Valeri Pizhanski / FoterThe Obama Administration
recently released recommendations
for strengthening the laws around protecting college students from
harassment and sexual assault. The report, Not Alone,
comes three months after the creation of the White House Task Force
to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. Not Alone and its
accompanying website, NotAlone.gov, recommends new
practices for colleges and universities nationwide.

Some of the recommendations aren’t bad—more polling data can
help fill in the gaps created by underreporting, prevention
programs are probably worth a try. But ultimately none of the
recommendations address the fundamental issue with on-campus rape,
and leave intact a system seemingly designed to fail.

The system for adjudicating on-campus sexual assault currently
in place utterly fails victims, the accused, administrators and
fellow students and faculty. The problem began in the 1970s, with
the passing of Title IX. The law includes a provision requiring
schools to independently investigate reports of sexual assault and
harassment.

Victims can still go to the cops in addition to these campus
courts. But for myriad reasons, including the fact that police
officers are all-too-happy to not have to deal with rape cases,
schools don’t want to work with police, and victims don’t want to
deal with two investigations, schools often handle the
investigations themselves.

It’s undeniably true that police botch rape cases horribly. They
harass, intimidate, blame, and abuse victims, refuse to collect
evidence or investigate, and allow rape kits to expire, untested by
the thousands every year. But you know who does an even worse job
than the professionals who are trained (however poorly) to deal
with the crime? College administrators.

Yet for some reason, lawmakers decided that that’s exactly who
should be responsible for investigating and punishing rapes on
college campuses.

Often, it’s in a school’s interest to sweep messes like rape
under the rug. Administrators have no training in investigating
rape allegations, and very little incentive to get justice for
victims, especially when the accused are star athletes, stellar
students, or just well-liked. Rapes are generally investigated and
sentences handed down by a panel of students, hardly a group of
professionals up to the task.

Despite updates to Title IX such as the Clery Act, which
requires schools to disclose campus crime statistics, and a

Dear Colleague letter from the Department of Education’s Office
for Civil Rights asking schools to do better at investigating and
prosecuting rape, schools have handled rape exactly as you’d expect
them to: poorly.

The stories are sickening. At Patrick Henry College, it’s come
out that administrators ask women who report rape whether they were
flirting with their rapists. One got an assignment to read a
modesty self-help book after reporting her rape. A college official

instructed her to delete e-mails, calls and texts from the
student who raped her.

Florida State University absolutely
refused to do any investigating whatsoever when a student
brought allegations forward that their star quarterback, Jameis
Winston, raped her, despite her bruises and the football star’s
semen which could be found in her underwear. What finally got him
suspended? Shoplifting crab legs.

After Lena Sclove’s rapist admitted to not only violently raping
her, but choking her as well, she has to attend classes with him

for two months before Brown University officials would look
into the incident.

Despite knowing Sasha Menu Courey believed she had been raped,
University of Missouri administrators defied federal requirements
and
refused to investigate. She committed suicide 16 months after
the assault. After Lizzy Seeberg accusing a Notre Dame football
player of raping her, the only people she heard from were friends
of the accused, who harassed her until she
took her own life ten days after reporting the attack.

Their attacks were never investigated. That’s
not unusual.

Perhaps realizing the deficiencies of the panel-of-students
route, the new report recommends schools get rid of the hearings
altogether. Only instead of turning the investigations over to law
enforcement, the Task Force wants schools to empower a single
administrator to serve as judge, jury, and executioner.
According to Greg Lukianoff, President of campus free-speech
organization FIRE, this new sole administrator would offer the
accused “no chance to challenge his or her accuser’s
testimony.”

Tellingly, the Task Force expresses only the most meager sense
of the rights necessary to secure fundamentally fair hearings,
noting that it believes the single investigator model would still
“safeguard[] an alleged perpetrator’s right to notice and to be
heard.”