Opinion: DeVos' new guidelines on handling campus sexual assault raise risk of another MSU

[demmiblue]

Source: The Detroit Free Press

Michigan State University’s failure to investigate years of sexual abuse allegations against physician Larry Nassar may become even more the norm in light of changes to the process of addressing sexual violence in education announced in September by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The new guidelines provide schools the option of adopting a higher standard of proof in Title IX cases, allow schools to create appeals processes only for those accused of perpetrating sexual violence and give significant autonomy to educational institutions to create their own response protocols. Given what we have learned about the decades of abuse perpetrated at the hands of an employee at Michigan State, does it really make sense to give schools even more power and discretion to control the internal mechanisms of reporting and investigation of sexual violence?

Several years ago during my time as a faculty member at Michigan State University College of Law, I served as a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant that investigated the reporting of sexual violence in the context of prisons, using the groundbreaking Michigan class action lawsuit, Neal v. Michigan Department of Corrections, as a case study. My interdisciplinary work on this project inspired subsequent research into how sexual violence is perpetrated (and subsequently minimized and ignored) within other closed and quasi-closed institutional systems like the military, immigration detention facilities and institutions of higher education.

So while Michigan State was benefiting financially and earning positive recognition from this project and other similar grants that address systemic gender inequality, it was likely simultaneously ignoring the abuse of hundreds of its female patients and female student athletes, allowing sexual assault to carry on, unchecked, for decades. It is difficult to comprehend how the university where I researched the complications associated with the reporting and investigation of sexual violence in closed systems was itself illustrating these same complications in its failure to take seriously and fairly investigate and adjudicate the claims of more than 150 women and girls.

Read more: https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/01/26/msu-title-9/1065913001/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. DeVos belongs in a courtroom for the rest of her life along with her entire family

defending themselves of their many crimes against humanity.