Society

Punishment First, Trial Later, or Never: The Education Department’s Investigation of Tufts University

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An excerpt from THIS article: http://www.openmarket.org/2014/05/21/punishment-first-trial-later-or-never-the-education-departments-investigation-of-tufts-university/

by HANS BADER on MAY 21, 2014 ·

Imagine if you could be expelled from your dorm, or a class, just because someone accused you of something — even if the accusation was so weak or thinly-grounded that it never even led to a disciplinary hearing against you, or the complainant was unwilling to even let you have the opportunity to clear your name. Such “interim measures” by colleges seem to be what the Education Department recently required of Tufts University in Massachusetts, as a condition of settling a Title IX investigation against it after it found a student not guilty of sexually assaulting a classmate who denied those charges, after he convinced it that the complainant was not credible and had clearly lied about her medical history. If Tufts didn’t agree to the settlement, the Education Department could have cut off all federal funds to the University — millions of dollars — and all federal financial aid to its students could have been terminated. So the settlement was not exactly voluntary. (Tufts tried to back out of the settlement, but knuckled under due to adverse publicity and the risk of huge financial losses.)

The Education Department’s demands violate due process rights. Although Tufts is a private university, the government cannot force a private institution to take an action that would constitute a due process violation if engaged in by a government institution. See Merritt v. Mackey (1987).

The settlement, on page 9, paragraph 15, requires an “an explicit assurance that the University provide interim measures during the course of a complaint, or a university-initiated investigation; an explicit statement that interim measures are available even if the complainant does not file or continue to pursue a complaint.” But taking “measures” against someone can violate due process even when the measures are not criminal and designed to protect the complainant rather than harm the accused, especially when the measures are not brief and limited to the time needed for a prompt hearing on whether the accused really is guilty or innocent. (For example, in Sacharow v. Sacharow, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a father accused of domestic violence had a right to defend himself before his ex-wife was put into the Address Confidentiality Program, which would have made it more difficult for him to maintain his relationship with his child. In Tyree v. Evans, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that a man was entitled not only to the opportunity to defend himself against domestic violence charges before a year-long restraining order could be granted to his accuser, but also the ability to cross-examine her.)
What are these “interim measures” the Education Department speaks of? As explained below, it includes things like excluding the accused from a classroom or dorm he shares with the accuser. So applying such interim measures even if the complainant does not file or continue to pursue a complaint could result in them continuing indefinitely, and could result in the accused being excluded from classes or dormitories without ever having any opportunity to defend himself, in blatant violation of the Constitution’s due process clause.

Disturbingly, the Education Department’s Letter of Findings never even discussed the possibility that the accused student might be innocent, as the university fact-finder found, even as it asserted, without any analysis of the evidence, that the lack of measures against the accused “resulted in the continuation of a sexually hostile environment for the Student.” (pg. 23). Instead, it complained that the university allowed in potentially exculpatory evidence, rather than rigidly applying deadlines or exclusionary rules, writing that “The University allowed consideration of the Student’s medical history, contrary to the applicable policies, even after the Accused was found to have obtained the Student’s confidential medical information by misrepresenting himself as a University medical student; and the University repeatedly modified existing procedures in a manner that benefited the Accused, including by allowing the Accused to submit an Addendum to his response on July 28, 2011, and allowing him to include details of the Student’s sexual history” (pp. 21-22). The way the accused obtained the complainant’s medical information would certainly be a basis for disciplining him for invasion of privacy, but not for finding sexual harassment, much less blaming the college (or finding a Title IX violation), since if the accused was innocent of sexual harassment and assault, he by definition can’t have created a “sexually hostile environment” for her.

Read the rest HERE

 

Society

Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Skewed White House Crusade on Sexual Assault

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Vice President Biden Speaks On White House Task Force To Protect Students From Sexual Assault

An excerpt from THIS article by Cathy Young:

Last year, a University of North Carolina student who remained anonymous for safety reasons spoke to the campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, about feeling victimized by the school’s response to a sexual assault report—the handling of which is now the target of a federal civil rights investigation.

