Campus-Rape Remarks By Education Official Spur Furor, Apology
Already under scrutiny for meeting with students who had been falsely accused of rape, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had the situation escalate when the head of her department’s Office of Civil Rights made troubling generalizations about campus sexual assaults.
On July 13, Ms. DeVos met with survivors of sexual assault, as well as students who had been falsely accused of sexual assault and disciplined under Title IX, the 1972 law that protects students from discrimination based upon gender, as part of an effort to re-evaluate President Obama’s expansion of the law to include colleges’ investigations of sexual assault complaints.
Questioned Probes’ Balance
The announcement July 11 that Ms. DeVos would meet with men’s-rights group National Coalition for Men Carolinas created a stir, and the controversy snowballed when an interview of Candice Jackson, head of the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, was published the same day by the New York Times in which she said she believed that campus-rape investigations have not been “fairly balanced between the accusing victim and the accused student,” and then suggested that most sexual-assault investigations did not include claims that the blamed student “overrode the will of a young woman.”
“Rather, the accusations—90 percent of them—fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’” she said.
Ms. Jackson apologized for her words.
“As a survivor of rape myself, I would never seek to diminish anyone’s experience. My words in the New York Times poorly characterized the conversations I’ve had with countless groups of advocates,” she said in a statement. “What I said was flippant, and I am sorry. All sexual harassment and sexual assault must be taken seriously—which has always been my position and will always be the position of this department.”
But for education leaders and advocates for sexual-assault survivors, the damage was done.
‘A Pit in My Stomach’
“That statement put a pit in my stomach when I read it,” Jess Davidson, the managing Campus-Rape Remarks By Education Official Spur Furor, Apology | Open Articles | thechiefleader.com:
