The jury in the Taylor Swift groping lawsuit ruled in favor of the pop star after four hours of deliberation. Swift counter-sued former Colorado radio host David Mueller for grabbing her behind at a meet-and-greet in 2013. Previously he had sued her for $3 million, claiming that her accusations were false. That suit was dismissed by a judge last week, but yesterday, the jury found in favor of Swift in her counter-suit. Mueller will have to pay her $1 in damages, an important symbolic victory for the pop star.

For Swift, this was more than a case of “he said, she said.” She hopes to inspire more victims of sexual assault to come forward. Swift recognized the uniqueness of her ability to launch a countersuit in which she was only seeking $1. After the verdict, she said: “I acknowledge the privilege that I benefit from in life, in society and in my ability to shoulder the enormous cost of defending myself in a trial like this.”

According to Swift, she posed with Mueller at a meet-and-great in 2013, and he reached under her skirt to grab her butt. One of the key points of contention was a photo from the event. In it, Mueller’s hand is clearly below Swift’s back. He claimed that he had just touched her ribs, Swift says that’s when he grabbed her bare butt. Her bodyguard and the photographer testified that they had seen him grope her as well, and her mother testified about the conversation they had in the immediate aftermath in which Swift disclosed what had happened to her.

Mueller was fired from his position as a radio host two days later. In addition to suing Swift, he also sued her mother and her radio promotions director Frank Bell. He claimed that Andrea Swift and Bell told his bosses, leading to his firing. They were both found not liable as well.

Swift has said that she plans on donating to organizations that aid women who have suffered from sexual assault. And she acknowledged that as one of the most recognizable pop stars in the world, she has a unique ability to be a role model for young women, as did her lawyer, Doug Baldridge. He stated during closing arguments: “By returning a verdict on Ms. Swift’s counterclaim for a single symbolic dollar, the value of which is immeasurable to all women in this situation…You will tell every woman…that no means no.”

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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After a four-year hiatus, Kesha is finally back to belting out pop hits, but that doesn’t mean her legal saga with music producer Dr. Luke is anywhere close to being over. In fact, the contentious court battle has managed to entangle another female pop star: Lady Gaga.

In the latest series of events, Luke’s legal team subpoenaed Gaga to testify in his defamation lawsuit against his former protégée, after several unsuccessful attempts to get her testimony on the record.

Gaga was subpoenaed in relation to a text message conversation between her and Kesha that was submitted into evidence last year, in which Kesha allegedly asked “The Cure” singer to join a “smear campaign” against him. Luke’s lawyers claim Gaga even spread a statement urging Sony Music to cut ties with Luke, according to court documents.

“Dr. Luke’s counsel served a subpoena on Lady Gaga because she has relevant information regarding, among other things, false statements about Dr. Luke made to her by Kesha,” Luke’s lawyer said in a statement on Saturday. “This motion has become necessary because Dr. Luke’s counsel has not been able to obtain, despite repeated request, a deposition date from Lady Gaga.”

Dr. Luke, real name Lukasz Gottwald, sued Kesha for defamation after she claimed he drugged, raped, and emotionally abused her. Gaga showed public support for Kesha throughout her years-long sexual assault case against Luke–including tweeting the popular hashtag #FreeKesha.

There are people all over the world who love you @KeshaRose. And I can say truly I am in awe of your bravery.

— xoxo, Gaga (@ladygaga) February 19, 2016

Gaga’s legal team responded to the subpoena with the following statement to Variety over the weekend:

As Lady Gaga‘s legal team will present to the court, she has provided all of the relevant information in her possession and is at most an ancillary witness in this process. Dr. Luke’s team is attempting to manipulate the truth and draw press attention to their case by exaggerating Lady Gaga‘s role and falsely accusing her of dodging reasonable requests.

Unfortunately, we can’t look at the text exchange for ourselves, because the judge sealed the messages between Gaga and Kesha, making the content confidential.

Now that the subpoena has been issued, Gaga will be required to set a date to appear in-person for a three-hour deposition. Many other celebrities are expected to provide testimony as well in the case.

In July, Kesha made a triumphant return to music with her emotional first single “Praying,” which appears to be inspired by her conflict with Luke. The track will appear on her brand new album “Rainbow”–her first in five years–which is expected to be released in August.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Survivors of sexual assault could receive around-the-clock access to a specialized medical examiner if a bill proposed by a Texas congressman passes.

Representative Ted Poe (R-TX) introduced a bill on July 26 that would require hospitals to provide access to sexual assault forensic examiners (SAFEs) or sexual assault nurse examiners (SANEs) for survivors of sexual violence. SAFEs and SANEs are specially trained examiners who are certified to provide forensic examination to survivors of sexual assault. According to a statement from Poe, hospitals would be required to have a SAFE on staff 24/7 or a plan to transport survivors to an area hospital that can provide forensic services. Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) co-sponsored the bill with Poe.

The bill, titled the Megan Rondini Act, is named after a University of Alabama student who committed suicide after her alleged rape. Rondini’s case was recently investigated by Buzzfeed News.

According to that investigation, Rondini alleged that T.J. Bunn, the son of a wealthy businessman, raped her after she blacked out at a bar with friends. Buzzfeed News reported that Rondini went to the authorities, but that the police focused on the fact that Rondini didn’t physically resist Bunn, despite telling him that she didn’t want to have sex with him. Rondini sought charges against Bunn, but later dropped them after learning that she could face felony charges for taking his gun while he was passed out–which she dropped outside after accidentally firing it. Unable to receive assistance from law enforcement or her university, Rondini withdrew from school and returned to her family’s home in Texas. However, Rondini’s depression and anxiety worsened, and on February 26, 2016, she committed suicide.

Poe introduced his bill to improve treatment for survivors of rape and sexual assault.

“Rape is a crime that destroys the very soul of a victim,” Poe said in his statement. “Often times, it is a fate worse than death. A victim must relive their attack over and over again…. The failures that drove Megan to commit suicide must not be allowed to continue in our society. Victims must be given a voice and the ability to have evidence collected and tested to bring them justice. This legislation helps give them both.”

The bill awaits further consideration until after the House of Representatives’ summer recess, from July 29 to September 5.

Marcus Dieterle

Marcus is an editorial intern at Law Street. He is a rising senior at Towson University where he is double majoring in mass communication (with a concentration in journalism and new media) and political science. When he isn’t in the newsroom, you can probably find him reading on the train, practicing his Portuguese, or eating too much pasta. Contact Marcus at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Cardinal George Pell has been charged with multiple sexual assault allegations by Australian authorities. Pell is the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church to be implicated in the child abuse scandal that has tarnished the church’s reputation throughout the past few decades.

Pell is accused of “historical sexual assault offenses.” These include at least two men who have come forward and described Pell inappropriately touching them at a swimming pool in the 1970s. Pell denied these allegations after an interview aired on Australian television in 2016 and he has denounced this “relentless character assassination,” according to the Washington Post.

Pope Francis did not release a statement on the issue, but the Vatican said that it feels “great regret” over the situation and that the Pope has appreciated what Pell did during his three years in Rome, according to the Washington Post.

Pell is set to appear at the Melbourne Magistrates Court on July 18. The magistrate will decide next week whether not to release the details of the investigation, according to BBC.

While he has repeatedly said he will fully cooperate with the investigation, Pell has also strongly denied the accusations. The Pope has granted him a leave of absence to fight the charges, according to BBC. Pell said that he would make the trip back to Australia if his doctor permits it. Last year doctors would not permit him to fly back to Australia last year so he answered questions from detectives via videochat.

“I’m looking forward finally to having my day in court,” Pell said. “I am innocent of these charges, they are false. The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me.”

Pell, an adviser to the Pope and Prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy, is a native of Ballarat, Australia, and was the Archbishop of Melbourne and then Sydney before becoming a cardinal in 2004. Named the head of the Vatican’s finances in 2014, Pell is considered the third most powerful person in the church.

In the past decade Pell has played a prominent role on Vatican commissions created to combat sexual assault within the Roman Catholic community. In 2013 he was named one of eight cardinals charged with investigating ways to reform the church, according to CNN. However, he has also been criticized for his lack of impact on the investigations and supposed connections with known child-abusing priests.

Because of his powerful position within the Vatican and the Australian Catholic community, it is possible that these allegations will be the biggest obstacle the church faces when it comes to combatting child abuse. Peter Saunders, a British abuse survivor who served on a papal commission investigating the abuse, told the Washington Post:

[These charges] will probably rock the Vatican like nothing else has ever done…The fact that one of the pope’s right-hand men, the secretary for the economy, has in a sense been arrested and will be charged with such serious offenses, that surely has got to have some kind of effect on the Vatican and the hierarchy.

So, the coming months will be telling for how the Pope and the Catholic Church respond to the accusations against Pell and the recurring issues with abuse within the church. While they’ve dealt with past scandals within the Vatican and in other branches, such a high profile conviction brings with it new challenges in addition to worldwide attention. Pope Francis has made it one of his goals to cleanse the church of child abuse and this will likely set him back.

Josh Schmidt

Josh Schmidt is an editorial intern and is a native of the Washington D.C Metropolitan area. He is working towards a degree in multi-platform journalism with a minor in history at nearby University of Maryland. Contact Josh at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Japan’s lower house of parliament, the House of Representatives, approved a bill on June 8 that would amend the country’s rape laws. Japan has not changed its rape laws since 1907.

The amendment would expand the legal definition of rape, add a provision about the psychological factor of rape and sexual assault, raise the minimum sentence for rape convictions, and remove a provision requiring victims to press charges themselves to prosecute their accused rapist.

Currently, Japan’s legal definition of rape is limited to forced vaginal intercourse, but the new amendment would expand that definition to include all forms of forced sexual intercourse.

Current law also requires the use of threats and/or violence for an offense to be considered rape or sexual assault. However, the amendment would expand that definition to include instances in which an aggressor in a position to control or influence a victim–such as the relationship between a guardian and a child–exhibits psychological control over that victim.

The minimum sentence for those convicted of rape would be raised from the current three years to five years under the new law. The amendment would also remove a provision requiring victims to request the indictment of their accused rapist. As of right now, victims must decide whether to pursue the case, which can lead to aggressors pressuring their victims to drop charges.

Even with the amendment, however, prosecutors can still decide not to pursue rape charges. In fact, 53 percent of rape and sexual assault cases are dropped by prosecutors. In September 2016, prosecutors decided not to pursue rape charges against Japanese actor Yuta Takahata, who was accused of allegedly raping a hotel worker.

Support for an amendment to Japan’s rape laws was sparked by Former Minister of Justice Midori Matsushima in 2014. Matsushima founded the Discussion Group on Sex Crime Penalties which led to further governmental discussion about how the penal code addressed sex offenses, and later led to the submission of the amendment.

If the bill is approved by the House of Councillors, the upper house of parliament, Japan will amend the country’s rape laws accordingly.

Marcus Dieterle

Marcus is an editorial intern at Law Street. He is a rising senior at Towson University where he is double majoring in mass communication (with a concentration in journalism and new media) and political science. When he isn’t in the newsroom, you can probably find him reading on the train, practicing his Portuguese, or eating too much pasta. Contact Marcus at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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A federal lawsuit has been filed against Baylor University, accusing football players at the school of engaging in gang rape as a rite of passage, and the school of doing nothing to prevent it.

The alleged rapes happened when Art Briles was head coach of the team and Kenneth Starr was president of the university. Briles was suspended a year ago, and Starr lost his position as president but remained a law professor at the school until last August, when he resigned.

Jane Doe, the anonymous woman who filed the lawsuit, claims that she was drugged and gang raped by four to eight Baylor football players in February of 2012. She alleges that the players then burglarized her apartment and harassed her through text messages until she left school the next year.

Jane Doe confirmed that at least one, 21-second videotape of two female Baylor students being gang raped by several Baylor football players was circulated amongst football players. The suit also alleges that Baylor football parties often involved dogfighting–at least once, a dog was so severely injured it almost died.

The lawsuit contends that Briles was fully aware of the alleged gang rape, and includes text messages between him and an assistant coach, in which Briles calls the woman a “fool” for reporting the burglaries to the police.

Baylor athletes gang-raped women as a ‘bonding’ experience: lawsuit. They allegedly called it ‘playtime.’ https://t.co/qXnSpRkxWl pic.twitter.com/ICcJ0c8gFU

— Kate Briquelet (@kbriquelet) May 18, 2017

Allegations of sexual assault at the Christian university began to surface in 2012. Baylor student Jasmine Hernandez accused football player Tevin Elliott of raping her twice at a party. He was convicted in 2014 of two counts of sexual assault and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In 2013, a female soccer player reported that she was sexually assaulted by football player Sam Ukwuachu. He was convicted in 2015,  and sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years probation.

Hernandez, who publicly disclosed her name, sued the school last year for failing to investigate her claims–Briles and Starr were fired not long after.

Another woman, who was identified under the pseudonym Elizabeth Doe, also filed a lawsuit against Baylor earlier this year, alleging that football players had gang-raped her in 2013. She stated in the lawsuit that 31 players had committed at least 52 rapes, including gang-rapes, between 2011-2014.

Elizabeth Doe’s lawsuit accused the school of using sex as a way to sell the football program to prospective students. It described how Kendal Briles, a former assistant football coach and son of former head coach Art Briles, asked a recruit, “Do you like white women? Because we have a lot of them at Baylor and they love football players.”

Also in @Baylor lawsuit: Woman got school counseling. Says unnamed counselor talked stats of women who don’t report rape to dissuade her

— Jim Vertuno (@JimVertuno) May 17, 2017

Jane Doe’s lawsuit described many of the same elements–likening rape culture at the school to a hazing ritual. She alleges that organized gang rapes were considered to be a “bonding” experience for the players. Her suit also alleges that the older players brought underage recruits to strip clubs. They also had a “hostess program” that allegedly made sure women had sex with the recruits during their visits to campus.

After the allegations against Baylor became known, the school’s board said it was “horrified” and “outraged” to learn what was happening on campus.

Briles filed a lawsuit himself in December, accusing the school of libel. But he quickly dropped the suit after the university released text messages between the assistant coach, the athletic director, and him, that showed how they all did their best to avoid contact with law enforcement and encouraged victims to not press charges.

Jane Doe’s suit claims that school officials encouraged the plaintiff and her family not to report the assault to law enforcement. But the school says it will do all it can to ensure that things are made right.

“The University’s response in no way changes Baylor’s position that any assault involving members of our campus community is reprehensible and inexcusable,” the school said in a statement.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Protesters took to the streets of Glasgow last week to push back against the “rape clause” in the UK welfare system. After reforms of the welfare system took effect in April, the tax credits a family can receive for having children are now capped at two children–except in the case of mothers who have a third child as a result of rape. However, those mothers have to provide evidence that the child was in fact conceived from rape–a provision decried as inhumane.

