Feminists are losing the war on campus sexual assault

[LJ_Reloaded]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-shatz/feminists-we-are-not-winn_b_6071500.html

Feminists, We Are Not Winning the War on Campus Sexual Assault

By Naomi Shatz
Attorney, Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP

It is no secret to anyone who occasionally picks up a newspaper or magazine that we are in the middle of a cultural sea change regarding sexual assault on college campuses, a movement that one prominent lawyer has even called “one of the most important civil rights movements of our time.” Debates are swirling about whether universities should handle sexual assault cases at all or refer them straight to the criminal justice system, about whether women ever make false sexual assault claims, and whether the definition of consent for these cases should or should not require affirmative consent (whether verbal or non-verbal) to sexual acts. As a feminist and a lawyer who represents male students accused of sexual assault by their colleges and universities, I find myself in a unique position to watch the media explode with these stories. In college I would have been one of the women attending the rallies, holding the signs, and celebrating the wave of expulsions and suspensions of men accused of sexual assault. In my first job as a lawyer I worked on issues surrounding how schools handled dating violence among students, and used Title IX, the law that addresses sexual assault in schools and universities, to sue an upstate New York school district for failing to protect my client from gender-based harassment. And then I joined a firm known for handling student discipline cases, started representing students accused of sexual assault, and soon realized what an insane, Kafkaesque world these student disciplinary proceedings are.

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We as feminists are failing if we make our victories dependent on eschewing the fundamental rights and principles our legal system was founded on — fairness, due process, a presumption of innocence — in order to obtain findings of guilt in sexual assault cases without regard to the facts of individual cases. A system that is as unfair to accused students as the one currently employed by U.S. colleges and universities lacks legitimacy, and the more people learn about the fundamental unfairness of these systems the more skeptical they will become of accounts of campus sexual assault and any resulting actions by the schools. While the federal government and universities’ new approach to sexual assault cases may feel like much-deserved justice for the years of turning a blind eye to sexual assaults of university students, celebrating this trend is shortsighted. If we hang winning or losing this battle on simply increasing the number of students expelled for sexual assault, then we’ve already lost. As feminists, we should demand better than knee-jerk reactions from the government intended to appease anti-sexual assault activists without truly addressing their demands, and poorly designed university policies intended merely to protect the school’s federal funding at the expense of our core democratic values of fairness, due process, and the presumption of innocence. We should be advocating systems that both address the actual needs and rights of sexual assault victims and respect due process and fairness for the accused. The current Title IX system does neither.

 

[richard_daily]

Pity bump.