Campus sexual assault and civil rights: a ready nexus?
“[S]haring a library with your rapist can make it hard to learn.”
Now that is a sentence that is bound to induce a bit of reflection for any reader confronting it, which is certainly the intention of two young women who recently penned a national article chronicling the widespread problem of sexual assault committed against female college students.
That problem, they note, is truly of sad and outsized dimensions on campuses across the country. According to one survey, an astonishing — and many people will quickly add the word appalling — 23 percent of polled female undergraduates stated that they had been victimized on at least one occasion by another party’s sexual misconduct.
That is unquestionably concerning. And, many people might reasonably argue, the rate of occurrence is so jarringly high that it qualifies as an epidemic.
The two women note that, while student sexual assault is often — and rightly — seen as a criminal act, “Most people don’t think of [it] as a civil rights issue.”
But it easily is, they contend, because the heightened atmosphere of fear and actual violence playing out on many campuses is inimical to learning in any equal sense. That is, it “promotes inequality and keeps already marginalized individuals from reaching their potential.”
And that reality, they argue, makes the application of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, which bans sex-based discrimination on the campuses of schools that receive federal funding, centrally on point in any college sexual assault case.
The women have founded a nonprofit group aimed at promoting the invocation of Title IX in cases where school authorities are deemed to be lax in their duty to investigate sex allegations and protect their female students.
As they note in tips provided to women across the country, “your school MUST [original emphasis] take steps to ensure you can learn free from a hostile environment.”
Serving clients throughout the Greater Los Angeles and Southern California area, we represent victims in a variety of civil litigation cases. If you or a loved one has been injured, turn to an experienced Los Angeles personal injury or sexual assault lawyer.
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