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Fraternities Lobby Against Campus Rape Investigations

Fraternities Lobby Against Campus Rape Investigations

By David Glovin (Bloomberg News) (TNS)

College fraternities and sororities, concerned that students accused of sexual assault are treated unfairly, are pushing Congress to make it harder for universities to investigate rape allegations.

The groups’ political arm plans to bring scores of students to Capitol Hill on April 29 to lobby for a requirement that the criminal justice system resolve cases before universities look into them or hand down punishments, according to an agenda reviewed by Bloomberg News.

“If people commit criminal acts, they should be prosecuted and they should go to jail,” said Michael Greenberg, leader of 241-chapter Sigma Chi, one of many fraternities participating in the legislative push.

The Fraternity & Sorority Political Action Committee, or “FratPAC,” and two other groups will ask Congress to block colleges from suspending all fraternities on a campus because of a serious incident at a single house. In addition, the Greek representatives want a rule against “any mandate” for chapters to go co-ed.

These Washington efforts come as colleges have shut fraternity chapters or required them to admit women after sex- assault allegations. Activists representing rape victims say that universities don’t take complaints seriously. A new documentary, The Hunting Ground, singles out fraternities for creating an environment that enables assaults.

Yet there’s a growing backlash from critics — including some Harvard and University of Pennsylvania law professors — who say university sexual-assault proceedings are stacked against the accused.

The U.S. Education Department requires colleges to investigate complaints and discipline students found responsible for sexual assault. University disciplinary boards can take action, including suspensions or expulsions, far more quickly than courts and, unlike criminal proceedings, don’t require a finding “beyond a reasonable doubt.” To sanction a student, allegations must be found more likely than not to be true.

“Campus judicial proceedings” should be deferred “until completion of criminal adjudication (investigation and trial),” according to an e-mail sent to students selected to lobby for fraternities.

Joelle Stangler, the University of Minnesota student body president, said the fraternity groups’ efforts are “extremely problematic.”

“Adjudication on campuses is incredibly important for victims and survivors, to make sure they receive some sort of justice,” said Stangler, who has worked with a Minnesota advocacy group for sexual-assault victims.

Ten-year-old FratPAC, which has raised about $2.1 million in donations for congressional candidates, invites students every year to Capitol Hill to lobby for tax breaks for fraternity houses. In 2012, it fought against federal anti-hazing legislation.

Two other groups — the North-American Interfraternity Conference, which represents 74 national fraternities, and the National Panhellenic Conference, which represents 26 sororities — will join FratPAC’s lobbying effort.

Fraternities and sororities are concerned about assailants going unpunished and victims lacking support services, as well as the rights of students facing a disciplinary process “that is not fair and transparent,” said Washington lobbyist Kevin O’Neill, who is FratPAC’s executive director, in a statement on behalf of the fraternity and sorority groups.

“Fraternities and sororities intend to be a leader in offering ideas for how Congress can provide a safe campus for all students,” O’Neill said.

Along with activists, Greek groups will be taking on many college administrators, who say they need campus proceedings to keep potentially dangerous students off their campuses before criminal cases are resolved.

“Imagine a situation where a young women is sexually assaulted, and it has to go through the state judicial process,” saidMark Koepsell, who heads the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors, which represents faculty and administrators. “Meanwhile, the alleged perpetrator is walking around campus.”

The Washington-based Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, a trade group, will oppose the Greek group’s agenda.
“The criminal justice system has been a virtual failure in its ability to address sexual assault,” said Kevin Kruger, president of the group. “It’s a really, really, really bad idea.”

Jennifer Waller, executive director of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, which represents the staff of sexual-assault hearings, said the goal of campus proceedings is to weigh whether a student violated university rules, not the law. The accused has a right to present a defense, she said.

Dozens of men have filed lawsuits claiming they have been unfairly treated in campus hearings. Fraternity groups also point to cases of what they call a rush to judgment against Greek houses. University of Virginia suspended activity at all houses after Rolling Stone magazine published a since-discredited article in November claiming fraternity members had gang-raped a student. On Monday, police in Charlottesville, UVA’s home, said they found no evidence supporting the Rolling Stone account and were suspending their investigation.