But there’s a twist: The student is a man who says he was wrongly accused.

It doesn’t help that at many colleges, a zealous cadre of activists regards any rape exoneration as a defeat and defines rape so broadly as to criminalize insufficiently enthusiastic sex.During his freshman year, four months after their breakup, his former girlfriend—a fellow UNC student he had started dating in high school—filed a complaint alleging repeated rapes. The student was promptly suspendedand forced to undergo an evaluation that included demeaning sexual questions; the results, he claims, were improperly shared with his accuser. Even after a student and faculty panel of three women and two men cleared him of all charges except one of verbal abuse, he was barred from campus for another semester pending additional psychological tests, then ordered to avoid classes that could place him near his ex-girlfriend.

Of course, the federal probe—one of the 55 cases on the list just released by the Department of Education—addresses the complaint by the alleged victim, Landen Gambill, who feels the university let her down. No one but Gambill and her ex-boyfriend knows what really happened (and there may be a “his” and “her” version of the truth). But only one side of the story has the government’s backing—which highlights some of the problems with the Obama Administration’s initiative against sexual violence on college campuses.

The administration’s effort, which made headlines last week with a report by the White House task force on campus sexual assault and new Department of Education guidelines, has an indisputably noble goal. Unfortunately, it is marred by flaws, including alarmist statistics, fuzzy definitions and a polarizing ideology of presumed guilt.

One of the foundations of this crusade is the staggering claim that one in five female students are sexually assaulted while in college. This figure comes from the 2005-2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study, which, as Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler has noted, was conducted at just two schools, with a fairly low response rate. Moreover, the survey’s data for “drug- and/or alcohol-enabled sexual assault” (about 70% of the incidents in the study) lump together unconsciousness or incapacitation with intoxication that may cloud one’s judgment and affect consent. Notably, despite widespread sexual assault awareness programs, two-thirds of the college women whom the study counted as victims of drug- or alcohol-enabled rape did not think they were raped, and few felt they had suffered psychological harm.

University of Michigan economist Mark Perry also points out that, if you take police records from university campuses and factor in the White House estimate that only about 12% of campus sexual offenses are reported, you don’t get anywhere near a one-in-five victimization rate over the course of a woman’s college attendance—more like 1 in 20 or 1 in 30.

Even in smaller numbers, sexual assault on campus is a cause for concern. But the government’s quest to address it creates new troubling issues.

Thus, since 2011, the Department of Education has recommended that colleges use the lowest burden of proof—“preponderance of the evidence,” which means a finding of guilt if one feels the evidence tips even slightly toward the complainant—in disciplinary proceedings on sexual assault. (Traditionally, charges of student misconduct have been judged by the higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence.”) The new guidelines make this a requirement; they also encourage “juries” with no student participation and even a shift to a single-investigator process.

Read more HERE

 

Fatherhood, Society

When Men Are Raped

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For some kinds of sexual victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences
Photo by Thomas Northcut/Thinkstock

By Hanna Rosin – an excerpt from this article on Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.

Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.

Sexual assault is a term that gets refracted through the culture wars, as Slate’s own Emily Bazelon explained in a story about the terminology of rape. Feminists claimed the more legalistic term of sexual assault to put it squarely in the camp of violent crime. Bazelon argues in her story for reclaiming the term rape because of its harsh unflinching sound and its nonlegalistic shock value. But she also allows that rape does not help us grasp crimes outside our limited imagination, particularly crimes against men. She quotes a painful passage from screenwriter and novelist Rafael Yglesias, which is precisely the kind of crime Stemple worries is too foreign and uncomfortable to contemplate.

I used to say, when some part of me was still ashamed of what had been done to me, that I was “molested” because the man who played skillfully with my 8-year-old penis, who put it in his mouth, who put his lips on mine and tried to push his tongue in as deep as it would go, did not anally rape me. … Instead of delineating what he had done, I chose “molestation” hoping that would convey what had happened to me.

