for which full Clery data are available. At Florida State University, for instance, those 57 sexual assaults logged by the victim advocacy program are more than double the university’s average 26 sexual offenses recorded from 2002 to 2006.

Some of the discrepancies are explainable. Many clinics record higher statistics because they serve a broader clientele than the schools’ student populations or because some of the incidents occurred elsewhere — particularly off campus. And crisis counselors say they routinely document reports from students who were sexually assaulted on spring break, raped in high school, or molested as children — none of which fall under Clery reporting requirements. But many survey respondents affirmed assertions from critics that colleges and universities are ducking bad publicity by exploiting weaknesses in the Clery Act and ignoring their clinic numbers, thus keeping official statistics low.

“Clery, in our minds, doesn’t do what it was intended to do,” says Mary Friedrichs of the Office of Victim Assistance at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The 42 sexual assaults documented by her program in one recent year didn’t appear in the university’s Clery data because, as certified counselors with confidentiality exemptions, her staff doesn’t report them to the campus police. By comparison, CU recorded an average of 14 sexual offenses from 2002 to 2006. Echoing many victim advocates, Friedrichs adds, “We don’t think it [the official data] tells a story that is understandable.”

Clery Confusion

The Clery Act requires some 7,500 colleges and universities — nearly 4,000 of which are four-year public and private institutions — to disclose statistics about crime on or near their campuses in annual security reports. Many provisions have evolved since the law passed 19 years ago, but what hasn’t changed is Clery’s requirement that schools poll a wide range of “campus security authorities” when gathering data. That designation includes a broad array of campus programs, departments, and centers, such as student health centers, women’s centers, and even counseling centers. The designation also applies to officials who supervise students — deans, coaches, housing directors, judicial affairs officers, to name a few. Experts on the law say that any center or program set up by an institution to respond to crime victims and to serve their needs should be designated a campus security authority, requiring Clery reporting. Only licensed mental-health and pastoral counselors are explicitly exempt from Clery reporting requirements.

In theory, those stipulations should make for comprehensive crime reporting. At the University of Iowa, a compliance team, led by the public safety department, collects documentation from non-police campus authorities and compiles statistics. According to Associate Dean of Students Tom Baker, who oversaw the process for years, the university distributes an e-mail letter seeking key details on sexual assaults and other crimes reported to campus authorities in a half-dozen offices and programs, including the school’s sexual misconduct response coordinator. The law requires schools to solicit information from local police departments, and Iowa’s team contacts four of them.

But the data gathering isn’t always meticulous. In fact, a 2002 study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice found that “only 36.5 percent of schools reported crime statistics in a manner that was fully consistent with the Clery Act.” A Center examination of 10 years worth of complaints filed against institutions under Clery shows that the most common problem is that schools are not properly collecting data. Some submit only reports from law-enforcement officials. In August 2004, Yale University became the subject of a complaint after it was discovered to be doing just that. Five years later, the U.S. Department of Education has yet to finish its review; a department spokesperson declined to comment on the pending inquiry. Evidently, though, the complaint has sparked some changes. Peter Parker, who heads Yale’s sexual harassment grievance board, began forwarding sexual assault data to the school’s official Clery reporter in 2007. “Before that,” he confirms, “nobody had asked us to compile our reports.”

Other schools submit inaccurate sexual assault statistics — in some cases inadvertently; in others cases, intentionally. Nearly half of the 25 Clery complaint investigations conducted by the Education Department over the past decade determined that schools were omitting sexual offenses collected by some sources or failing to report them at all. In October 2007, the department fined LaSalle University, in Philadelphia, $110,000 for not reporting 28 crimes, including a small number of sexual assaults. (The university appealed the decision and then settled for $87,500, without admitting it was at fault.) In April 2005, Salem International University, in West Virginia, agreed to pay the department $200,000 in fines after never reporting a sexual offense in its Clery reports, even though the school itself had documented such offenses.

There’s also been misclassification of sexual assaults. Schools can wrongly categorize reports of acquaintance rape or fondling as “non-forcible” sexual offenses — a definition that should only apply to incest and statutory rape. Five of the 25 Clery audits found schools were miscoding forcible rapes as non-forcible instead. In June 2008, Eastern Michigan University agreed to pay the department $350,000 — the largest Clery fine ever — for a host of violations, including miscoding rapes. In February 2002, officials determined that Mount Saint Mary College, in New York, had incorrectly reported two sexual offenses as non-forcible; the school had to correct the error. The problem has grown so prevalent that the department now calls schools whenever they submit even one report of a non-forcible sexual offense.