Beginning April 27 in Washington, the fraternity groups will provide two days of training to the student lobbyists, who will then split into small groups for visits with lawmakers and their aides. Members of congress, including recipients of FratPAC donations, will speak at its April 29 dinner.

In her summary of the Greeks’ positions, Jennifer Kilian, director of member services for the interfraternity conference, said the student lobbyists will also call for more data and education about sexual assault and new prevention programs.

“Students and alumni participating in the Greek Hill visits will be lobbying on the unified position fraternities and sororities have adapted (sic) on Title IX issues,” Kilian said, referring to the federal law that bans discrimination on the basis of gender, inan e-mail to those selected to lobby.

(c) 2015 Bloomberg News, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Image: from The Hunting Ground via YouTube

Devastating ‘Hunting Ground’ Documents Shocking Prevalence Of Campus Rape

Devastating ‘Hunting Ground’ Documents Shocking Prevalence Of Campus Rape

By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — Documentary director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering can often be found in the eye of a hurricane. Three years ago, they teamed up on The Invisible War, and now they are back with the equally devastating The Hunting Ground.

The former film, an Emmy winner that was also Oscar nominated, was such a shocking look at rape in the military that it led to Pentagon policy changes and congressional reforms.
Now, with Hunting Ground, the team is exploring another hot-button issue that is both similar and different, an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses.

Like its predecessor, Hunting Ground bristles with unnerving statistics: for instance, that one in five college women, and one in 33 college men, will be sexually assaulted during their time on campus, adding up to an estimated 100,000 assaults for the coming year. But only 5 percent of these get reported.

Skeptics have challenged those statistics, but Hunting Ground also features heartbreaking first-person interviews, often conducted by producer Ziering off camera, about the specifics of the attacks and their aftermath. Given that the colleges and universities mentioned are geographically and culturally diverse, including Berkeley, Tufts, Yale, Swarthmore and the University of Southern California, it’s striking how similar the situations, as well as the official responses, turn out to be.

These are not, the filmmakers emphasize, he-said she-said situations. Rather, these assaults are often the work of calculated predators who target victims and wait for opportunities. (In an especially chilling moment, one convicted predator goes on camera to describe how it’s done.) One statistic cited by Hunting Ground is that serial predators are responsible for 91 percent of all sexual assaults on campus, with each predator committing an average of six assaults.

As in the military, most survivors of assault at college feel that the often-hostile, disbelieving, blame-the-victim response of the institution they believed in was as difficult to deal with as the attack itself. A case at James Madison University in Virginia, where perpetrators were expelled after they graduated, is shown provoking outrage on the part of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart.

It was bitter dissatisfaction with how the University of North Carolina treated them that led UNC students Annie Clark and Andrea Pino to become friends and then take a more activist route.

Hunting Ground had considerable access to these two women as they first came up with the idea of filing a Title IX anti-gender discrimination complaint against their school and then traveled the country putting together an organization called End Rape on Campus to help women at other schools do the same. The positive energy this campaign evokes is a much-needed bright spot in a story that doesn’t have a lot of them.

For, as Hunting Ground thoroughly details, powerful factors are arrayed against students who report being assaulted, starting with what writer Caitlin Flanagan calls “the American fraternity industry.”

With frat houses being what one interviewee describes as “unregulated bars,” sometimes serving doctored alcohol, Hunting Ground reports that fraternity men are three times more likely than other men to commit rape. But a confluence of financial factors apparently makes these institutions all but untouchable.

Statistics provided by the film also indicate that athletes are involved in a higher-than-average number of assaults, but because big-time sports are such moneymakers, little is done by colleges in this area as well.

Some of the film’s most wrenching first-person stories involve accusations against athletes, including the story of St. Mary’s College of Indiana student Lizzy Seeberg, related by her father, Tom, of how his daughter committed suicide.