Rape survivors have to fill out an eight-page form detailing the attack and a third party (such as a healthcare provider or a social worker) must provide additional testimony. The woman can only receive tax benefits if she is not living with the perpetrator and if she has not received financial compensation following a conviction of the perpetrator. But psychologists across the UK have expressed concern that this rape clause will harm survivors. In a letter to The Guardian, a set of psychologists write that forced reliving of the attack may cause “flashbacks, renewed shame and emotional turmoil, and consequently affect how mothers bond with their children.”

The clause was an amendment to an existing law, so it was not debated or voted on in parliament. First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP has decried the clause and has fought against it. SNP MP Alison Thewliss led the Scrap the Rape Clause campaign, presenting a petition with 10,000 signatures asking for the clause to be struck from the tax reforms. Members of the Scottish Parliament have filed a motion to debate the clause, which could push the UK Parliament to also debate it. The SNP is not alone in its discontent: the rape clause may particularly harm women in Northern Ireland, where reporting serious crimes, including rape, is mandatory. If women apply for a tax credit for a third child conceived through rape, they may be drawn into a criminal investigation against their will.

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson has argued that the Scottish government could set up new benefits to aid families with more than two children, outside of the UK government’s reforms. Davidson accused Sturgeon of simply writing the rape clause off as part of her list of complaints against the UK government instead of actively considering how Scotland could adapt the tax credit system.

Whether or not the rape clause is upheld, families across the UK will find themselves in a new financial bracket thanks to the tax reforms. Historically there has not been a limit to how many children a parent can claim–so large families that have previously benefited from tax credits may now find themselves slipping out of financial stability. The tax reforms disproportionately affect low-income families and will push them deeper into poverty. The rape clause was established in an odd effort to be “compassionate” but the misguided attempt to soften the blow of the tax reforms has only exacerbated ideological divides both within Scotland and the UK as a whole.

Jillian Sequeira

Jillian Sequeira was a member of the College of William and Mary Class of 2016, with a double major in Government and Italian. When she’s not blogging, she’s photographing graffiti around the world and worshiping at the altar of Elon Musk and all things Tesla. Contact Jillian at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

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A Texas teenager who ran into a church earlier this month, claiming she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by three black men, has admitted that she made the story up. Breana Harmon Talbott made headlines with her story, and many white nationalists took the opportunity to blame the alleged perpetrators’ race for the crime. Far right groups on Reddit, social media, and neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer picked the story up. Many complained about the lack of media coverage and claimed that if the races had been reversed, it would be all over the national news. But now, the story has proven to be a hoax.

#satchat
Breana Talbott, 18, Denison TX, appar kidnapped/raped by 3 men.
I guess no media bc doesn’t fit noble blacks/evil whites narrative. pic.twitter.com/qBMiuqYPOz

— Philip Schuyler (@FiveRights) March 11, 2017

When Talbott entered the church on March 8 she was bleeding from cuts and scratches on her body, which she later admitted were self-inflicted. A rape kit from the investigation came back negative, meaning that there was no physical evidence of rape. On Wednesday, police announced that Talbott’s allegations were unfounded. “Talbott’s hoax was also insulting to our community and especially offensive to the African-American community due to her description of the so-called suspects in her hoax,” a statement on Facebook read. It also said the department would file a criminal case against Talbott for “False Report to a Peace Officer, a Class B Misdemeanor.” Talbott also admitted that she had fabricated the story.

Breana Talbott of Denison accused of staging kidnapping, making up story of being raped near church: #Denisonpolicehttps://t.co/Vm3UlUyUDI pic.twitter.com/7qtvJ0mMFX

— domingo ramirez jr. (@mingoramirezjr) March 22, 2017

The news caused shock and outrage in the community. Talbott’s friends had even created a GoFundMe to replace her jewelry that she claimed was stolen. Her then-fiancé was the one who called the police when she “went missing” about three hours before she reappeared. He had no idea she made the whole thing up and they have since separated. Denison Police Chief Jay Burch said that even though everyone was relieved the attack never happened, “there could be permanent damage as a result–a damage of relationships within our community, damage to the reputation of our community.”

Denison PD confirms 3/8/17 kidnapping & sexual assault was a hoax perpetrated by Breana Talbott, victim @FOX4 pic.twitter.com/pbapqXKF7s

— John Gnann (@kdfw07) March 22, 2017

The topic of false allegations when it comes to rape and sexual assault is incredibly sensitive. According to Slate, a commonly cited estimate is that only about 2 percent of rape reports are false. And women had to fight for a long time to gain the respect and the rights we have today. For a long time it wasn’t considered rape if a man forced himself upon his spouse, and that didn’t change until 1979 with the first conviction of spousal rape in the U.S. Still, victims of sexual abuse are often not taken seriously and so many have to fight to get a proper investigation. Cases like Talbott’s make it even more damaging when people make false accusations, because they’re used as justification to not trust other survivors.

Unfortunately, Talbott’s case received even more attention because she claimed that the made-up offenders were black. This played right into the hands of far right extremists who immediately used the story to push their own agenda. According to a recent study, black people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted than white people, and are also more likely to spend a long time imprisoned before being exonerated. False accusations will undermine the credibility of real victims, but they also contribute to a false image of who commits crimes. While the police figured out what had really happened before anyone was arrested or charged, wrongful convictions are always a problematic possibility.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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For the first three months of 2017, Uber has been mired in controversy. Many have attributed the strife to the company’s mistreatment of its employees, influenced by its toxic “bro” culture and iffy moral compass. While it’s easy to brush Uber’s woes off as growing pains for a burgeoning Silicon Valley tech company, its web controversies seem to point to bigger problems with leadership.

Compounding Controversies

Back in January, during the weekend of the first travel ban and successive protests, the company garnered harsh criticism for turning off its surge pricing for rides to New York’s JFK Airport. The opportunistic move prompted people to delete the app in favor of its competitor Lyft.

Shortly after that, Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, left President Donald Trump’s economic advisory council amidst criticism from the public and Uber’s own employees. The company was also sued by Google for allegedly stealing a key component in self-driving car technology. Then in late February, Kalanick was caught on video arguing with a driver over Uber’s fares.

Most recently, Uber initiated an internal investigation into sexual harassment and discrimination allegations lobbed at the company. The investigation was opened after Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, wrote a blog post outlining her disturbing experience at the company with an anonymous male executive who propositioned her for sex, prompting several female employees to also come forward.

Multiple company executives have since resigned. While Uber has reacted quickly to all of these controversies, the company’s responses have been either met with criticism or overshadowed by yet another controversy.

Uber CEO Seeks Help

Following the embarrassing squabble with one of his drivers, Kalanick admitted that he needs to “fundamentally change as a leader and grow up.” As a result, Uber announced that Kalanick was seeking to hire “leadership help.”

In early March, Uber announced that this “leadership help” would come in the form of a new COO. But the search for this position appears to have hit a snag with the news of president Jeff Jones’ resignation and a rumors of a “toxic” company culture, with Kalanick at the helm. Jones’ hiring was heavily publicized by Uber, and his departure undoubtedly adds complications to Uber’s future hiring plans.

In a statement released to Recode, who first broke the story of his departure, Jones said:

I joined Uber because of its Mission, and the challenge to build global capabilities that would help the company mature and thrive long-term.

It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business.

Dissatisfied Drivers and Changing the Company’s Culture

Aside from the resignations and sexual assault allegations from employees, Uber is also dealing with more crises regarding drivers’ dissatisfaction with wages. Uber drivers in some states are not allowed to accept tips and Uber’s attempt to strike down a Seattle law that allows its drivers to unionize proved fruitless.

Yesterday, four top Uber officials, all notably female, conducted a media call where they attempted to field questions about Uber’s shifting company culture. Conspicuously, Kalanick was not on the call, but Arianna Huffington, who sits on the company’s board of directors, was.

“Uber must change if it is to be as successful in the next decade as it has been in the last seven years,” Huffington said on the call. “Creating a great culture will be key to their future success. Going forward there can be no room at Uber for brilliant jerks and zero tolerance for anything but totally respectable behavior in an equitable workplace environment.”

Additionally, Huffington also reiterated the company’s faith in Kalnick’s leadership abilities, while underlining the fact that Uber’s culture had to change, and that new hires would be a focus for the company moving forward.

Uber executives have responded swiftly to each controversy; however, as we have seen with their clumsy and thwarted responses thus far, there’s no real indication that the company won’t stumble as it continues to move forward.

Austin Elias-De Jesus

Austin is an editorial intern at Law Street Media. He is a junior at The George Washington University majoring in Political Communication. You can usually find him reading somewhere. If you can’t find him reading, he’s probably taking a walk. Contact Austin at Staff@Lawstreetmedia.com.

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Canadian Judge Robin Camp has resigned after his comments during a 2014 rape trial when he asked the woman testifying why she didn’t “keep her knees together.” Camp’s language and comments during the trial implied that he thought the woman could have prevented being assaulted if she had wanted to. He faced backlash for his condescending and wrongheaded behavior pretty much immediately and a 15-month investigation by the Canadian Judicial Council began.

On Thursday, the council released its findings and stated that Camp was “manifestly and profoundly destructive of the concept of impartiality, integrity and independence.” The council urged that he be removed from office, and a few hours later Camp announced that he would resign.

The case involved 29-year-old Calgary man Alexander Wagar and an anonymous 19-year-old woman, who accused Wagar of raping her in the bathroom during a house party. The judge’s behavior was also inappropriate; throughout the trial he acted as if the alleged rape victim was to blame. He repeatedly referred to her as “the accused” even though that was the proper term for Wagar.

Why couldn’t this guy keep his lips together? He was obviously asking for it. https://t.co/gZsU5j9Zgt

— Lisa Bloom (@LisaBloom) March 10, 2017

Camp also claimed that young women “want to have sex, particularly if they’re drunk.” He stated that for women, “some sex and pain sometimes go together,” which is not necessarily a bad thing.” He even went as far as telling the woman that she could have avoided being raped if she had moved her pelvis “slightly.”

As expected, Camp acquitted the man. But the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned the decision and ordered a second trial with another judge. Judge Gerry LeGrandeur said that although neither the accuser nor the accused sounded completely reliable during their testimonies, he couldn’t say without reasonable doubt that a sexual assault had actually occurred. After his second acquittal, Wagar’s attorney claimed that he was “the true victim.”

Repeat, he is one person. We need to look at the systemic issues of victim blaming in the criminal justice system. https://t.co/EBgX07DH4g

— Farrah Khan (@farrah_khan) March 9, 2017

The woman in the case said that her experience throughout trial left her with suicidal thoughts, including Camp’s inappropriate questioning. “What did he get from asking that?” she said at a hearing during the inquiry into Camp. “He made me hate myself and he made me feel like I should have done something… that I was some kind of slut.” Camp, who had been nicknamed the “knees together judge,” showed remorse and admitted that he had been rude and had used “facetious words.” In the middle of an apology he had to correct himself, when he said, “The thing I feel worst about is the questions I asked of the accused.” He then quickly corrected, “the complainant.”

Camp’s daughter also took part in the hearing and said she is a rape survivor herself. She said that although her father’s comments were “disgraceful,” she claimed to have seen him develop an understanding and empathy for those who have experienced trauma. Camp also pointed to how he has spent a lot of time educating himself about sexual assault, met with feminist scholars, and underwent sensitivity training. But in the end, that was too little, too late. The council wrote in its report, “his apologies and efforts at remediation do not adequately repair the damage caused to public confidence.”

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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It’s inauguration week, but there are a lot of other things going on too. For example, the Air Force just relaxed its rules for recruits who have used marijuana before enlisting. Read more about that here. And that’s good news! Now check out some rant-worthy news. Welcome to RantCrush Top 5, where we take you through today’s top five controversial stories in the world of law and policy. Who’s ranting and raving right now? Check it out below:

Just Days Before his Inauguration, Trump is Sued for Defamation

With only a few days left until his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump is facing a lawsuit by a former contestant on his TV show “The Apprentice.” Last year, Summer Zervos, who participated in the reality show in 2006, accused Trump of aggressively kissing and groping her when he met with her a year after she was on the show. In response, Trump claimed that she was a liar and made the whole thing up. Zervos is now saying that Trump defamed her by doing so. She says that she will retract her lawsuit and not seek any monetary damages if Trump takes his statement back and admits that what she said was true.

BREAKING: Former ‘Apprentice’ candidate Summer Zervos files defamation lawsuit against Donald Trumphttps://t.co/S3vTcKPB9P pic.twitter.com/XUHXCFiEDR

— Globalnews.ca (@globalnews) January 17, 2017

Gloria Allred took the case and is also representing three other women who have accused Trump of similar behavior. “Enough is enough,” Allred said. “Truth matters. Women matter, those who allege they were victims of sexual misconduct or sexual assault by Mr. Trump matter.” Trump has already settled several lawsuits to avoid legal issues while in office, but those settlements have not required him to admit wrongdoing. Given that this lawsuit could be resolved without money, it will be interesting to see what his response will be.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post RantCrush Top 5: January 18, 2017 appeared first on Law Street.

Consent is essential before engaging in any kind of sexual activity. But as one case in Switzerland makes very clear, consent goes well beyond simply saying yes or no before having sex. In a landmark decision Monday, the Criminal Court in Lausanne, Switzerland convicted an unnamed man of rape after he secretly removed a condom during sex with his partner, without her knowledge or consent.

According to the Independent, the 47-year-old French man met the Swiss woman using the popular dating app Tinder. On the pair’s second date in June 2015, they started having sex with a condom. Afterwards, the woman learned that he had removed the condom during sex.

The judge determined that the woman never would have consented to unprotected sex.

According to bedsider.org, “ignoring a partner’s desire to protect against pregnancy or STIs, or even sabotaging a partner’s efforts to protect against pregnancy or STIs (like taking off a condom in the middle of sex without permission)” is considered sexual assault.

As Broadly notes, our understanding of consent has evolved in recent years. Dr. Sinead Ring of the University of Kent pointed to the UK’s Sexual Offenses Act 2003 as good point of reference for understanding “conditional consent.”

“If it’s proved the woman consented to sex with a condom and he changed the circumstances under which she’d consented, it’s quite possible he’d be convicted of rape,” Ring told Broadly. “But a jury would have to determine that he didn’t have a reasonable belief in consent and just went ahead and did it anyway.”

The perpetrator in this case received a one-year suspended sentence. The woman’s lawyer described the conviction as “a first for Switzerland.”