“I don’t know anyone who’s read the definitions [who] can claim there are any non-forcible sex offenses on campuses,” says David Bergeron of the department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, which monitors Clery compliance. Still, 27 colleges reported one or two non-forcible sex offenses in their 2006 Clery data.

School officials and watchdog groups agree that colleges have improved Clery reporting over the past two decades. Dolores Stafford, police chief at George Washington University and a national expert on the Clery Act, has trained campus police officers and administrators on the law since the late 1990s, and has seen what she calls “a sea change” in attitudes, which she attributes to improved training and guidance from the Education Department. These days, she says, “There are less intentional and egregious violators.” Department audits still reveal schools getting in trouble over their data, she explains, “but not a whole lot of areas where people are purposely underreporting or over-reporting.”

Are the Numbers Believable?

Indeed, today’s issues may be subtler than that. Rape generally ranks among the most underreported of all crime statistics, experts say. But critics point out that the huge percentage of schools reporting no incidents whatsoever indicates a serious problem with Clery data collection. In 2006, in fact, 3,068 two- and four-year colleges and universities — 77 percent — reported zero sexual offenses. Another 501 reported just one or two.

All those miniscule totals look like red flags to watchdog organizations. “Find any school with a zero, and you’ll find problems with Clery reporting,” asserts Margaret Jakobson, a victims’ advocate who’s testified before Congress about issues with Clery compliance. In the late ’90s, Jakobson, along with Security on Campus, a watchdog group, filed some of the earliest Clery Act complaints after identifying students who had reported being raped on campuses touting zeros.

“It strains believability to think that those numbers could actually be true,” says Mark Goodman, former director of the Student Press Law Center, which has long lobbied to close Clery loopholes. He, like many critics, suspects that some schools are intentionally misinterpreting their obligations under Clery and weeding out reports in order to protect their reputations as safe campuses.

But Lynch, of the law enforcement administrators, and other campus police chiefs believe all those zeros most likely reflect something else: Most rape victims don’t report the crime in the first place. The 2002 Justice Department-funded study has actually pegged the number of college women who report their rapes to campus police or other officials at just under five percent. It could be that some schools with low sexual assault statistics don’t do a good job at encouraging student victims to come forward. Or it could be that some do — and still end up with zeros. After all, one limitation of the Clery Act is that statistics reflect “official” reports. In other words, a victim has to tell a campus security authority for a sexual assault to count.

“We get the feeling that people would prefer that we would report a lot of sexual assaults even if we were making it up,” observes Stafford, the George Washington chief, “but I can only report what I know.”

Another limitation of the Clery Act: it counts only those crimes occurring on or near campuses, and in school-affiliated buildings like fraternity houses. The initial thinking behind this narrow geographic focus was that off-campus crimes would inevitably be documented by local police, experts say. But that means that Clery statistics don’t include such settings as off-campus apartments, where most campus-related rapes are believed to take place. Last year, Jacqui Pequignot, who heads the victim advocate program at Florida State, recorded just nine sexual offenses on or near campus, as compared to 48 off campus. Pequignot, who estimates that 36,000 of FSU’s 42,000 students live in apartments more than a block from the university, notes that critics often suspect misreporting whenever they don’t see huge numbers of campus sexual assaults. “But sometimes,” she says, “it’s really just about the fact that the numbers are greater off campus.”

See No Evil

Some schools ignore the reports of sexual assaults they do have. At the University of Iowa, alleged victims are instructed to contact the Rape Victim Advocacy Program for medical and counseling services. Housed on campus, the advocacy program records all calls, and categorizes incidents on or off campus. But these numbers don’t appear in the university’s security report, confirms associate counsel Rob Porter, because certified counselors make up the staff — and they have that privacy exemption. Instead, the school explains in a report footnote that the advocacy program has its own statistics.

And that’s more than what some schools do with counselors’ reports. At Texas Tech University, counselors don’t track the details of an alleged assault — its time, its location — needed for Clery reporting purposes. Jack Floyd, who compiles the Clery data, says counselors are encouraged to forward information about sexual assaults and other crimes to campus police. But, he affirms, “Nobody has returned a report form since I’ve been here,” beginning in 2001.

“Confidentiality inhibits our requirement to do so,” says Eileen Nathan, of the Texas Tech counseling center, explaining why the staff do not submit reports.