An athlete is also involved in the best-known incident that The Hunting Ground deals with, as Erica Kinsman goes public for the first time to tell in detail her side of the story involving Jameis Winston, the Florida State quarterback she accuses of sexual assault. (No charges were filed against Winston, and he was cleared of violating the school’s student code.)

The Hunting Ground posits that money keeps these centers of higher learning from doing more about these complaints. Colleges and universities are determined to protect their reputations, fearing that willingness to acknowledge a problem would be bad for business. Fear of retaliation often keeps faculty and administration from speaking up for students or talking at all, and six university presidents declined to be interviewed here. If it does nothing else, The Hunting Ground should make that kind of evasion more difficult in the future.

© 2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Image: YouTube

Guns On Campus: Not An Agenda For Women’s Safety

Guns On Campus: Not An Agenda For Women’s Safety

Allowing guns on campus won’t reduce sexual assault on campus — instead, it will increase the risk of homicide.

Two years ago, Republican leaders released a post-mortem analysis of the 2012 election in an effort to better understand how they lost the single women’s vote by 36 percent. The 100-page report recommended that GOP lawmakers do a better job listening to female voters, remind them of the party’s “historical role in advancing the women’s rights movement,” and fight against the “so-called War on Women.” Look no further than recent GOP-led efforts to expand gun rights on college campuses under the guise of preventing campus sexual assault for evidence that conservative lawmakers have failed to take their own advice.

Today, lawmakers in at least 14 states are pushing forward measures that would loosen gun regulations on college campuses. In the last few days, a number of them have seized upon the growing public outcry over campus sexual assault to argue that carrying a gun would prevent women from being raped. (So far they’ve been silent on how we might prevent young men – who, of course, would also be allowed to carry a gun – from attempting to rape women in the first place.)

Republican assemblywoman Michele Fiore of Nevada recently told The New York Times: “If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them? The sexual assaults that are occurring would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.” (Really? Hot little girls?) And as the Times highlighted, Florida representative Dennis Baxley jumped on the “stop campus rape” bandwagon recently when he successfully lobbied for a bill that would allow students to carry loaded, concealed weapons. “If you’ve got a person that’s raped because you wouldn’t let them carry a firearm to defend themselves, I think you’re responsible,” he said.

Let’s be clear. People aren’t raped because they aren’t carrying firearms. They are raped because someone rapes them. What a sinister new twist on victim blaming. As if anything positive could come from adding loaded weapons to the already toxic mix of drugs, alcohol, masculine groupthink, and the rape culture endemic in college sports and Greek life on campuses around the country.

These lawmakers have appropriated the battle cry of students who are demanding more accountability from academic institutions to prevent and respond to campus sexual assault. It’s a vain attempt to advance their own conservative agenda of liberalizing gun laws. This is an NRA agenda, not a women’s rights agenda. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, each of the lawmakers who have supported such legislation has received an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA). They have enjoyed endorsements from the NRA during election years and some – including Fiore and Baxley – received campaign contributions from the organization.

These lawmakers are pointing to the demands of a handful of women who have survived sexual assault and are advocating for liberalized campus gun laws. The experiences of these students are real and deserve to be heard and considered as we debate how to make campuses safer. We must also recognize that these students are outliers. Surveys have shown that nearly 80 percent of college students say they would not feel safe if guns were allowed on campus, and according to the Times, 86 percent of women said they were opposed to having weapons on campus. And for good reason.

Research shows that guns do not make women safer. In fact, just the opposite is true. Over the past 25 years, guns have accounted for more intimate partner homicides than all other weapons combined. In states that that require a background check for every handgun sale, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners. The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide for women by 500 percent. And women in the United States are 11 times more likely than women from other high-income countries to be murdered with a gun. Guns on college campuses would only make these statistics worse.

If the GOP wants to show they care about women – or at the very least care about their votes – this is just one of the realities they need to acknowledge. And they need to listen to the experiences of all women who have experienced sexual assault – like those who have created the powerful Know Your IX campaign – not just those who will help advance their NRA-sponsored agenda.

Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow her on Twitter @dreaflynn.

Cross-posted from the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog.

The Roosevelt Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Photo: Keary O. via Flickr