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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When most people think about rape and sexual violence they imagine a situation where a woman is attacked by a man she does not know. We usually do not think of college campuses, particularly dating on college campuses, as a place where rape is likely to occur. Yet college campuses are a dangerous place for both female and male students and the rate of rape and sexual violence is startling. During their college years, one in five women are sexually assaulted or raped. And it is not just female students who are victimized, as 17 percent of student victims are male.

Rapes on college campuses do not fit our mental model for how rape occurs, which makes it difficult to combat and makes victims reticent to report crimes. Among college women, nine out of 10 knew their rapist. Rape is particularly likely for freshmen and sophomores, especially cases of incapacitated rape, which happens to 15 percent of female freshmen.

Reporting Problems

Despite high rates of violence, only 20 percent of victims report the crime to the police. There are multiple reasons why victims may not choose to go to the police. Oftentimes the victim and the rapist are in the same social circle and victims fear social reprisal for reporting. They may also fear that their claims will not be taken seriously by the police or school officials and that they may be subject to disciplinary action or criminal prosecution themselves. Remember, many of these victims have been drinking underage and/or using drugs prior to their rape.

Victims may also have been conditioned to think that their rape was not a “real” rape. Their rapist is someone that they know, not a stranger grabbing them in a dark alley. Force may not have been used since often the victim was incapacitated at the time. Our culture also offers multiple excuses for rapists and puts blame on victims who were intoxicated or otherwise “irresponsible.” These feelings of guilt on the part of the victim are internalized and expressed by not reporting the crime because it isn’t worth dealing with.

In an effort to combat the problem of rape on campus, many colleges and universities have adopted affirmative consent practices. The use of affirmative consent to change cultural attitudes about rape and/or to change rules on how to prosecute sexual violence has caused a great deal of controversy and should be more thoroughly examined.

What Is Affirmative Consent?

For a full background on rape culture and affirmative consent, you can read this article. But the video below, featuring journalism icon Gwen Ifill, also provides an excellent overview of the concept of affirmative consent and some of the push-back on adopting it as a standard.

So let’s unpack some of the arguments surrounding affirmative consent. Jaclyn Friedman, the affirmative consent advocate, explains that the “no-means-no” standard (where consent is presumed unless it is expressly denied) doesn’t deal well with some kinds of sexual assault. In particular, it does not provide adequate protection from abuse for victims who may freeze up and feel too unsafe to deny consent. This is actually a common reaction, particularly for victims who are sexually inexperienced, incapacitated, or conditioned to not resist. When the burden is placed on all participants to make sure that everyone is consenting, it eliminates some of these dangers. It also would eliminate a situation where one party feels they were victimized and the other party honestly does not feel they did anything wrong because they thought silence was consent.

In a culture where silence indicates a lack of consent, not evidence of it, it becomes much more difficult for this to happen. This could be especially helpful for younger college students, or the sexually inexperienced, who are in fact more likely to be assaulted than their older student peers.

Shikha Dalmia takes a different view on the issue because of how affirmative consent changes the burden of proof and, in her view, the presumption of innocence. Her main objection is not that we may want to adopt this as a cultural model for how consent works but that we might use affirmative consent as a legal framework. As she states, consent is already required, under the “no-means-no” standard. But we presume that there was consent until the non-initiator indicates otherwise. This presumption is necessary, in Dalmia’s view, to maintain a presumption of innocence for those accused of rape.

We have to take that concern seriously because the presumption that everyone is innocent until proven guilty is a cornerstone of our judicial system. But changing the presumption of consent does not necessarily lead to a change in the burden of proof/presumption of innocence.

In a formal rape trial, the prosecution currently needs to show that the victim did not give consent, but that is not the same as saying we assume they are lying. In some instances where the defendant is asserting impotence or intoxication as a defense against rape they are already required to prove that element of the case, yet it does not change the underlying presumption of their innocence. Requiring one party to prove an element of the charge does not mean that we assume that party is being deceptive.

We are placing the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove a lack of consent. And they offer evidence for this such as the actions of the victim and defendant, including but not limited to what was said. But if consent was not presumed that wouldn’t change the fact that we are still asking the prosecution to prove its case. Prosecutors would still have to contend with any evidence the defense offers to show that there was in fact consent, and they would still be offering their own evidence to show that nothing the victim did amounted to consent. It would change the understanding of what all parties should have understood at the time of the incident–that they should have obtained consent–not be a commentary on what the defendant did or did not do.

A Practical Solution?

The second problem is how affirmative consent actually works in practice. Is it really something that will “work” on campuses, or in the general population, given our cultural scripts for how men and women behave sexually?

There are impracticalities to the use of affirmative consent but not for the reasons that detractors might suggest. The impracticality is not in asking for consent during a sexual encounter. The main obstacle is changing the cultural norm so that not getting that consent is a problem.

But hasn’t that been the case in all movements for increased social justice? Sharing a water fountain between blacks and whites was never impractical on its face, in fact, it is even more practical to have one water fountain. Just as affirmative consent as a model has the potential to reduce confusion and assault. The impracticality is from an unwillingness to implement a new system that changes social norms, gender norms in this case, not with the new norms themselves. There may not be enough evidence of how effective affirmative consent is on college campuses to draw a conclusion about its implementation. But there is some anecdotal evidence, suggested here, that even skeptics can incorporate affirmative consent into their sexual behavior.

The video below highlights both the concern about the practicality of the system and the appropriateness of how affirmative consent policies have been added to most college campuses. Many of these institutions adopted an affirmative consent model because the Obama administration, as part of the “It’s On Us” program, made continued federal funding contingent upon colleges dealing meaningfully with sexual assault. In the video, the panel discusses the issue in the state of California.

Some of these objections are based on a misunderstanding, sometimes a deliberately created misunderstanding, of affirmative consent. It certainly does not require written consent, and in fact, does not require even verbal consent. Obviously, a written document would be your strongest piece of evidence in a case trying to show you had obtained consent. But that doesn’t mean that it is the only way to do so, and this line of reasoning conflates the idea of how affirmative consent would work in practice in most sexual encounters with how affirmative consent might affect a legal proceeding.

What Affirmative Consent Would Change

Either at the school or the state level, a legal proceeding is only changed by explicit amendments to the burden of proof or the presumption of innocence. Affirmative consent does not do that. Our current prosecutorial system functions perfectly well, even when consent is at issue, without a document signed by the victim saying they didn’t consent. There is no reason to think that a written contract would be required simply by asking an initiator to make sure their sexual activity was welcome.

In fact, if you look at one example definition of affirmative consent used by a university, specifically the State University of New York, it explicitly includes actions as one method to show consent. The key is that the words or actions create a “clear permission” regarding willingness.

But there is still discomfort with the idea that the federal government can influence policy at colleges around the country by threatening to withhold funding. Some people think it is inappropriate to try to strong arm a college in this way.

And yet the government already engages in this behavior all the time, in other contexts, to promote fair treatment. One example is the area of special education. While I was at William and Mary I worked in our clinic for children with special needs, ensuring that they received FAPE–a free and appropriate public education. In exchange for federal funding, the state of Virginia agreed to follow certain guidelines for how they were required to handle children with special needs. Before the implementation of the law that allowed this, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, children with special needs were often shoved into a corner and ignored.

Most people would not object to this requirement because they realize that sometimes you need practical reasons to encourage socially just behavior. As much as we would like to think otherwise, people do not always behave morally on their own, state governments and colleges included. The federal government has consistently used the power of the purse to encourage behavior to support marginalized groups. The fact that they are doing so now, to protect students from sexual assault, should not matter. A prudish or squeamish reaction to the involvement of the government in sexual matters focuses on the sex and not on the violence. Rape that occurs when someone is incapacitated, knows the attacker, was drinking, etc. is just as much an act of violence as a stranger jumping a victim on the street. And there is no more quintessentially appropriate role for government than the prevention of violence against its citizens.

Conclusion

We need to deal with rape as it actually happens in reality, rather than dealing with rape as it is portrayed in our culture. A rapist is not always, or even usually, a stranger. It does not always happen with physical violence; often sexual assault happens in a wider social context. And because sexual assault is inextricably linked with sexual conduct in general, we have to address our sexual culture if we want to address sexual assault.

Affirmative consent may not be a panacea for the issue of sexual assault, even just on college campuses. The use of alcohol and drugs, the tight-knit social communities where these assaults occur, and the relative sexual immaturity of the age group all make sexual assault more complicated on a college campus. But the discussion of whether we want to adopt this model, either in a social or in a judicial context, has opened the door for people to grapple with what consent really means. That discussion is a valuable one for us to be having.

Mary Kate Leahy

Mary Kate Leahy (@marykate_leahy) has a J.D. from William and Mary and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Manhattanville College. She is also a proud graduate of Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart. She enjoys spending her time with her kuvasz, Finn, and tackling a never-ending list of projects. Contact Mary Kate at staff@LawStreetMedia.com

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Throughout most of our history, rape was a property crime.

Today we do not, in the modern United States at least, think of a woman’s sexuality as a financial asset. But that is a recent phenomenon. For most of our history, rape was not treated the same way as other violent assaults because it wasn’t just a violent assault, it was also a crime against property.

You can see this view–of a woman’s sexuality belonging to her father and later her husband–in laws concerning rape and sexual assault. It was even possible for a father to sue a man who had consensual sex with his daughter because he had lost the value of his daughter. Based on this view, value is lost in terms of her work if she became pregnant and was no longer able to earn wages, or in terms of a future wife for someone else because of this stain on her character. Men could not be held accountable for raping their wives because a wife was a man’s property and consent to sex–at any time of his choosing–was part of the arrangement.

Lest you think that these laws are ancient examples of a culture that no longer bears relation to our current policies on rape, spousal rape was not made illegal in all fifty states until 1993, where it still may carry a less severe sentence than other rape offenses. The tort of seduction was technically on the books in North Carolina in 2003.

This context is important given our current cultural attitudes toward sexual assault. To understand this culture and how it can be amended, we need to look more deeply at the historical understandings of rape and consent.

Force Means No

The framework for defining rape underpins our understanding of who is required to prove consent or non-consent. The Hebrew Scriptures, which established longstanding cultural norms that helped form a basis for what was morally and legally acceptable in early America, make a distinction between a woman who was raped within a city and one who was raped outside of the city limits. The first woman was stoned to death and the second considered blameless (assuming she was a virgin). This distinction is based on the idea that it was the woman’s responsibility to cry out for help and show that she was non-consenting. A woman who was raped in the city obviously had not screamed because if she had someone would have come to her rescue and stopped the rape. The woman outside the city had no one to rescue her so she could not be blamed for being victimized.

This brutal logic, which is completely inconsistent with how we know some victims of rape react to an attack, was continued in the American legal system when our laws on rape were formulated. Rape was defined as a having a male perpetrator and a female victim and involving sexual penetration and a lack of consent. But it was again the woman’s responsibility to prove that she had not consented and the way that this was demonstrated was through her resistance. She was only actually raped if she had attempted to fight off her attacker. Different jurisdictions required different levels of force to show a true lack of consent. For example, fighting off an assailant to your utmost ability or even up to the point where the choice was either to submit to being raped or to being killed. Indeed, the cultural significance of chastity as a virtue that the female was expected to guard was so profound that many female Christian saints are saints at least in part because they chose to die rather than be raped or be a bride to anyone but Christ.

Potential canonization aside, it was consistently the responsibility of the woman alleging that she was the victim of a rape to prove that she had fought off her attacker in order to show that she had not consented. If she could not show that she had sufficiently resisted, she was deemed to not have been raped. Her chastity was someone else’s property, either her father’s or her husband’s/future husband’s, so it was always understood that someone, other than her, had the right to her sexuality. The assailant had assumed that he had the right to use her sexually and was only a rapist if she acted in such a way that a reasonable man would have known that she did not belong to him. Her failure to communicate that fact, that she was the property of some other man, was a sign that she had in fact consented. Therefore the rape was not his moral failing in stealing another man’s property but her moral failing in not protecting that property from being stolen.

Culture Wars

We can see the effects of this ideology in how we treat rape victims today. Although we don’t necessarily require evidence of forceful resistance, it is considered helpful in prosecuting a rape case. Rape shield laws may have eliminated the most egregious examples of slut-shaming victims, but an innocent or even virginal victim is certainly what the prosecution could hope for if they were trying to design their most favorable case. One of the first questions that will be asked of the victim is “did you say no?” In other words “what did YOU do to prevent this from happening to you?” The burden is still often legally and almost always culturally on the victim to show that they did not consent.

There is an alternative approach that has been gaining traction on college campuses and elsewhere known as the concept of “affirmative consent.” Take a look at the video below, which elucidates the differences between the “no versus no” approach compared to affirmative consent, which is often described as “yes means yes.”

In this video, Susan Patton and Rush Limbaugh both represent examples of rape culture. The contrast between the views of Savannah Badlich, the advocate of affirmative consent, and Patton, who is against the idea, could not be starker. To Badlich, consent is an integral part of what makes sex, sex. If there isn’t consent then whatever happened to you, whether most people would have enjoyed it or indeed whether or not you orgasmed, was rape. It is your consent that is the foundation of a healthy sexual experience, not the types of physical actions involved. In contrast, Patton expressed the view that good sex is good sex and consent seems to not play a role in whether it was good sex, or even whether it should be defined as sex at all. The only thing that could indicate if something is an assault versus a sexual encounter is whatever physical evidence exists, because otherwise, the distinction is based only on the assertions of each individual. Again we are back to evidence of force.

What is “Rape Culture”?

Rape culture refers to a culture in which sexuality and violence are linked together and normalized. It perpetuates the idea that male sexuality is based on the use of violence against women to subdue them to take a sexual experience, as well as the idea that female sexuality is the effort to resist or invite male sexuality under certain circumstances. It overgeneralizes gender roles in sexuality, demeans men by promoting their only healthy sexuality as predatory, and also demeans women by considering them objects without any positive sexuality at all.

According to this school of thought, the “no means no” paradigm fits in perfectly with rape culture because it paints men as being predators who are constantly looking for a weak member of the herd to take advantage of sexually, while also teaching women that they need to be better than the rest of the herd at fending off attacks, by clearly saying no, to survive. If they can’t do that, because they were drinking or not wearing proper clothing, then the attack was their fault.

“Yes Means Yes”

Affirmative consent works differently. Instead of assuming that you can touch someone until they prove otherwise, an affirmative consent culture assumes that you may not touch someone until you are invited to do so. This would be a shocking idea to some who assume that gamesmanship and predation are the cornerstones of male sexuality and the perks of power, but it works out better for the majority of men and women, who would prefer and who should demand equality in sex.

This video gives a brief highlight of some of the issues that are brought up when affirmative consent is discussed and the difficulties that can still arise even with affirmative consent as a model.