In fact, some counselors believe the fine print of the Clery Act encourages them not to report. Under the law, licensed therapists and pastoral counselors are the only campus employees excluded from reporting requirements. Schools can still use aggregate information — minus names and other identifying information — on sexual assaults from counseling centers, experts say. And interviews with survey respondents reveal that some colleges designate a center staffer as a campus authority for Clery purposes. Others offer a blanket exemption to the entire counseling staff, however, fueling criticisms that administrators are merely exploiting a loophole to keep official statistics low. Even Education Department officials suggest as much.

“Some institutions may try to stretch that [counselor] privilege,” Bergeron says.

One of the schools that has faced controversy on that front is West Virginia University. Deb Beazley is the sexual assault prevention educator at WVU; she is not a licensed counselor. Beazley helps alleged victims navigate services and heads the countywide sexual assault response team that services the campus. She maintains what she calls a “universal reporting system” of incidents culled from her records, as well as from university faculty and staff. She classifies the anonymous, third-party reports based on incident date, time, and location, either on or off campus. She even records the birth date of alleged victims to avoid double-counting. By all accounts, she compiles numbers in a way that would satisfy Clery requirements. But they don’t end up in official data, as per school policy, even though West Virginia counts rape reports forwarded to campus police by non-police campus authorities.

“It’s important to understand that, by definition, what Deb is collecting is survey data,” explains Bob Roberts, police chief at West Virginia University, “and we do not take survey data because it is anonymous.”

Roberts is not a stranger to Clery reporting disputes; in March 2004, West Virginia became the subject of a Clery Act complaint after three whistleblower police officers alleged that the university was miscoding crimes. Last September, the Education Department found some problems with the way the university had dealt with sexual assaults — misclassifying forcible and non-forcible offenses, and failing to include sexual assault reports. In its response to the department’s preliminary findings, dated October 30, 2008, the university admitted the errors and outlined recent steps to bolster its record-keeping. But counting Beazley’s anonymous reports isn’t among the improvements.

“You have to compare apples to apples,” contends Roberts, who now trains campus officials around the state on the finer points of the Clery Act, “and other campuses I know of are not reporting anonymous data.”

Yet some schools clearly are — Florida State, for one. Experts say colleges should count numbers from any campus program set up for victims to report crimes and seek services. Stafford, the George Washington chief, collects statistics from her university’s response team, its counseling center, and its health center in order to “give people a full picture of what’s happening on the campus.” Still, she stresses that schools ignoring these numbers are not necessarily violating the law.

“It is not clear in the [Education Department’s Clery Act] handbook or in the law … that victim advocates and sexual assault services coordinators are required to report,” she says. “It’s a big weakness right now.”

And one not likely to change any time soon. According to Bergeron, the Education Department has to allow some room for schools to interpret who actually constitutes a campus security authority; after all, it has to regulate everything from a for-profit technical school to a four-year university. He doubts it’s possible to write a department regulation answering “every question in every circumstance that everyone on a campus would ever encounter,” he adds.

But there’s little doubt that the differing interpretations of the law are sowing confusion — with one school submitting sexual assault statistics beyond what’s required and another the bare minimum. Ultimately, these loopholes, coupled with the law’s limitations, can render Clery data almost meaningless. Victim advocates point out that the schools they believe are reporting the most accurate sexual assault numbers — the 10 percent who reported three or more rapes in 2006 — now have to compete with all those schools touting zeros.

“It’s almost like UMass gets penalized for doing it correctly,” notes Rebecca Lockwood, who heads rape crisis services at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her program numbers are gathered for Clery purposes. In 2006, UMass Amherst ranked among just 61 schools, or 1.5 percent, documenting campus sexual assaults in the double digits. As Lockwood sees it, “I’d like to see the schools that report zero be held accountable.”

CORRECTION: The original version of this article erroneously reported that the Department of Education fined LaSalle University for ignoring crime data, including 28 sexual assaults. The university and the department later reached a settlement. The data in question actually involved a total of 28 crimes, of which only a small number were sexual offenses. The error arose out of a misreading of an Education Department document. The article posted on the Center’s website has been revised accordingly.

CORRECTION: The original version incorrectly stated 77 percent of four-year universities reported 0 rapes in 2006. The article should have said 77 percent of two and four year universities reported 0 rapes.

Reporting Fellow Claritza Jimenez contributed to this article.