WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) today released a bipartisan letter signed by 10 of their colleagues to Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, & Education leaders calling for new federal funding to investigate and enforce sexual assault laws at colleges and universities.
“After being victimized by a crime as deeply traumatic and personal as a sexual assault, no young man or woman should be left to fend for themselves,” said McCaskill, a former courtroom prosecutor of sex crimes. “I fear that, like the U.S. military, we’re going to find systemic problems on our college campuses-including very low reporting due to lack of protections and resources. Our schools must provide the highest level of responsiveness to ensure that victims are protected and empowered, and that perpetrators don’t get a free pass.”
“When our young people go on to higher education, it should be an opportunity to learn, grow, pursue their dreams and prepare for their future careers,” Senator Gillibrand said. “But for one in five young women on campuses across America, the college experience becomes their worst nightmare, as victims of sexual assault. America’s colleges and universities are the best in the world. But it is simply unacceptable that they become havens for rape and sexual assault. It is time to take this crisis head on and end the scourge of sexual assault on our college campuses, hold offenders accountable, and keep our students safe.”
According to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education, college campuses reported nearly 5,000 forcible sex offenses in 2012. This puts college women at a higher risk for sexual assault than their non-college bound peers.
Laws covering sexual assault on campus are handled by the U.S. Department of Education, under Title IX and the Jeane Clery Act, which calls for colleges and universities to report information on crime on and around campuses, and provide victims with select rights and resources.
Each year, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) handles more than 10,000 complaints against schools over violations of Title IX, but has just half the staff it did in 1980, when OCR received a third of the amount of complaints as today. Not one position of OCR’s staff is dedicated exclusively to handling Title IX sexual violence complaints.
Worsening the problem, the Clery Compliance Team has less than a dozen staff members to enforce the law at over 6,000 colleges and universities across the country, rendering the team unable to investigate the 63 percent of schools that failed to report crime statistics in the manner required by the Clery Act. Nearly one-third of the campus sexual assault policies at 299 colleges surveyed do not fully comply with the Clery Act. From 2000 to 2013, Clery Act enforcement employees were only able to investigate and collect enough data to impose fines on just 21 colleges or universities.
To begin to get a handle on the growing crisis on campus sexual assault, Senators McCaskill and Gillibrand are working to equip the right federal agencies with the resources needed to create real accountability.