Evaluating Criticism of Affirmative Consent

The arguments are important so let’s unpack some of the key ones in more detail. The first objection, expressed in both videos, is how exactly do you show consent? Whenever the affirmative consent approach comes up, one of the first arguments is that it is unenforceable because no one is going to stop sexual activity to get written consent, which is the only way to really prove that a person consented. We still end up in a “he said, she said” situation, which is exactly where we are now, or a world where the government is printing out sex contracts.

The idea that affirmative consent will by necessity lead to written contracts for sex is a logical fallacy that opponents to affirmative consent use to make the proposition seem ridiculous. Currently, we require the victim to prove non-consent. Often the victim is asked if they gave a verbal no or if they said they did not want the contact. The victim is never asked: did you put the fact that you didn’t want to be touched in writing and have your assailant read it? The idea that a written explanation of non-consent would be the only way we would take it seriously is absurd, so it would be equally absurd to assume that requiring proof of consent would necessitate written documentation. Advocates for affirmative consent don’t want sex contracts.

In addition, even under our current framework we accept a variety of pieces of evidence from the prosecution to show that the victim did not consent. A clear “no” is obviously the strongest kind of evidence, just as under an affirmative consent framework an enthusiastic verbal “yes” would be the best evidence, but that is just what the best evidence is. That is certainly not the only kind of evidence available. Courts already look at the entire context surrounding the incident to try to determine consent. The process would be virtually the same under an affirmative consent model. The only difference would be that the burden would be on the defendant to show that they believed they had obtained consent based on the context of the encounter instead of placing the burden on the victim to show that, although they didn’t say “no,” they had expressed non-verbally that they were unwilling to participate.

The shift in the burden of proof is sometimes cited as a reason not to adopt an affirmative consent model. Critics argue that this affects the presumption that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. Which is, rightly, a cornerstone of our judicial system. If this model did, in fact, change that presumption then it wouldn’t be an appropriate answer to this problem. But it does not.

Take another crime as an example. A woman’s car is stolen. The police issue a BOLO on the car, find it, and bring the suspect in and sit him down. They ask him “did you have permission to take that car?” and he replies “Yes, officer, she gave me the keys!”

He is still presumed innocent and, as far as this brief hypothetical tells us, hasn’t had his rights violated. It looks as though he is going to get a fair trial at this point. That trial may still devolve into another he said, she said situation. She may allege that she didn’t give him the keys but merely left them on the kitchen table. At that point, it will be up to the jury to decide who they believe, but that would have been the case in any event. He is presenting her giving the keys to him as one of the facts to show his innocence.

If a woman’s car is stolen we don’t question her about how many miles are on the odometer. We don’t ask if she wore a seatbelt the last time she drove it. We don’t care if she had been drinking because her alcohol consumption doesn’t negate the fact that she was a victim of a crime. We certainly wouldn’t force her to prove that she didn’t give the thief the keys.

That is how affirmative consent works. It wouldn’t require a written contract or even necessarily a verbal assertion. Context would always matter and the cases would still often become two competing stories about what the context meant. And it doesn’t mean that we are assuming that person is guilty before they have the chance to show that they did, in fact, get that consent. It just means that we are placing the burden of proving that consent was obtained on the party claiming that consent had been obtained.

Conclusion

There is no other category of crime where we ask the victim to show that they didn’t want to be the victim of that crime. A man who is stabbed in a bar fight, regardless of whether he was drunk or belligerent, isn’t asked to prove that he didn’t want a knife wound.

We need to change our cultural framework of rape and consent. When we are working under an affirmative consent framework what we are doing is changing the first question. Currently, our first question is for the victim: did you say no? Under an affirmative consent model our first question is for the suspect: did you get a yes?

Resources

Women Against Violence Against Women: What Is Rape Culture? 

Vice: A Brief And Depressing History of Rape Laws

Women’s Law Project: Rape and Sexual Assault In the Legal System

Find Law: Is The Tort of Wrongful Seduction Still Viable? 

International Models Project On Women’s Rights: Law Reform Efforts: Rape and Sexual Assault In The United States of America

Catholic Company: The Virgin Martyrs As Models of Purity

Chicago Tribune: To Combat Sexual Assault, Colleges Say ‘Yes’ To Affirmative Consent

Think Progress: What Affirmative Consent Actually Means

SUNY: Definition of Affirmative Consent 

Washington Post: Why We Made ‘Yes Means Yes’ California Law

Mary Kate Leahy

Mary Kate Leahy (@marykate_leahy) has a J.D. from William and Mary and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Manhattanville College. She is also a proud graduate of Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart. She enjoys spending her time with her kuvasz, Finn, and tackling a never-ending list of projects. Contact Mary Kate at staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Rape Culture and the Concept of Affirmative Consent appeared first on Law Street.

The Brock Turner sexual assault case upset us all, and you can’t have missed the assault survivor’s powerful words as her statement circulated in the media. It started with the words, “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.” A few days after the trial, an open letter was released by Vice President Joe Biden, commending her for her courage. She has only been identified as Emily Doe in the media to protect her identity. Now Glamour magazine has named her as woman of the year for her courage and her words, with the praise: “It was Doe’s take-no-prisoners telling of what happened afterward that changed the conversation about sexual assault forever.”

We honor Emily Doe to support the @RecallPersky initiative: https://t.co/ZwZyzGwv6R #GlamourWOTY #shattertheceiling pic.twitter.com/YrJnEYp8IU

— Glamour (@glamourmag) November 1, 2016

The nomination continued:

Doe’s words circled the globe. Within four days her statement had been viewed 11 million times; it was read aloud on CNN and the floor of Congress. Rape hotlines experienced surges in both calls and offers of volunteer help. And importantly, California closed the loophole that had allowed lighter sentences in cases where the victim is unconscious or severely intoxicated.

On Tuesday, Doe wrote another piece for Glamour describing how she was told her case was an “easy” one, thanks to the evidence and witnesses. But she didn’t experience it that way.

I had forensic evidence, sober un­biased witnesses, a slurred voice mail, police at the scene. I had everything, and I was still told it was not a slam dunk. I thought, if this is what having it good looks like, what other hells are survivors living?

Doe went on to describe how she lost all hope when she heard Turner was only sentenced to six months in prison. And how later, he was let out after serving only about half that time. But after Buzzfeed published the powerful statement she read in court, support from women all over the world started pouring in. She got letters from Botswana, Ireland, and India, she received bicycle shaped earrings to symbolize the two Swedish guys who biked by and rescued her, and she got paintings of lighthouses, referring to the part of her speech when she talked about being a beacon of light for others.

Doe wrote how she wants to be a role model for young girls–and to encourage everyone to speak up. She also contemplated how one woman felt it necessary to comment somewhere on the internet: “Sad. I hope my daughter never ends up like her,” as if being raped was Doe’s own fault. Someone else said: “she’s not pretty enough to have been raped.” Doe absorbed those remarks, but drew strength from seeing her message spread online and on the TV news. And she said she did hope other girls would “end up” like her–strong and knowing their rights.

Emily Doe, “the Stanford Survivor” speaks out in a powerful essay—”I hope you don’t end up, I hope you keep going.” https://t.co/0thSTYFw8Y pic.twitter.com/x6LzPuTLKa

— End Rape on Campus (@endrapeoncampus) November 1, 2016

Placing the blame on an assault survivor is a dated and dangerous way mindset. No matter how someone is dressed or how dark it is outside, an attack is never the survivor’s fault.

If you think the answer is that women need to be more sober, more civil, more upright, that girls must be better at exercising fear, must wear more layers with eyes open wider, we will go nowhere. When Judge Aaron Persky mutes the word justice, when Brock Turner serves one month for every felony, we go nowhere.

She ended her essay by saying that the world won’t change until everyone makes it a priority to avoid harming other people–and hold accountable those who do.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Attorneys for Rolling Stone magazine and a former administrator at the University of Virginia completed their closing arguments on Tuesday, in a defamation case brought against the magazine for an article it published two years ago about now-debunked rape accusations. Seven jurors will begin deliberating the case on Wednesday in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Nicole Eramo, the former associate dean of students at UVA, also in Charlottesville, is suing the magazine for $7.5 million for its November 2014 story, “A Rape on Campus.” Eramo says the writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, unfairly portrayed her as a villain, and as an administrator protecting her institution rather than her students. The story centers around “Jackie,” a student who alleged she was gang raped and beaten at a fraternity party in 2012.

Tom Clare, Eramo’s attorney, argued that Erdely set out to tell a story of “institutional indifference,” and had a preconceived agenda that directed her reporting. He said she ignored key sources and facts that ran counter to her narrative, asserting “once they decided what the article was going to be about, it didn’t matter what the facts were.”

After the Rolling Stone piece thrust the case, and campus sexual assault more broadly, into the national conversation, a police investigation largely debunked the story “Jackie,” told Erdely. Rolling Stone issued an apology in December 2014, and the story was retracted in April 2015. To prove her case, however, Eramo must show the magazine intentionally acted with “actual malice.” 

Rolling Stone defamation trial nears end as lawyers say facts of UVA case ignored https://t.co/3nkzmG6woo

— The Guardian (@guardian) November 2, 2016

On the other side of the aisle, Rolling Stone’s lawyer, Scott Sexton, said there is no evidence that the magazine was aware of the story’s falsehoods before publication. “Everyone who encountered this young woman believed her,” he said. “Yet we are the ones, in a sense, being tried for having believed her.”

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was commissioned by Rolling Stone after the story’s retraction in 2015 to study how the article was reported and where it failed. The commission called Erdely’s piece “a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable,” encompassing “reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking,” especially concerning the writer’s reliance on a single source (“Jackie”), and her failure to corroborate details with friends or interview the accused attackers.

The trial has lasted over two weeks, as 10 jurors–the seven who will decide the case and three alternates–reviewed 11 hours of video testimony, a score of eye witnesses, and 300 exhibits. “Jackie” will be providing a recorded deposition, and will not show up in court.

Alec Siegel

Alec Siegel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. When he’s not working at Law Street he’s either cooking a mediocre tofu dish or enjoying a run in the woods. His passions include: gooey chocolate chips, black coffee, mountains, the Animal Kingdom in general, and John Lennon. Baklava is his achilles heel. Contact Alec at ASiegel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Rolling Stone Defamation Case is in the Jury’s Hands Now appeared first on Law Street.

In an article published Wednesday by The New York Times, two women describe how Donald Trump sexually harassed them: one said Trump groped her 36 years ago when she sat next to him on an airplane. The other said he forcibly kissed her on the lips in 2005, when she was a secretary for one of his real estate firms in Manhattan. At a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday, Trump, calling the women “horrible, horrible liars,” dismissed the charges as “all fabricated” and “pure fiction.” He claimed they were whipped up by the media and Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent.

“These vicious claims about me, of inappropriate conduct with women, are totally and absolutely false. And the Clintons know it,” Trump said at the rally.

A spate of sexual assault accusations involving the Republican presidential hopeful have surfaced in the days following a leaked tape in which Trump, in 2005, brags about forcing himself on women because he’s a “star.” Aside from the two women who shared their stories with the Times, Natasha Stoynoff, a writer with PEOPLE Magazine, recounted an incident from 2005 in which Trump assaulted her at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

“We walked into that room alone,” Stoynoff wrote, referencing a “tremendous” room Trump showed her while giving her a tour of his mansion. “Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.”

Trump vociferously denied all of these reports on Thursday in front of a boisterous crowd, saying:

And so now we address the slander and libels that was just last night thrown at me by the Clinton machine and the New York Times and other media outlets, as part of a concerted, coordinated and vicious attack. It’s not coincidence that these attacks come at the exact same moment, and all together at the same time as WikiLeaks releases documents exposing the massive international corruption of the Clinton machine, including 2,000 more e-mails just this morning.

Trump’s attorneys, meanwhile, threatened the Times, saying it would be sued for libel unless they took the article down. Times’ Vice President and Assistant General Counsel David McCraw responded in a letter:

“Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself,” he wrote, adding: “If Mr. Trump disagrees, if he believes that American citizens had no right to hear what these women had to say and that the law of this country forces us and those who would dare to criticize him to stand silent or be punished, we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.”

Alec Siegel

Alec Siegel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. When he’s not working at Law Street he’s either cooking a mediocre tofu dish or enjoying a run in the woods. His passions include: gooey chocolate chips, black coffee, mountains, the Animal Kingdom in general, and John Lennon. Baklava is his achilles heel. Contact Alec at ASiegel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Trump Dismisses Sexual Assault Stories as “Fabricated” and “Pure Fiction” appeared first on Law Street.

First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama took to the podium Thursday afternoon to deliver a powerful speech condemning Donald Trump’s “sexually predatory behavior,” admitting that she can’t believe “a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women.”

During the speech, which took place at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally in New Hampshire, Obama referenced Trump’s salacious “Access Hollywood” audio recording, calling the Republican nominee’s comments “shocking,” “demeaning,” and lacking “basic standards of human decency.”

Obama, who at times looked emotional, admitted that she couldn’t stop thinking about the tape that has “shaken her to her core.”

FLOTUS said:

This wasn’t just locker room banter. This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior. And actually bragging about kissing and groping women using language so obscene that many of us worried about our children hearing it when we turned on the TV. And to make matters worse it now seems very clear that this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s one of countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life.

Obama later rejected Trump’s excuse for his language saying, “to dismiss this as everyday locker room talk is an insult to decent men everywhere.”

Clinton applauded Obama’s comments on Twitter writing, “FLOTUS, I’m in awe. Thanks for putting into words what’s in so many of our hearts.”

.@FLOTUS, I’m in awe. Thanks for putting into words what’s in so many of our hearts. -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 13, 2016

Michelle Obama’s speech will definitely be remembered as one of the most powerful this election cycle. Trump’s campaign continues to implode following numerous sexual assault allegations and inappropriate comments toward women, proving voters may have finally had enough when it comes to his scandals.

Watch Part of Michelle Obama’s Speech Below

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Michelle Obama Condemns Trump’s “Predatory Behavior” in NH Speech appeared first on Law Street.

After the first presidential debate broke records as the most watched debate in U.S. history, expectations for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s second showdown at Washington University in St. Louis were high. Here are five of the most buzzworthy moments from the second presidential debate:

 You Know They Had to Talk About The Tape

Going into the second debate, we knew Trump was going to be confronted with questions about the 2005  recording where he was heard speaking vulgarly about women with then “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush. CNN’s Anderson Cooper wasted no time bringing it up saying, “You’ve bragged that you sexually assaulted women,”  before asking the Republican nominee to explain his actions. Trump responded by saying repeatedly that it was just ” locker room talk” and deflected the conversation to ISIS, Clinton’s emails, and Bill’s past discretions.

