“Survivors, victims of a lack of due process, and campus administrators have all told me that the current approach does a disservice to everyone involved.”
Betsy DeVos last week while announcing a notice-and-comment process for coming changes to the Title IX program at the U.S. Department of Education.
Why it stinks: Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced her intentions to weaken the Obama administration’s Title IX system, which strengthened avenues for sexual-assault survivors to report what happened, stay on campus, and in an ideal situation, get justice. In the time leading up to this announcement, DeVos met with men’s rights groups, such as the National Coalition for Men, which publishes headshots of women whose rape reports have been dismissed, taking Trump’s “on all sides” approach to assault. This approach is not well-founded in research. One in five women on campuses will be sexually assaulted, data from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center show, while false reporting accounts for as little as 2 to 10 percent of reported sexual assaults. Rolling back protections for survivors does nothing but push women back into a culture of silence, surviving sexual assault with no protections or avenues to justice at their universities.
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The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.