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​The Safe Campus Act won’t make campuses safer

Congress’ sexual assault bill will have negative repercussions for survivors

In July, members of Congress introduced the Safe Campus Act, which aims to provide students with due process protections and bring campus sexual misconduct boards up to par with the criminal justice system. Among other changes, the act would require survivors to report their assaults to the police in addition to their universities; if a survivor does not wish to involve law enforcement, her school cannot pursue disciplinary action against the accused.

Last March, the General Assembly passed a similar sexual assault bill. Its bill requires school personnel to report evidence of a sexual assault to that school’s Title IX committee within 72 hours and also requires that any case deemed a felony assault be submitted to the police or for review by a local commonwealth attorney. When the bill passed, we argued mandatory reporting to the police or a local attorney could be harmful for survivors. The police, as a whole, have not demonstrated an ability to respond to survivors’ needs when questioning them: according to Claire Wyatt, a 2013 University graduate and organizer for advocacy group New Virginia Majority, 90 percent of assault survivors who go to the police have a retraumatizing moment during initial questioning. The fear of interacting with police — and of bringing criminal charges against someone — could deter survivors from reporting their sexual assaults. A drop in reporting rates would undermine the value of mandatory reporting, since if survivors don’t report their assaults, then no steps can be taken to discipline the accused and make campuses safer.

The national application of the General Assembly’s bill could have similar effects. If law enforcement has a more prominent role in universities’ cases, survivors may be hesitant to pursue charges, either due to their own trauma or because they don’t wish to launch a criminal investigation or harsher sanction than a school would provide. Of course, someone who has committed a rape deserves a criminal prosecution — but if a survivor won’t come forward for fear of criminal prosecution, with this bill, her rapist will get no prosecution at all, since the school can’t pursue its own adjudicative process.

The Safe Campus Act also confuses standards for various illegal activities; under it, colleges would still be allowed to punish a student for illegal acts like selling drugs regardless of police involvement, whereas sexual assault and battery would specifically require police involvement. It seems illogical to hold schools to different standards for different illegal activities. The issue of due process is often brought up when it concerns schools’ adjudication of sexual assault, and due process is incredibly important — but national legislators aren’t questioning whether due process is met in the adjudication of other illegal activities, singling out sexual assault.

According to The Huffington Post, 27 advocacy organizations have publicly declared opposition to this bill. Together, the president of the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, the executive director of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault and the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence wrote a letter opposing the bill in August. Experts in this field recognize that school processes and the criminal justice process are two distinct systems with different missions, and a school should be able to sanction an offender separately from a criminal process. If schools cannot move forward with their own sanctioning processes, their campuses will remain unsafe.

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