Clinton responded by saying that the video and Trump’s attacks against the Khan family, a Hispanic federal judge, President Obama, and a reporter with a physical disability definitively show that he’s not fit to be president. “He owes the president an apology. He owes our country an apology.”

That video represents exactly who Donald Trump is.

-Hillary Clinton.#debate

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) October 10, 2016

More Sniffling

Like the first debate, viewers continued to be distracted by Trump’s constant sniffling. While the source of his nasal woes is still unclear, people couldn’t help but speculate about the cause.

#Debate: @realDonaldTrump seems a lot more calm, although his sniffling hasn’t gone away.

— Melissa Mecija (@10NewsMecija) October 10, 2016

Is Trump going to blame the sniffling on his mic again? #debate

— Anthony De Rosa (@Anthony) October 10, 2016

symptoms of cocaine abuse

1. dry mouth
2. sniffling
3. rambling incoherently #debate

— Hutch Harris (@thethermals) October 10, 2016

Trump Threatens to Put Clinton in Jail

When addressing Clinton, Trump said that if he wins, “I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” in response to her private email server use while serving as Secretary of State. Clinton responded by saying viewers should fact check his falsehoods, and that it’s a good thing Trump isn’t in charge of our nation’s laws. “Because you’d be in jail,” shot back Trump, followed by cheers from the audience.

Excuse me, Moderators

It’s not unusual to see presidential candidates interrupt the moderator to get their points across, but this time it was excessive. Trump accused the moderators of teaming up against him and favoriting Clinton.  “It’s one-on-three,” muttered Trump. In fact, ABC’s Martha Raddatz had just asked Clinton about her emails. “We brought up the emails,” Cooper responded.

The Candidates Had to Say Something Nice About Each Other!

After attacking each other’s policies, personal lives, and scandals for an hour and a half, the candidates were asked to close out the debate by naming one positive thing they respect about one another.

Clinton went first, saying that she admires Trump’s children. Trump closed out the debate saying, “She doesn’t quit, she doesn’t give up. I respect that. I tell it like it is. She is a fighter.”

Aww maybe there is hope that they can one day be friends. Or not.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post 5 Buzzworthy Moments From the 2nd Presidential Debate appeared first on Law Street.

A Swedish court decided on Friday that the arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange still stands. He was accused of rape during a visit to Sweden back in 2010 and remains in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange denies the rape allegation and has refused to leave the embassy out of fear that he will be extradited to the United States where he could face espionage charges for documents leaked by his website.

Originally from Australia, Julian Assange visited Sweden in the summer of 2010 to give a lecture. He spent time with two Swedish women and over the course of a couple days he spent the night with each of them. Opinions diverge over what happened next. According to the women, what started out as consensual sex ended up being non-consensual. But Assange denies any wrongdoing and claimed he was shocked to hear the accusations.

Some people believe the women are part of a bigger political scheme to have Assange arrested. International media has criticized the strict Swedish rape laws, calling the country a “feminist dystopia” for how easy it is to be convicted while mocking the women for being upset that Assange dated more than one person at the same time. But the women’s testimonies, which were obtained by the Guardian, indicate that the case is more complicated than that. Assange allegedly attempted to have sex with both women without a condom, and although he eventually did use one, one of the women alleges that he intentionally ripped it before they had sex. The other woman claims she woke up and realized he was having unprotected sex with her, against her will. According to the Associated Press, allegations of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion were dropped due to the statute of limitations in Sweden, but the rape charge will remain until 2020.

In response to the ruling, Assange’s Swedish defense lawyer Per Samuelson told the Associated Press, “We are naturally disappointed that Swedish courts yet again choose to ignore Julian Assange’s difficult life situation. They ignore the risk that he will be extradited to the United States.”

Swedish prosecutors said they have not been in contact with the United States about Assange’s case, and if a third country asks to have Assange extradited it would need permission from Britain. Prosecutors are trying to move forward on the case by interrogating Assange at the embassy with the help of an Ecuadorean official who will question him on October 17.

Yesterday, the Wikileaks Twitter account said that Assange would turn himself into the United States if authorities release Chelsea Manning.

If Obama grants Manning clemency, Assange will agree to US prison in exchange — despite its clear unlawfulness https://t.co/MZU30S3Eia

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 15, 2016

Manning is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified materials. She ended her hunger strike earlier this week after the U.S. Army decided to allow her to undergo gender transition surgery.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Swedish Court: Detention Order for Julian Assange Stands appeared first on Law Street.

Comedian and former TV superstar Bill Cosby is due back in court on Tuesday, for proceedings in one of the only sexual assault cases against him that hasn’t passed the statute of limitations. He is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting about 60 women over the past 50 years, but many of the women revealed what happened well after the fact, and prosecutors were unable to purse charges. The Andrea Constand case took place in 2004 in Pennsylvania, where the statute of limitations is 12 years, meaning January 2016 was the deadline for pressing charges. In December of last year, Pennsylvania prosecutor Kevin Steele did so.

Andrea Constand was an operations manager and coach for the women’s basketball team at Temple University, Bill Cosby’s alma mater. As in the other alleged assault cases, he invited her over to his house, gave her some pills to make her relaxed, and then  assaulted her. Cosby has denied any wrongdoing.

Two months ago the judge in the case rejected Cosby’s request to have the criminal charges dismissed. On Tuesday he is due back in court for a pretrial hearing, and his lawyers want the judge to dismiss two pieces of key evidence: Cosby’s deposition from 2005, and a recording of a phone call between Cosby and Andrea Constand’s mother from the same year.

HAPPENING TODAY: Bill Cosby is back in Montgomery Co. court for evidence hearing. Could learn trial date @CBS21NEWS pic.twitter.com/W38d3F05wP

— Sara Small (@SaraSmallTV) September 6, 2016

The Constand case is in part based on Cosby’s 2005 deposition. Cosby talked about having extramarital affairs that he claimed were consensual, despite admitting to drugging the women. According to his defense team, he only talked freely about that because then district attorney Bruce Castor promised to not bring a criminal case against Cosby. But Castor said he made the promise so that Cosby couldn’t use the Fifth Amendment to avoid the questions.

Andrea Constand’s mother Gianna was recording when Cosby phoned her in her home in Canada in 2005, without Cosby’s knowledge. According to Canadian law it is legal to record a call with only one party’s consent, but Cosby’s lawyers want the court to apply the Pennsylvania law to the case, which would require both parties’ consent.

However, prosecutor Kevin Steele claimed that Cosby either knew or suspected what was happening, based on comments Cosby made on the call, and the fact that he claimed to have that information in his 2005 deposition.

Cosby is currently free on a $1 million bail but could face up to ten years in prison if found guilty.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Bill Cosby Back in Court For Andrea Constand Sexual Assault Case appeared first on Law Street.

After serving only three months in Santa Clara County jail for sexual assault, former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner was released on Friday morning. He left after serving half of a six-month sentence that he received in June after he was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on Stanford’s campus in of January last year.

The case has been widely covered and the judge was harshly criticized for the lenient punishment. Prosecutors wanted a six-year sentence, but Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky responded saying, “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him. I think he will not be a danger to others.”

As Turner left the jail, wearing dress pants and a wrinkled white shirt, a small group of demonstrators and members of the press watched. Sandra Pfeiffer, who told NPR member station KQED that she was a rape survivor herself, said, “Other people get locked away for a very long time, why did he get out after 90 days? Why? Why? It doesn’t make sense.”

In the aftermath of Turner’s sentencing, the Department of Education released a list of sexual assault complaints at colleges across the country. The list revealed that Stanford had five federal complaints–not counting Brock Turner’s case, which was conducted in the justice system not by the university–into how the school handled sexual assault cases. According to the list, Stanford had the most of any school under review.

Before Turner was sentenced, his father sent a controversial letter to the judge in his son’s case, which also led to a lot of criticism. In the letter, he argued that his son didn’t deserve to have his life ruined by a prison sentence. He wrote, “His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”

In court, Turner’s victim read a powerful statement in court where she questioned the lenient punishment and society’s view on sexual assault. She also wondered what the outcome would have been if the assailant had not been a privileged, white star-athlete:

If I had been sexually assaulted by an un-athletic guy from a community college, what would his sentence be? If a first time offender from an underprivileged background was accused of three felonies and displayed no accountability for his actions other than drinking, what would his sentence be?

Turner’s early release made a lot of people on Twitter mad, as some saw it as an example of white privilege.

I know dudes from my hood who’ve had their lives ruined over a bag of weed and this dude Brock Turner just did 3 months for rape.

— Blédakiss (@ChefRoble) September 2, 2016

If only Brock Turner were a poor undocumented Mexican immigrant & not ‘an All-American boy,’ Trumpists cld use him to vilify a whole people.

— Jeffrey Wright (@jfreewright) September 2, 2016

Some argued that his sentence reflects one of the many reasons why victims of sexual abuse often do not speak up.

If you ever say “Why don’t rape victims just tell the police?” Please refer to the Brock Turner case and realize that it’s not that simple.

— tess (@that1mum) September 2, 2016

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Brock Turner Released From Jail After Serving 3 Months for Sexual Assault appeared first on Law Street.

It’s been over a year since New York Magazine enlisted the help of 35 women to blow the lid off Cosby’s decade-spanning sex scandal. Unfortunately, California’s 10-year statute of limitations for prosecuting rape meant many of these women would never face their alleged abuser in court. And that didn’t sit well with Golden State lawmakers.

On Thursday, the California Assembly passed a bill to eliminate the time limit for prosecuting rape and other felony sex crimes. Now the bill referred to as SB 813 is on its way to the state Senate, which passed an earlier version of legislation 33-0 in June, according to the LA Times. If it is successful there, it could be signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown before the session ends.

Nearly half of the states in this country have a statute of limitations for these crimes. Understanding where each state stands can be confusing at times since the U.S. hasn’t standardized its terminology for what is considered sexual assault (some states define it as: Sexual Offense, Forcible Rape, Criminal Sexual Conduct, Sexual Battery, etc.) Many states do, however, make exceptions when the victims happen to be minors. But even in these cases many victims must report their attacks before they reach a certain age.

Opponents of the bill, which included the California Public Defenders Association and some victims’ rights groups, spelled out a list of reasons for why statute of limitations exist for rape cases. They say the time limits are meant to decrease the chances of wrongful convictions due to inaccurate memories, deaths of witness, and lost or tampered evidence.

According to the Daily Mail, three of Cosby’s alleged victims spoke before the California Senate in June to support the bill. They include Victoria Valentino, a former Playboy Model who claimed Cosby raped her in Hollywood in 1969; “Kacey,” who said the comedian sexually assaulted her 20 years ago in Bel-Air; and the actress Lili Bernard, who claimed she was raped by Cosby in the ’90s in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

“War criminals, no matter how many decades have passed, cannot evade prosecution,” Bernard told the Senate committee. “I am asking you to do the same thing for us, rape survivors, who survived the war upon our body.”

Unfortunately for her, if the bill passes, California won’t be prosecuting Cosby for any former allegations, since charges cannot be brought retroactively. The bill would only apply to crimes committed after January 1, 2017, or to incidents where the statute of limitations hadn’t run out by that date.

Click here to learn more about your state’s laws governing sex crimes using Rape Abuse Incest National Network’s database.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post California Aims to Eliminate Time Limit on Prosecuting Rape Cases appeared first on Law Street.

A second Olympic boxer has been arrested in Rio on allegations of sexually assaulting a housekeeper. Jonas Junius, a 22-year-old Namibian boxer who was scheduled to compete in the welter weight division Thursday, is said to have allegedly grabbed and kissed a maid before offering her money to have sex with him.

BREAKING: Boxer Jonas Junius has been arrested for an attempted sexual assault of an Olympic Village housekeeper. pic.twitter.com/aj4XEDw8WZ

— Namibian Sun (@namibiansun) August 8, 2016

Junius’ case was preceded last week by the Friday arrest of Moroccan boxer Hassan Saada, 22, who is being detained in a Rio jail for 15 days for allegedly sexually assaulting two Brazilian maids in the Olympic Village.

Chief investigator Carolina Salomao told CBS New, “They were cleaning the room right across his, and he assaulted them. He groped the breast of one of them and touched the other woman’s thigh. They were able to get out.”

Under Brazilian law suspects can be held for long periods of time while police gather evidence. He was scheduled to fight Saturday against Turkish boxer Nadir Mehmet Unal in the light heavyweight division. Saada’s lawyers attempted to obtain a special release to allow him to compete, but it was denied.

Moroccan boxer Hassan Saada has been arrested for sexually assaulting two female cleaners in Rio. #Starrfmsports pic.twitter.com/4VdePeekLt

— Starr 103.5FM Sports (@Starrfmsports) August 5, 2016

Junius, who was the honored flag bearer for Namibia during the Olympic Opening Ceremony, will also be held for 15 days while Rio police investigate the assault claim.

There’s something eerie about the similarities of the two cases–both suspects are 22-year-old boxers accused by housekeepers. Still, with details at a minimum and investigations underway, it’s impossible to speculate if the cases have a connection, or are unfortunate coincidence..

Click Here to Read About the Sexual Abuse Coverup Claims Rocking the Gymnastics World Before Rio

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Second Olympic Boxer Accused of Sexual Assault in Rio appeared first on Law Street.

A Title IX lawsuit against the University of Tennessee-Knoxville has been settled for $2.48 million with a group of eight women who accused the school of fostering a “hostile sexual environment,” listing incidents dating back to 1995, mostly involving allegations against male student athletes.

The announcement of the settlement comes just two days before the university has to formally respond to the case in the U.S. District Court. However, though UT is paying out nearly $2.5 million, it is not admitting guilt or negligence.

The lawsuit was first filed in February, when six women filed a civil suit claiming that athletes who were found guilty of assault went unpunished. They alleged that perpetrators and their teammates discouraged women from reporting rape charges, and that an athlete who tried to help a woman who had been assaulted was attacked by a fellow athlete. The women are dismissing the lawsuit against UT, according to David Randolph Smith, the Nashville attorney who represents the eight women.

“My clients and I are dismissing the lawsuit with prejudice and signed the settlement agreement,” Smith said in a statement. He added:

We are satisfied that, while universities everywhere struggle with these issues, the University of Tennessee has made significant progress in the way they educate and respond to sexual assault cases. My clients and I are also convinced that the University’s leadership is truly committed to continue its exemplary efforts to create a model as it relates to sexual misconduct.

The lawsuit claimed UT’s administrative hearing process was one-sided and denied victims the “rights to a hearing and to the same equal procedural, hearing, and process rights as given to perpetrators of rape and sexual assault.” It also accused the university of interfering with investigations and providing lawyers for students accused of misconduct. The $2.48 million payout from UT to the eight women will be split between UT’s athletic department and central administration. The money will not come from taxpayer dollars, student fees or donor funds, according to the school’s lawyers.

