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President Carter on Letterman: “One of the Worst Places in Our Country for Sexual Abuse is on College Campuses”

March 31, 2014

By Douglas Smith

Former President Jimmy Carter called college campuses a hotbed for rape on the Late Show with David Letterman last Monday night. He said;

· “One of the worst places in our county for sexual abuse is on college campuses. The finest universities in America are a place where girls are regularly sexually abused. Quite often their rapists are serial rapists who know that when they go to a college campus, they won’t be revealed, they won’t be charged, they won’t be prosecuted because college Presidents and Deans don’t want their universities to get a reputation as a center for sexual abuse.” [1]

That is a profound statement made by a former president who has been known for his principled stands on human rights issues. How true is this statement with regard to the University of Michigan?

There has been a dramatic change in the number of sexual assaults reported to the Office of Student Conflict Resolution (OSCR) since the Dept. of Education Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to Universities in April 2011, informing them that current policies on sexual assault on campuses were not in compliance with the Title IX law and issuing guidance as to what needed to be done to correct that lack of compliance.

Reports to SAPAC are for counseling and are confidential but a student must report to OSCR if they want the University to take any disciplinary action. Part of the letter from the DOE said that Universities could no longer use the possibility of criminal prosecution as a roadblock to prevent disciplinary hearings for students accused of sexual assaults.

The University’s written policy on sexual assaults has never stipulated that a victim had to complete a criminal trial before any disciplinary hearings could be held. The low number of reported sexual assaults that have led to OSCR hearings and at least one report from a victim indicates that this was the unwritten policy.

Ideally, all sexual assaults should be reported to OSCR for disciplinary hearings in order to protect not only the victim but all potential victims on campus. The dramatic increase in reporting of sexual assaults for disciplinary hearings is a good thing but it remains to be seen whether the university will administer the new policy in a way that will truly protect victims of sexual assault.

We also must keep in mind the rights of the accused to due process.

Current OSCR policies do not allow a student to be represented by an attorney. The administration’s rationale is that discipline is educational and rarely results in expulsion but that is not true for allegations of sexual assault.

These policies do not allow the accused to confront the witnesses against them, nor do they allow any rights of discovery for documents or witnesses against them.

Students are not even guaranteed the due process described in the OSCR procedures because each school is allowed to develop their own procedures that circumvent OSCR. One example is that the OSCR procedures require 20 days’ notice to allow the student to get legal advice but the School of Nursing procedures don’t require similar notice.

A finding that a student is responsible for a sexual assault is a life-changing event and the accused is entitled to due process that is much more rigorous than the University currently provides.

This board needs to pay due attention to this issue and revamp the due process in the student disciplinary procedures for all schools and all campuses.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1aBUtedW8Y (at 13:20 into the video)