President Barack Obama announced the creation of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault on Jan. 22, giving the group 90 days to submit recommendations for a coordinated federal response to campus rape and sexual assault. Students and community members supported the move, but they were not confident that it would directly influence College policies.
Task force objectives include strengthening higher education institutions’ federal enforcement efforts concerning rape and sexual assault and broadening public awareness of institutional compliance with legal obligations.
Many interviewed said they thought that the publicity generated by the task force would support institutions grappling with sexual violence response and prevention.
“For President Obama to place this as a priority and publicly state that it’s something that needs to be dealt with at every college and that there needs to be support for survivors and activists and students, that’s very important,” said Holli Weed ’14, a Mentor Against Violence and Sexual Abuse Peer Advisor.
Weed said Dartmouth already has several initiatives that address the White House’s goals, including bystander intervention programs.
Occidental College professor Caroline Heldman, co-founder of End Rape on Campus and lead complainant in the Title IX complaint against Occidental, said the task force is more than a symbolic gesture. Instead, it shows a watershed moment.
“What is happening now is historic,” Heldman said. “We’ve never seen this level of activity — public complaints, protests, filing group or single lawsuits — we’ve never seen this level of action since campus action against rape started, and we’ve never had this level of response from the President.”
Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator Amanda Childress said she thought programs like the Dartmouth Bystander Initiative should be central to Dartmouth’s efforts to combat assault. The Dartmouth Bystander Initiative trains students to intervene in social encounters that are likely to lead to an assault.
Childress said these programs are the fastest and most effective way to prevent future assaults, particularly because “there are more of us than there are of them,” she said in an email.
The same day it announced the task force, the White House released a report entitled “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action.” According to one study cited in the report, of the 7 percent of college men who admitted to committing or attempting to commit rape, 63 percent admitted to averaging six rapes each. The report also cited the fact that one in five women has been sexually assaulted while at university.
Elizabeth Hoffman ’13, former president of the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault, said serial rapists are the most pressing issue on campus.
“When I was working with survivors, I noticed that the same names would come up,” she said. “Older women on campus have more knowledge of the social structure and were more aware of the predators. What was difficult to deal with was that we didn’t have a good way of communicating that to more vulnerable members of the community, our underclassmen.”
Students involved in sexual assault awareness on campus said they were in favor of a zero-tolerance policy for students found guilty of sexual assault.
SPCSA president William Scheiman ’14 said the organization is currently working on reforming the Committee on Standards process to increase penalties for perpetrators and reporting of sexual misconduct.
Heldman said that she hoped to see the standardization of definitions, policies and sanctions.
“Universities will do all they can to skirt federal law because of fear of losing their reputation and losing money as a result,” Heldman said. “If there’s ambiguity, they will skirt around the issue.”
Susy Struble ’93, founder of the nonprofit organization Dartmouth Change, said she hopes enhanced coordination among federal agencies will allow the government to withhold funds and impose fines on universities violating compliance standards. She also called for more transparency from the College.
Hoffman said that reports filed under the Clery Act, which requires colleges to disclose annual campus crime statistics, only represent a small portion of campus sexual assaults. The reports’ specific criteria exclude many instances of sexual assault.
“In that context, if you see our numbers are 20 or 25, that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Hoffman said.
Andrea Pino, a senior at the University of North Carolina and co-founder of the IX Network, a group of students seeking to change the way their unversities address sexual assault, said that while the task force is a positive step, it requires greater student input and is too compliance-oriented to foster meaningful change.
“Those of us who filed a complaint last year, we’re not seeing campus taking on these issues,” she said. “We’re seeing universities being reactive and hoping for us to graduate.”
Pino contributed to the Clery Act complaint filed against Dartmouth last year, which was later followed by an independent Title IX investigation into the College.
Weed added that the White House report does not address the relationship between rape and other forms of sexual violence.
“Extreme forms of sexual violence don’t just happen,” she said. “There are things that happen beforehand. There are places where you can intervene and stop other forms of sexual violence before they get that far.”
Hoffman said Dartmouth demonstrated some leadership in actively addressing sexual assault on campus during her time as a student.
“I saw a lot of momentum,” she said. “The Dean of the College and the President of the College have done a great job of devoting resources to addressing the issue and I hope that they will continue to do so, with greater support from the Board of Trustees.”