Joe DiPietro, UT System President, announced that in the next few weeks he will appoint an independent commission to review the current programs in place that combat sexual assault, and assess what areas need to be strengthened.

“I continue to say that one incident of sexual misconduct is one too many,” DiPietro said. “But unfortunately, on a college campus, these incidents will happen. When they do, I want the confidence of knowing that we did everything within our power to appropriately deal with the situation, and we provided the necessary support for all involved. There are no excuses for anything less.”

UT Chancellor Jimmy Cheek is also spearheading his own initiatives—he will hire six more people for Title IX compliance positions.

Inez Nicholson

Inez is an editorial intern at Law Street from Raleigh, NC. She will be a junior at North Carolina State University and is studying political science and communication media. When she’s not in the newsroom, you can find her in the weight room. Contact Inez at INicholson@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post University of Tennessee Settles Sexual Assault Lawsuit for $2.5 Million appeared first on Law Street.

Welcome to RantCrush Top 5, where we take you through today’s top five controversial stories in the world of law and policy. Who’s ranting and raving right now? Check it out below:

Unrest on Okinawa Island: Protesters Call For Removal of US Military Bases

Okinawa Islanders have had enough. After a 20 year-old Japanese woman was raped and killed at the hands of a US Marine, intensified protests sprung up Sunday to remove U.S. military bases from the island. This is largest demonstration against the U.S. since the rape of a 12 year-old girl by two American marines and a Navy sailor in 1995.

These crimes are not tolerated in the states so why are they committed by our servicemen overseas? The issue risks weakening ties between Japan and Washington, and has yet to be endorsed by Japanese lawmakers. Read the full story here.

Rant Crush

RantCrush collects the top trending topics in the law and policy world each day just for you.

The post RantCrush Top 5: June 20, 2016 appeared first on Law Street.

Ex-Stanford student and swimmer Brock Turner, who most of us are acquainted with by now, has been banned for life by USA Swimming. Turner, who was sentenced to an upsettingly mild sentence of six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious student in 2015, was a promising athlete with his mind set on the Olympics. Now he will never be able to compete professionally in swimming since USA Swimming is the national governing body for the sport, and also hosts the trials for the Olympics.

See Law Street’s five reasons why people are protesting the Brock Turner’s sentence.

A spokesperson for the organization told USA Today that Turner was no longer a member of the organization at the time of the assault since his membership had just expired, but if he wished to apply today, he would not be eligible. The spokesperson said:

USA Swimming strictly prohibits and has zero tolerance for sexual misconduct, with firm Code of Conduct policies in place, and severe penalties, including a permanent ban of membership, for those who violate our Code of Conduct.

Now that Brock Turner has been banned from US Swimming for life and no longer has any of those cool future prospects can he just go to jail

— Kendra W (@kendrawcandraw) June 10, 2016

Although sentenced to six months, it now looks like Turner will be a free man after only three–online inmate records from Santa Clara County Jail show that he is to be released on September 2. This is because inmates at county jails only serve half the time they were sentenced if they behave well. On top of that, he is reportedly held in protective custody to keep him safe from other inmates during his short jail stay.

#BrockTurner will probably serve HALF of the 6 month sentence+is placed in protective custody as to not be targeted. pic.twitter.com/UNowixpccG

— very famous (@adatweetsthings) June 10, 2016

Turner was found guilty of three felonies, which carry a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison–but the judge thought it too harsh for the 20 year-old, saying “a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him,” so the judge sentenced him to six months in a county jail. The assailant’s father also read a letter in court, pleading for a mild punishment, saying, “he has never been violent to anyone including his actions on the night of Jan 17^th 2015.” This seems like a strange statement about someone who was found guilty of attacking an unconscious woman.

The girl who was assaulted read her moving statement in court and it was later published on Buzzfeed, to which Vice President Joe Biden replied with an open letter expressing his anger with what happened and thanking her for her courage to speak up. Both of them praised the two Swedish students that rescued her and held on to Brock Turner until the police showed up.

Brock Turner is blowing up but these men (Carl Fredrik and Peter Jonsson) rescued the girl and called the police. RT pic.twitter.com/vMqZePrYMn

— Tweet Like A Girl (@TweetLikeAGirI) June 10, 2016

The judge, Aaron Persky, has been widely criticized for the lenient sentence and urged to withdraw. In the new and totally unrelated case he’s working on, 10 prospective jurors have refused to work with him because of the Turner case.

For more on this, read Law Street’s piece about Lena Dunham and the cast of “Girls” dedicating a video to the survivor of the Stanford case.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Stanford Sex Offender Brock Turner Banned by USA Swimming – Forever appeared first on Law Street.

Yesterday we went through the five reasons why people are protesting the Brock Turner’s sentence, the 20-year-old former Stanford swimmer who was sentenced to six months in jail after he sexually assaulted an unconscious woman last year. Now it seems that civilians aren’t the only ones speaking out against the case and rape culture–celebrities are too.

Lena Dunham, who is the creator, writer, and star of the HBO series “Girls,” tweeted out Wednesday a video featuring her and few of her fellow female cast mates discussing sexual assault in dedication to the survivor of the Stanford case.

I dedicate this to the brave survivor in the Stanford case who has given so much to change the conversation. https://t.co/KMOJUxvPu0

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) June 8, 2016

In the compelling Now This video, Dunham along with Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, and Zosia Mamet explained that despite their differences, they are all in agreement when it comes to the issue of sexual assault.

Their message was simple–support, listen, and take action.

In the video, the women also offered the following three statistics on sexual assault:

• One in five women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
• 80 percent of those attacks will be committed by someone they know.
• One in four girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18.

They also didn’t hesitate to recognize their own privilege in the video, stating,

While its just the four of us here right now, we hope to represent the solidarity and support all survivors should be able to find. Which may be the first time that four white women can accurately represent anything.

Following the video’s release, people began using the hashtag #SheIsSomeone on social media to express their support for the Stanford victim, and other victims like her who have suffered from sexual assault as well as victim blaming.

A friendly reminder that sexual assault & rape is wrong because #sheissomeone and we all deserve safety and respect. https://t.co/j4XKxcKzUa

— Kelly Roskam (@KellyEWRoskam) June 9, 2016

People all over the world are coming together to support this girl and it’s amazing. #SheIsSomeone

— Emily (@emilyhawkkins) June 9, 2016

Not because she’s someone’s daughter
Not because she’s someone’s girlfriend
But because #SheIsSomeone

— Tessa (@GonceTessa) June 9, 2016

Dunham, who is an outspoken feminist, has publicly supported many women’s issues in the past, and even created an online feminist newsletter titled Lenny Letter in an effort to continue raising awareness on other issues plaguing women today.

So for all the women out there, I’d like to extend a big “thank you” to the cast of “Girls” for speaking out on this issue and helping to educate more women and men on how they can help support victims of sexual assault.

For more on the Stanford sexual assault case and Brock Turner’s sentencing read our original article here.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Cast of “Girls” Unites to Send Powerful Message About Sexual Assault appeared first on Law Street.

Protests erupted throughout the nation last week after a California judge sentenced former Stanford University freshman Brock Turner to a six month jail sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster.

People are mad, and there are currently six Change.org petitions protesting Turner’s sentence. If you’re new to the case, here are five reasons why people are outraged:

1. The Judge Was Extremely Lenient

On March 30, Turner was found guilty of three felonies: assault with intent to rape an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object.

Then on June 2, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months in county jail, which is less than the state’s recommended sentence, followed by three years of formal probation. Turner must also register as a sex offender and participate in a sex offender rehabilitation program. However, with good behavior Turner may only have to serve three months of the prison sentence.

Since the charges carried a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison, Turner’s six months came across as extremely lenient. Apparently the judge worried that a stiffer sentence would have a “severe impact” on the 20-year-old star swimmer.

Many people theorized that the judge offered Turner “special treatment” because he was a Stanford alum as well as a former college athlete. The judge is now facing public demands to resign from office.

2. The Father’s Letter to the Judge

Before sentencing, Turner’s father wrote a letter arguing that his son should receive probation instead of jail time. In the letter Dan A. Turner writes, “He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easy going personality and welcoming smile.”

Turner added, “His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”

Brock Turner’s father criticized for statement he read to court in sexual assault case: https://t.co/ELMMkUfQtu pic.twitter.com/A9CcKvBiWu

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) June 7, 2016

At no point did the letter acknowledge that Brock committed the assault, instead the letter focused entirely on Brock’s pain and suffering rather than his victim’s. Eventually Dan A. Turner apologized for his “20 minutes of action” comment, which he claims was “misinterpreted by people.”

3. Biased Media Coverage

Mugshot Double Standard

For weeks, whenever the media reported on Turner, this photo was used:

Brock Turner’s friend blames his felony sexual-assault conviction on political correctness: https://t.co/GGXH6VcwjR pic.twitter.com/TO3KQ1k8cP

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) June 6, 2016

After a while this photo of a suited Turner smiling for his yearbook photo began to drum up its own controversy. Many people wondered why Turner’s booking photo wasn’t being used instead. It wasn’t until recently that Turner’s mugshot from the night he was arrested was finally released to the public.

The mugshot taken of Brock Turner the night of his arrest https://t.co/NVU6ZmXTqe pic.twitter.com/3lKGu9W7Sl

— deathandtaxes (@DeathAndTaxes) June 7, 2016

These photos illustrate a double standard in the way the media treats young, white criminals versus young, black victims of violence.  For an excellent explainer on this double standard, read this think piece by Mic.

Washington Post Coverage

The Washington Post was also criticized for its coverage of Turner’s verdict. In an article titled “All-American swimmer found guilty of sexually assaulting unconscious woman on Stanford campus,” the paper dedicated several paragraphs to Turner’s swimming career and squashed Olympic dreams.

Even though Turner had already been convicted, the paper showed him preferential treatment by focusing on his accomplishments and the impact the sentence would have on his once-promising future, rather than the severity of his crimes.

4. The Victim’s Powerful Letter

After the sentencing, the victim, whose identity has been protected, wrote a heart wrenching 12-page letter addressed to Turner that has since gone viral. In the letter, she discusses learning about her assault, reliving that night in court, and struggling to move forward after everything that happened to her.

She writes,

If you think I was spared, came out unscathed, that today I ride off into sunset, while you suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken. Nobody wins. We have all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering. Your damage was concrete; stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.

Unfortunately, the victim’s emotional message had no real effect of the outcome of Turner’s sentencing.

You can read the victim’s powerful letter in full here.

5. We Can’t Even Call Him a Rapist

It’s important to note that the reason I haven’t used the word “rapist” to define Turner throughout this article is not due to personal bias, but California law.

According to New York Magazine,

In California, rape is defined as someone using “physical force, intimidation, duress, or threats to persuade the victim to engage in sexual intercourse.” In the case of Turner’s rape of an unconscious woman, witnesses and testimony determined that Turner penetrated his victim with a foreign object, not a sexual organ.

So in other words California is telling me and the rest of the world that Turner was able to rip the clothes from his victim’s body, insert his fingers inside of her, grope her breasts, and hump her half naked body, but we can’t call him a rapist?

Like almost everything else involving this case, it simply doesn’t seem fair.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post 5 Reasons Why People Are Protesting Brock Turner’s Sentence appeared first on Law Street.

The Senate voted unanimously Monday to approve legislation that will outline basic rights for sexual assault and rape survivors–the first federal bill to ever do so.

The Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act was sponsored primarily by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D) of New Hampshire with the help of Amanda Nguyen, the founder of Rise, a nonprofit that protects the rights of sexual assault survivors.

The bill passed the Senate today!! https://t.co/fYh4TUZfr3

— Amanda (@nguyen_amanda) May 24, 2016

According to Refinery29 the bill would provide the following four essential rights to sexual assault survivors:

1. The right to have a sexual assault evidence collection kit preserved for the entire relevant statute of limitations.
2. The right to be notified in writing 60 days prior to the destruction of a sexual assault evidence collection kit.
3. The right to request further preservation of a sexual assault evidence collection kit.
4. The right to be informed of important results of a sexual assault forensic examination.

Nguyen lobbied Senator Shaheen to introduce the bill after struggling to preserve her own rape kit for years due to a tangled web of bureaucracy.

The 24-year-old State Department liaison to the White House and astronaut-in-training was sexually assaulted two years ago in Cambridge and submitted a rape kit as evidence to the State of Massachusetts. According to The Guardian, “Massachusetts law gives Nguyen 15 years to decide whether to pursue legal action. But a pamphlet handed to her at the hospital said that unless she filed an ‘extension request,’ under state law, the state could destroy her rape kit in just six months.”

After scrambling to file an extension and find the location of her rape kit, Nguyen was able to prevent her rape kit from being destroyed. Unfortunately despite the 15 year statue of limitations, Nguyen is still required to return to Massachusetts every six months to repeat the process.

To see just how messed up our sexual assault laws are watch this fantastic “Funny or Die” clip.

Shaheen commented on the Senate victory in a statement saying,

It’s been 10 months now since Amanda Nguyen first walked into my office. The system failed Amanda and so many other survivors of sexual assault across the country. Today, the Senate has sent a message that it’s time to change the culture around how survivors are treated in our criminal justice system.

Currently there is not a single state where the law guarantees rape kits be kept until the statute of limitations expires. The Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act could help alleviate the nation’s backlog of untested rape kits, as well as provide a major solution by making sure that these kits are not trashed legally by labs.

The bill must now pass through the House of Representatives before it can become a law. If you’d like to get involved you can join Nguyen’s Change.org petition to urge Congress to “support common sense rape survivor rights.” The petition currently has over 106,000 signatures, and needs roughly 43,000 more to reach its goal.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Senate Approves Bill Outlining Basic Rights for Rape Survivors appeared first on Law Street.

Oklahoma has done it again, ladies.

Oklahoma law does not criminalize someone who forces an intoxicated or unconscious person to engage in oral sex.

A Tulsa County judge dismissed a case in November involving two high school students after a 17-year-old boy reportedly offered a ride home to a 16-year-old girl. She had been heavily drinking and court documents show that her BAC was at 0.34, which would constitute alcohol poisoning. She was taken back to her grandmother’s house where she was completely unconscious and taken to the hospital. She later woke up to sexual assault testing and the boy’s DNA was found on her body.

He was initially charged with forcible sodomy and first-degree rape.

The boy claimed their encounter was consensual, but the girl claimed that she had no memory of it happening.

According to the court, “Forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation.”

The case was appealed, but the appeals court affirmed that the state could not prosecute the boy for his actions.