Of course it doesn’t. For listeners to appreciate and understand what I had endured, I needed to risk that they will gag or rush out of the room. I needed to be particular and clear as to the details so that when I say I was raped people will understand what I truly mean.

For years, the FBI defined forcible rape, for data collecting purposes, as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Eventually localities began to rebel against that limited gender-bound definition; in 2010 Chicago reported 86,767 cases of rape but used its own broader definition, so the FBI left out the Chicago stats. Finally, in 2012, the FBI revised its definition and focused on penetration, with no mention of female (or force).

Data hasn’t been calculated under the new FBI definition yet, but Stemple parses several other national surveys in her new paper, “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions,” co-written with Ilan Meyer and published in the April 17 edition of the American Journal of Public Health. One of those surveys is the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, for which the Centers for Disease Control invented a category of sexual violence called “being made to penetrate.” This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.

“Made to penetrate” is an awkward phrase that hasn’t gotten any traction. It’s also something we instinctively don’t associate with sexual assault. But is it possible our instincts are all wrong here? We might assume, for example, that if a man has an erection he must want sex, especially because we assume men are sexually insatiable. But imagine if the same were said about women. The mere presence of physiological symptoms associated with arousal does not in fact indicate actual arousal, much less willing participation. And the high degree of depression and dysfunction among male victims of sexual abuse backs this up. At the very least, the phrase remedies an obvious injustice. Under the old FBI definition, what happened to Rafael Yglesias would only have counted as rape if he’d been an 8-year-old girl. Accepting the term “made to penetrate” helps us understand that trauma comes in all forms.

Now the question is, in a climate when politicians and the media are finally paying attention to military and campus sexual assault, should these new findings alter our national conversation about rape? Stemple is a longtime feminist who fully understands that men have historically used sexual violence to subjugate women and that in most countries they still do. As she sees it, feminism has fought long and hard to fight rape myths—that if a woman gets raped it’s somehow her fault, that she welcomed it in some way. But the same conversation needs to happen for men. By portraying sexual violence against men as aberrant, we prevent justice and compound the shame. And the conversation about men doesn’t need to shut down the one about women. “Compassion,” she says, “is not a finite resource.”

 

Read the entire piece HERE

Fatherhood, Society

Get Up, Stand Up!

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BY MICHAEL COREN ,QMI AGENCY

An excerpt from THIS article: http://www.torontosun.com/2014/05/08/its-time-to-stand-up-for-mens-rights

What I encountered was evidence of a campaign to discredit men and a legal and sociological campaign to remove their rights as husbands and partners and, in particular, fathers.

I’m very lucky to be in a happy marriage with a wonderful wife and with four great kids. I have never been a victim.

As soon as I wrote this column, however, I was inundated with stories of men, good men, who had lost their homes, their savings, their freedom, their children, after false and malicious complaints.
The anecdotes had similar themes. A married couple with children. The marriage falls apart, nobody’s fault in particular. She gets a lawyer, and suddenly alleges that she’s been abused — it’s not true, but it means he has to leave the home, has hardly any rights, can’t see the kids.

They divorce, he has to pay a lot of money in support even though she’s already with another man and doing very well financially. He now lives in a basement apartment.

He’s allowed to see the kids every second weekend, one night a week. But often she says they’re not well or she’s just not there when he goes to pick the children up. After repeated pleas he shouts, bangs on the door. She calls the police, he’s arrested, convicted, put on probation and humiliated.

Or how about the couple who argue and hit each other, or she hits him and he does nothing.

The cops come and only he is arrested. Don’t expect sympathy or fairness from the police and judges — this is political law now and they are terrified of finding against a woman accuser.

Men having to pay extremely high levels of alimony even when the man is poor, the woman now wealthy. Men lied about, assumed to be in the wrong, treated like a natural abuser.