“The plain meaning of forcible oral sodomy, of using force, includes taking advantage of a victim who was too intoxicated to consent,” Benjamin Fu, the Tulsa County district attorney leading the case, told The Guardian. “I don’t believe that anybody, until that day, believed that the state of the law was that this kind of conduct was ambiguous, much less legal. And I don’t think the law was a loophole until the court decided it was.”

The defense attorney, Shannon McMurray, argued in the Oklahoma Watch that the court was right because intoxication cannot be substituted for force.

“There was absolutely no evidence of force or him doing anything to make this girl give him oral sex other than she was too intoxicated to consent” McMurray said.

This ruling has acted as a catalyst for the public to urge change to the law. Lawmakers as well are pushing to close this gap and make sure that this cannot be used in the future to dismiss a case.

One Oklahoma State Representative, Scott Biggs, R-Chickasha, said that he plans to amend the bill in order to include unconscious victims under the forcible sodomy law.

Oklahoma: it isnt rape if you’re drunk. So I can get drunk and rob people and it’ll be okay then? maybe steal a car?https://t.co/yM2YK4cW8z

— Lynsie Lee (@LynsieLee) April 28, 2016

WTF IS WRONG WITH OKLAHOMA???? OK court: oral sex is not rape if victim is unconscious from drinking https://t.co/AKf2vyKP7q#YesAllWomen

— Jeska Dzwigalski (@JeskaD) May 1, 2016

While the verdict shocked many, it wasn’t surprising to all.

“It’s not surprising, although unfortunate, that this is how it came down,” Rebecca O’Connor, the vice president for public policy of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network told The New York Times. “It’s also not unique to Oklahoma. This sort of gray area of law can lead to unfortunate consequences.”

Julia Bryant

Julia Bryant is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street from Howard County, Maryland. She is a junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Economics. You can contact Julia at JBryant@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Oklahoma Court: It Isn’t Rape if She is Too Intoxicated appeared first on Law Street.

With movies like “The Hunting Ground” making waves, numerous studies conducted on incidences of sexual assault on college campuses, and dozens of schools under investigation by the federal government for possible Title IX violations, the conversations about rape on college campuses are at an all time high. Now, a new video protesting the way that some of our nation’s institutions of higher learning deal with sexual assault on campuses is making its rounds, and it’s possibly the most powerful statement I’ve seen yet:

The video takes a common life marker–getting accepted into college–and features videos of a bunch of different kids reading their college acceptance letters. But then, after each of the students find out they’ve been accepted, they go on to read promises from their prospective schools that are about more than just education. The teens read the following phrases in short succession: “Prepare for a challenging year ahead,” “which includes losing your virginity to a rapist.” “You’ll be taken to the basement and violently raped.”

The video directs viewers to the website dontacceptrape.com for more information, a joint effort between advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, LA-based production company PRETTYBIRD, and Ultraviolet, a group fighting against sexual assault and sexism. The group explains its inspirations for the campaign:

The campaign includes stories of sexual-violence survivors in the form of ‘acceptance letters’ detailing the truth of the event as if it were coming from the college itself. These videos tap into the trend of teens posting acceptance videos on social media. The goal of the campaign is to raise awareness of this issue and inspire students, parents and the public to demand their colleges and universities act to protect their students.

In addition to launching the videos, the campaign also published full page ads in a couple of print publications, including the Harvard Crimson and USA Today. That ad took a similar approach:

The Unacceptable Acceptance Letter campaign launched today with this story printed in @thecrimson. #dontacceptrapepic.twitter.com/F5D4iwPSik

— Laura Petruccelli (@LauraPastacheli) April 16, 2016

As college acceptance season continues, and students begin to narrow down where they will be spending the next 4-odd years, this haunting video is particularly timely.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Anti-Rape PSA Features Dark College Acceptance Letters appeared first on Law Street.

In the context of campus sexual assault becoming more of an epidemic sweeping colleges across the country, one first-year student asked presidential candidate John Kasich how he as president will help women “feel safer and more secure regarding sexual violence, harassment and rape.”

Kasich turned away, making jokes to the audience about how he needs to leave, almost trivializing the St. Lawrence University student’s question.

He responded by explaining the efforts that Ohio has taken to provide support to victims on college campuses, like access to confidential reporting, rape kits, and the opportunity for victims to “pursue justice after you have had some time to reflect on it all.”

He then hit her with a kicker: don’t go to parties with alcohol.

Let’s unpack this statement. First of all, no woman should feel afraid just by simply going to a party with alcohol. If women do, and if telling women not to go to parties is even in the realm of something someone thinks, shouldn’t that warrant some sort of drastic preventative change?

However, Kasich did not address the root issue of how universities and colleges can solve the issue of sexual assault, rather he perpetuated the idea that it can only be prevented if women do not put themselves in situations where they could be sexually assaulted (which really is a wide variety of situations…so should women stop going to school, too?).

Rather than direct this conversation toward precautionary measures, Kasich tried to fix the issue by naming reactionary measures. The suggestions he stated at the beginning are great, but do not actually fix the issue of women (and men) being sexually assaulted in the first place.

A woman should be able to attend college parties totally naked, dance on tables & drink lots of alcohol w/o being raped or assaulted #Kasich

— James McHale (@JamesMcHaleUK) April 15, 2016

A 2007 study for the National Institute of Justice showed “… the vast majority of incapacitated sexual assault victims (89 percent) reported drinking alcohol, and being drunk (82 percent), prior to their victimization.”

Obviously alcohol does play a role in a lot of sexual assaults, especially on college campuses, but does that mean that one necessarily causes the other? Not quite, according to a report from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Although alcohol consumption and sexual assault frequently co-occur, this phenomenon does not prove that alcohol use causes sexual assault. Thus, in some cases, the desire to commit a sexual assault may actually cause alcohol consumption (e.g., when a man drinks alcohol before committing a sexual assault in order to justify his behavior).

Women should not be afraid to be around people drinking, period. In addition, alcohol doesn’t rape, people rape. And while it may play a factor, it is not an excuse for Kasich’s comments.

Julia Bryant

Julia Bryant is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street from Howard County, Maryland. She is a junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Economics. You can contact Julia at JBryant@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post John Kasich to College Women: “Don’t Go To Parties With Alcohol” appeared first on Law Street.

Every 107 seconds someone in America is sexually assaulted. A staggering 35.8 percent of these assaults occur when the victim is between the ages of 12 and 17. Still despite these figures, the topic of sexual assault is still too taboo for many to even talk about.

Everyday Sexism, a project aimed at spreading awareness about sexism, equality and women’s rights, decided to challenge this stigma with the creation of the hashtag #WhenIWas on Tuesday. The hashtag allows victims to share their early experiences with sexual harassment, violence, discrimination, and abuse, in order to bring attention to its alarming prevalence among children and teenagers.

Early this morning the account tweeted:

Today the government announced an inquiry into sexual violence and harassment at school – a vital issue that’s been overlooked for too long

— EverydaySexism (@EverydaySexism) April 19, 2016

Thousands of our https://t.co/pYch8sXUOn entries come from girls under the age of 16, detailing sexism, harassment, violence & abuse

— EverydaySexism (@EverydaySexism) April 19, 2016

Many people are shocked and unaware that sexual harassment, violence, discrimination and abuse start from an extremely young age

— EverydaySexism (@EverydaySexism) April 19, 2016

Help us raise awareness of how early the problem can start by tweeting about your early experiences using the hashtag #WhenIWas

— EverydaySexism (@EverydaySexism) April 19, 2016

The responses quickly began flooding in. Hundreds of women shared their chilling entries with the world using the hashtag, and quickly it became pretty apparent just how similar many of their stories were.

These tweets reveal just how early sexual assault and harassment can start. Click through the slideshow below to learn more.

#whenIwas in 14 a teaching priest told us in class that rape is impossible as “a letter can’t be posted if the letterbox isn’t open”.

— Sadhbh (@Sadhbhzilla) April 19, 2016

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Hashtag #WhenIWas Reveals How Early Sexual Assault Starts appeared first on Law Street.

April is sexual assault awareness month. And on Friday, one of the four former Vanderbilt football players involved in the infamous Vanderbilt rape case from June 2013 was retried alone. After nearly three hours of deliberations, the jury came to their conclusion and justice was timely served this awareness month. The jury found Corey Batey, a 22-year-old former Vanderbilt football player, guilty of aggravated rape and aggravated sexual battery.

According to a Washington Post poll conducted last year, 25 percent of women and 7 percent of men are victims of “unwanted sexual incidents” while in university. The Washington Post conducted the poll last year by telephone, which surveyed 1,053 women and men undergraduate students at a four-year college, between the ages of 17 to 26, living on campus or nearby. Sexual assault was defined as five different types of “unwanted contact: forced touching of a sexual nature, oral sex, vaginal sexual intercourse, anal sex and sexual penetration with a finger or object.” Using that definition specifically, “5 percent of men and 20 percent of women said they had been sexually assaulted in college.”

With sexual assaults on college campuses increasing and becoming an issue that needs to be addressed more urgently than ever, more colleges are joining the effort to put an end to sexual assault each year and are implementing “mandatory sexual assault awareness programs.” In addition to these mandatory awareness programs, “many universities have joined President Obama’s “It’s On Us” campaign, which is a nation-wide promotion aimed at putting an end to sexual assault on college campuses.” Though universities are showing a commitment to effectively address the issue of sexual assault on campuses, there are been results that indicate that these programs are not yet working. This last fall, Indiana University invited more than 7,000 undergraduate and graduate students to take a survey about their perceptions and experiences with sexual assault. It found:

Twenty-nine percent of the undergraduate women reported experiencing some form of nonconsensual sexual touching while at IU […] 35 percent of the undergraduate women and 34 percent of the graduate women reported being the victims of some form of sexual harassment while at IU […] and, 86 percent of the undergraduate women and 85 percent of the graduate women participants who reported experiencing some form of nonconsensual sexual contact did not report the incident to anyone at IU.

As these findings are similar findings with studies conducted at other universities, an answer on how to solve the epidemic of sexual assault on campuses remains to be solved. Hopefully, this recent court ruling against Batey will influence sexual assault victims to speak up and encourage universities to continue to make efforts with protecting and creating a safe space for sexual assault survivors, and putting an end to this horrendous crime for good.

Ashlyn Marquez

Ashlyn Marquez received her law degree from the American University, Washington College of Law and her Bachelor’s degree from The New School. She works in immigration law and has a passion for worker’s rights, tacos, and avocados. Contact Ashlyn at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Deja Vu: Former Vanderbilt Football Player Found Guilty of Rape appeared first on Law Street.

Uber (and its competitors) have certainly disrupted and innovated the transportation industry. But the reviews haven’t all been stellar–there have been multiple instances in which drivers have been accused of sexual assault. So, a new ride sharing company, Chariot for Women, is launching, with both women drivers and for women passengers. However, legal experts are concerned that the company may face legal challenges early on, on the grounds of discrimination.

The company was started by a former Uber driver named Michael Pelletz, who realized that drivers could sometimes be in vulnerable positions if a passenger gets aggressive. That, combined with security concerns from Uber and Lyft passengers, inspired the company. The website states:

The plan was perfect: As a women-owned company, Chariot for Women would use the safest practices to give the most secure and fun rideshare experience in the industry, driven by women, for women. Drivers are thoroughly background checked before they can ever accept one passenger request.

In addition to picking up women, the service will also pick up children under the age of 13, as well as transwomen. Chariot is also planning on using a feature that requires both the driver and passenger to confirm their identities with a code word when beginning a ride.

All of these ideas sound like ostensibly good things. However, the company may run into issues, and gender discrimination lawsuits could cost the fledgling startup quite a bit. Massachusetts employment law specialist Joseph Sulman stated:

To limit employees to one gender, you have to have what the law calls a bona fide occupational qualification. And that’s a really strict standard. The law’s really tough on that. For gender, it’s not enough to say, ‘we really just want to have a female here because our customers prefer that to feel safer.

However, Chariot’s founders seem ready to take on the legal challenge head on. Pelletz stated:

We want to show there’s inequality in safety in our industry. We hope to go to the US Supreme Court to say that if there’s safety involved, there’s nothing wrong with providing a service for women.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Chariot: A New Women-Only Ridesharing Company Could Have Legal Issues appeared first on Law Street.

In a controversial ruling, Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi was found not guilty on multiple accounts of sexual assault and one count of choking based on the allegations of three women. In his judgment, Justice William B. Horkins cited “serious deficiencies in the evidence” that left reasonable doubt in the case.

Ghomeshi was the host of the popular radio show “Q,” but was fired from his position at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) last October after the network claimed to have seen evidence of him causing “physical injury” to a woman. Around the time of his dismissal, multiple women came forward to the Toronto Star with various allegations of violence and sexual harassment against Ghomeshi (there would end up being over 20 accusations total). This particular trial involved incidents occurring in 2002-2003 involving three women, two who chose to remain unidentified during the trial; the third was Canadian actress Lucy DeCoutere.

While it may hold true that there was not enough evidence to garner a conviction for Ghomeshi, the real outrage surrounding the acquittal seems to stem from the actual judgment released by Justice Horkins, which tore apart the testimonies of the alleged victims and addressed any inconsistencies in their recollections of the events as being “outright deception.” Horkins also claimed that the evidence provided included “questionable behaviour” by the witnesses.

Judge in Ghomeshi trial called witness’s behaviour “odd.” Yup! When you’ve been sexually assaulted, things can seem “odd” #IBelieveSurvivors

— DeAnne Smith (@DeAnne_Smith) March 24, 2016

The judge’s comments in #Ghomeshi case uphold that rape culture and victim-blaming is alive and well. #IBelieveSurvivors

— Janet Mock (@janetmock) March 24, 2016

Witness 1 shared rxn to #Ghomeshi verdict w/ @Chatelaine: “He called us all liars. This was an insult to women.” pic.twitter.com/levQxBF1TV

— Sarah Boesveld (@sarahboesveld) March 24, 2016

Further, Horkins hit upon the fact that witnesses failed to disclose information that he believed would be “significant” to the trial, such as the fact that DeCoutere engaged in multiple “kissing sessions” with Ghomeshi the night of the assault, and the fact that victims had engaged in “flirtatious” behavior with him. This response by the judge seemed to imply that this behavior by the witnesses were indications of consent on their part.

Ghomeshi himself was never put on the stand; however, after his firing by CBC he responded in a now-deleted Facebook post, indicating that his aggressive sexual behavior was consensual. He wrote:

Let me be the first to say that my tastes in the bedroom may not be palatable to some folks. They may be strange, enticing, weird, normal, or outright offensive to others. But that is my private life. That is my personal life. And no one, and certainly no employer, should have dominion over what people do consensually in their private life.