Yes, I know you’ve heard all of the stories about abusive men, women victims and deadbeat dads and of course some of that is true, but nowhere near in the numbers that we have been told to believe.

Almost all of the feminist movement’s demands were given, and rightly so, decades ago, and while there is clearly work still to be done, we do not live in the 1890s. Now we have feminists silencing contrary speech on campus, women’s studies courses that waste minds and money and feminist law that denies equality.

Read the rest here

Fatherhood, Society

What happens when a boy wants to play field hockey?

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53361d518e8c6.preview-620What happens when a boy wants to play field hockey?

If you live in Missouri, or countless other states in America, too bad. That’s what happened to high school sophomore Matthew Bozdech. When he asked to play, the school refused his request.

Matt Bozdech is 15. He has braces and brown hair. He likes video games. He’s a fairly typical teen boy, except for the field hockey thing. He started playing several years ago, moving from the ice version to the grass one, and kept at it, even though the sport is widely considered a girls game in the United States.

Now, Matt wants to play field hockey for his school, Eureka High. But the school only has a girls team. No school in Missouri, or for hundreds of miles around, has a boys team. So what’s a boy to do?

It’s a question that has been posed in just a few states — and never before in Missouri. Nationwide, fewer than 300 boys played field hockey in high school in 2012-13, compared to nearly 62,000 girls, according to one survey. So when boys do play, they almost always play on girls teams. Matt and his father asked Rockwood School District to give him a chance. He would play with the girls. He didn’t mind. Rockwood said no.

But the Bozdechs did not let it stand there. They filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging Matt was discriminated against because he’s a boy, and was retaliated against for complaining about his exclusion. Earlier this year, the federal agency said it would investigate the allegations.

This is the flip side of the debate over Title IX, the 1972 law that bars gender discrimination in school programs. Along the way, Title IX revolutionized sports programs by requiring equal playing opportunities for boys and girls, men and women. Title IX has changed public perceptions — erasing the novelty of girls sports and leading to fewer raised eyebrows when a girl tries to play football or wrestle with the boys.

But a boy trying to play on a girls team is still viewed differently. It raises other, less clear questions about what is fair. “I still like my school. I still support the team,” Matt said. “I just want to play.”

Girls field hockey enjoys strong support in St. Louis, with summer camps and year-round clubs. Many area schools have teams. Catholic schools tend to excel at it. In the Rockwood School District, the largest in the St. Louis County with 21,500 students, all four high schools have girls field hockey teams.

Before Matt even reached high school, Bozdech, who works as principal at Loyola Academy in St. Louis, talked with Eureka officials about his son playing field hockey. He asked if Matt could join the team, and he was told no. He then asked if Matt could help manage and practice with the team. That offer was turned down, too. When Matt was a freshman, Bozdech asked again. Same response.

This was in 2012. At the same time, in Smithtown, N.Y., a boy named Keeling Pilaro was making national headlines for fighting and winning the right to play on his high school’s girls field hockey team. “That’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” Bozdech recalled thinking.

But, in Missouri, Matt couldn’t even get near the field.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Society

Constitution be dammed!

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The White House recently announced detailed guidance for colleges on how to deal with sexual assaults. This won praise from advocates who are hell-bent on making their own rues with regard to justice in criminal matters, but renewed concerns from others about protections for the rights of the accused.

Why should these institutions have any role in investigating or adjudicating sexual assault cases? It’s a matter for police.

The real problem is that now you have the federal government (under Title IX), in conjunction with universities,  conducting parallel investigations of matters that fall under local criminal jurisdictions. I feel this is just piling on for political mileage.

Is this is the way we want to handle all criminal matters? Why is it different for sexual crime?

By having an internal judge, jury and executioner only for colleges, it would appear that we should have it for every business and institution in America. Why not have the same thing happen at Google, Apple, Boeing, churches, schools etc? If here is any accusation of a crime at any of these places, it will be handled internally, not through our criminal court system.

Is that the kind of society we want to have?