After the news of the verdict broke, protests broke out in front of the courtroom in Toronto, and people gathered to rally in support of the accusers. There were also calls by many for legal reform in sexual assault cases within the Canadian legal system. Ghomeshi’s fight is not completely over yet; he will be back on trial in June to face one of the other charges levied against him.

Actress Zoe Kazan also released a series of tweets yesterday, alleging that Ghomeshi had acted inappropriately towards her:

Before we went on air, he told me I was “just his type.” “Funny, sexy, just the right amount of damage,” he said (after talking abt 3 mins).

— zoe kazan (@zoeinthecities) March 24, 2016

Later he showed up @ party I was at & wdnt leave me alone. His unwanted attention made me feel like I’d “asked for it.” I felt dirty & sad.

— zoe kazan (@zoeinthecities) March 24, 2016

This behavior is insidious, but so is a culture that condones it, by turning a blind eye, or shaming the victim. We internalize these mores.

— zoe kazan (@zoeinthecities) March 24, 2016

Ghomeshi may have been set free by the Canadian legal system, but in the court of public opinion, it looks as if his reputation may be tarnished for good.

Mariam Jaffery

Mariam was an Executive Assistant at Law Street Media and a native of Northern Virginia. She has a B.A. in International Affairs with a minor in Business Administration from George Washington University. Contact Mariam at mjaffery@lawstreetmedia.com.

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Perhaps no public figure has received as much criticism and vitriol over such a long period of time as Hillary Clinton. Clinton has been nationally famous since the 1980s, and internationally famous since her first day as First Lady of the United States. In her stump speeches and TV appearances, Clinton chalks the near-constant mudslinging up to oppositional Republican forces who are threatened by her ability to enact real change. And though it may sound trite at this point in the campaign due to repetition, sexism is still a real and damaging force, and may contribute to some of these efforts. Of course, that can’t be true for every line of attack–not every criticism is a right-wing conspiracy designed to slander the former secretary of state. So which is the truth–or could it be a mixed bag of libelous fiction and legitimate fact? Let’s evaluate Clinton’s history of responding to sexual assault and rape by trying to determine the truth, and what they might mean about Clinton’s candidacy and presidency.

Before I dive in, I’ll try to pre-empt some bias–as it stands, I like Hillary Clinton. I know that for some reason, saying you support the efforts of the frontrunner of The Democratic Party (and the most likely person to be our future president) is a divisive statement, but it’s something I should acknowledge. I wasn’t always set on Mrs. Clinton, and my support isn’t unmovable, but her levelheaded approach to policy reform and breadth of executive experience appeal to me. I like Bernie Sanders, and I respect him as a politician. He’s represented the state of Vermont loyally for decades, but I find myself doubting whether he’d make progress on his lofty plans with Congress, and wonder if he has enough foreign policy clout to serve as our Commander in Chief.

Still, the internet can be a toxic place for a Hillary Clinton supporter. The seemingly cult-like online presence of Sanders fans is suffocating to anyone voicing support for his opponent. In the real world, Clinton leads Sanders nationally, and has fantastic momentum in the delegate count, but the subset of voters who are active online paint a very different picture. Know that I’m not a blind supporter of Mrs. Clinton, and that I believe her to be a flawed person.

Most famously, Clinton’s husband’s sex scandal has also become her cross to bear. It’s no shock to the American people at this point that President Bill Clinton had an extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. At the time that the affair was first breaking to the public, Hillary Clinton argued that the claim was yet another attempt by a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to tarnish her husband’s reputation. Then, as evidence to support Ms. Lewinsky’s claims grew, Clinton told the press that she had been misled by her husband, and she publicly committed to her marriage in spite of her husband’s indiscretions, taking the role of “the good wife.” Whether Clinton was truly unaware of the goings-on between her husband and Ms. Lewinsky, and whether Hillary and Bill are in love and devoted to each other is anyone’s guess. It’s equally reasonable to think that the former President and his wife have successfully moved on from the scandal as it is to think that their relationship is rocky and held together by political promise. Either way, I don’t think that the personal marital strife of the couple reflects poorly on Hillary Clinton’s intelligence or leadership.

The larger concern borne out of the Lewinsky scandal is Hillary Clinton’s attitude toward women leveling accusations against her husband. On the campaign trail these days, she tells crowds that rape victims should be believed and supported.

Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported. https://t.co/mkD69RHeBL

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 23, 2015

That proves troubling when faced with Juanita Broaddrick’s 1978 rape accusations against Clinton’s husband, which came to light two decades later. This created a conundrum for her: if these claims are false, standing by your husband is the right thing to do. If the claims are true, disbelieving a rape victim is heartless, wrongheaded, and reprehensible. The only response from Bill or Hillary to these claims came through President Clinton’s lawyer, who said “Any allegation that the president assaulted Juanita Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false.”

A person in a position as powerful as president is a lightning rod for false accusations, but it’s also true that a president’s influence could be used to cover up sexual indiscretions as well as acts of sexual violence. Knowing that both of those things are true, it would be extremely difficult to navigate charges made against your extremely powerful husband. There is no evidence to show that Hillary Clinton threatened or intimidated Broaddrick into silence. At the time, Clinton was supporting Anita Hill during her testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, so it’s tough to argue that Hillary was completely unsupportive of women or even specifically victims of sexual harassment and assault. Many online rags will argue that Hillary personally sicced private investigators on Bill’s accusers, but the only concrete statement on that comes from a 1998 Matt Lauer interview:

I think we’re going to find some other things. And I think that when all of this is put into context, and we really look at the people involved here, look at their motivations and look at their backgrounds, look at their past behavior, some folks are going to have a lot to answer for.

That’s certainly not the “love and kindness” angle that Clinton is espousing now, but it’s not inherently criminal or evil. While false rape accusations are exceedingly rare, they do happen, so though it’s very disappointing to hear Clinton say these things, it would only be truly unforgivable if Clinton knew that these accusations were true, and actively tried to bury them. Criticizing Hillary Clinton for her comments about rape accusers in the nineties is absolutely fair game, and shows pretty clearly that in many areas of women’s issues, Hillary Clinton was certainly part of the problem.

For a candidate whose campaign often puts women’s issues at center stage, Clinton’s comments from twenty years ago show that she has been on the offensive against specific women accusing her husband. Whether she’s learned from the backlash, or simply learned to hold her tongue, her policy decisions and voting record show that she’s been a defender of women for decades, turning the feminist corner and leading the charge among the 2016 candidates. While her record on equal pay legislation, maternity leave, and global women’s rights is something she can proudly tout, some of Mrs. Clinton’s attitudes and comments from the 90s are absolutely disheartening, but not disqualifying.

Sean Simon

Sean Simon is an Editorial News Senior Fellow at Law Street, and a senior at The George Washington University, studying Communications and Psychology. In his spare time, he loves exploring D.C. restaurants, solving crossword puzzles, and watching sad foreign films. Contact Sean at SSimon@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Recently, several former members of the University of Tennessee Volunteers female training staff sued the University for violating their Title IX rights. While many people may have been caught up with Peyton Manning’s name in the filing, others were probably confused about why Title IX was invoked at all. After all, Title IX is concerned with female athletes having the opportunity to receive scholarships for playing collegiate sports, right? Partly, but it can also be invoked in cases where a woman feels her rights have been infringed upon, notably in the context of a number of high-profile sexual assault cases at major universities. Read on to find out the whole scope of the landmark statute and what role it is playing in potentially punishing universities for their actions.

What is Title IX?

Title IX is actually a section of the Educational Amendments that were passed in 1972. The purpose of these amendments was to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex in all federally-funded education programs and activities. Title IX states:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Since its inception, the law has been the basis for numerous amendments, reviews, political actions, and even Supreme Court cases. While Title IX is primarily discussed in the context of athletics, there are several other areas that the law regulates.

In regard to athletics, Title IX regulations require schools to give women the same amount of access as they do for men. Once it became law, Title IX had a measurable effect on female participation in sports. The law ensures that all schools provide equitable opportunities for both male and female sports including availability, resources, and scholarships. In 1972, when the law went into effect, only about 295,000 girls played sports at the high school level in the United States. Fast-forward to 2011 and that number has risen to 3.2 million. Additionally, the number of women receiving athletic scholarships went from zero to 200,000 over the same period.

The opportunity to participate in athletic programs has significant consequences beyond access for women who want to participate. In fact, increased participation has also been associated with increased graduation rates, healthier lives, and diminished trouble with the law.

The video below gives an overview of the effects of Title IX in sports:

Criticism of Title IX

While Title IX has clearly had a significant impact on female participation in athletics and equality in education more generally, the law still has its critics. On one side are those who complain that Title IX is still not doing enough to prevent discrimination. This group’s argument began almost immediately after the law’s inception when it was weakly enforced and nearly eliminated thanks to the 1984 Supreme Court decision in Grove City vs. Bell. Even as the law started to be more rigorously enforced after Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, women at all levels of athletics still have much lower rates of participation and receive less funding than men. Others also argue that enforcement remains weak and investigations can drag on for a long time without being fully resolved.

On the other hand, the law is also criticized by those who bemoan its effects on men’s sports. This starts with the prevailing belief that funding a women’s sport means cutting funding to men’s teams. But between 1988 and 2011, for example, over 1,000 new men’s sports teams were added by NCAA members. Additionally, many of the men’s sports that have seen spending cuts during this time were the victims of universities’ increasing focus and spending on two high-profile sports–football and men’s basketball–and not necessarily because of funding for women’s sports. The interaction between these two sports and Title IX is also frequently misunderstood. Title IX does not require schools to spend the same amount of money on men’s and women’s sports. Instead, all Title IX requires is that the “benefits and services” provided to both men and women are equal.

Preventing Assault

While most discussion of Title IX focuses on athletics, much of the public’s attention has started to shift toward the law’s role in preventing sexual assault. Indeed, protecting students against sexual assault has become one of the most important aspects of Title IX. The Supreme Court even ruled that schools may be liable if they fail to address reported incidents. According to the Department of Education, sexual violence “refers to physical sexual acts perpetrated against a person’s will or where a person is incapable of giving consent… A number of different acts fall into the category of sexual violence, including rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, sexual abuse, and sexual coercion.”

As more students speak out about the issue of sexual assault on college campuses and evidence about its prevalence mounts, the government has taken a more active role in dealing with the issue using Title IX. There’s a large number of surveys that measure sexual assault and sexual violence on college campuses, but many often come to different conclusions about the extent to which it affects undergraduates. Most cite the statistic that 1-in-5 female students are victims of sexual assault, and even that figure has its critics. Tyler Kinkade at the Huffington Post points out that while these statistics may be good talking points, the reason that the issue has become so important is because of the large number of students calling for more attention and better procedures to deal with these incidents.

Enforcement and High-Profile Incidents

While concern and outrage over alleged sexual assaults have increased, enforcement has faced some resistance. This seeming indifference reached such a zenith that in 2014 the Department of Education released a list of over a 100 colleges and universities under investigation for violating Title IX. The Department expounded upon this last year, releasing a “Dear Colleague” letter in which it reminded its constituent schools what sorts of actions violate Title IX laws. That letter was a follow-up to a similar one sent out in 2011–which itself was a reminder of sexual harassment guidelines released in 2001–that gave schools instructions on how to deal with sexual assault complaints. As these steps show, these schools under investigation have been repeatedly reminded of their responsibilities, yet many high profiles cases have come up recently.

The incident involving Peyton Manning and the University of Tennessee is a perfect example of the difficulties surrounding these types of cases. The case began all the way back in 1997 with a lawsuit against Manning and the University of Tennessee. It continued with another lawsuit against Manning in 2003, after the release of his autobiography in which he depicted one of the women involved unfavorably. The newest lawsuit that was filed earlier this year shows how long the process surrounding these cases can last. In the meantime, the woman who accused Manning had to agree to leave the school, while the university won a national championship and he was able to enjoy a long and storied career. According to the suit, instead of protecting victims, the school actually created an environment that was hostile to them.

This is certainly not the only controversial incident. Another high-profile incident involved former Florida State University quarterback and current Tampa Bay Buccaneers player Jameis Winston. In 2012, a female student sued Florida State for its investigation of her rape complaint against Winston and its “deliberate indifference” throughout the process. FSU’s poor handling of the case also led her to file a lawsuit. The civil suit against the school was resolved this year when FSU paid a $950,000 settlement. The alleged victim has also filed a civil suit against Winston; he has countersued.

The following video looks at the alleged Title IX infraction at FSU:

Results and Remaining Issues

Since the Office of Civil Rights began stepping up its expectations and enforcement of Title IX violations, the number of investigations has increased dramatically. Accusations like these and the actions of the Department of Education are not isolated incidents. As of April 2015, the Department of Education had over 100 active investigations for sexual violence-related Title IX issues. In its Dear Colleague letters, OCR instructs institutions to develop new standards for investigating complaints and instructed institutions to hire a Title IX coordinator to ensure that cases are handled properly.

It is important to note that in many of these investigations, including the ones surrounding Manning and Winston, no one has been found guilty in a criminal court–though criminal guilt is not necessarily the point. Regardless, the original claims were not adequately investigated, and in some cases ignored. Proper investigations may also disprove the claims and absolve the accused. Too often, though, school are accused of not pursuing complaints thoroughly or do not have the necessary processes in place to properly investigate them. Due to these shortcomings, victims are often depicted negatively and a culture of hostility can result.

Unfortunately, OCR’s investigations and related civil suits often take a very long time to complete. The Department of Education has a large backlog of investigations into schools that have been accused of violating Title IX. While President Obama made a push for more funding, little more was granted, and likely not enough to offset the rise in the number of cases and the loss of approximately a third of the Department’s workforce. Title IX also covers K-12 school districts, along with colleges and universities–adding another lay of emphasis in resolving these cases and achieving resolutions.

Conclusion

While Title IX is often seen as a law that guarantees equality in sports, it is much more than that. Athletics is only one of many areas in which the statute seeks to ensure fairness and equality. What is clearer than Title IX’s exact breadth is its impact, as it has drastically improved the opportunities for women and girls in the United States. Unfortunately, what is also clear is the limitations of the legislation and the trouble that many institutions have complying with the new guidance.

One example of these limitations, and probably the most troubling, is in regard to sexual harassment. There have been repeated, high-profile incidents of workers and students complaining of sexual harassment or assault. As the growing number of OCR investigations indicate, schools have had a hard time instituting processes to adequately deal with these cases. This is exactly the type of thing Title IX was meant to prevent, yet has struggled to accomplish. The law is certainly not a panacea, but it applies to more than just sports and with greater implementation, it can have a very wide-reaching effect.

Resources

Feminist Majority Foundation: Empowering Women in Sports

Title IX: History of Title IX

NCAA: How is Title IX Applied to Athletics?

The Washington Post: Title IX has Helped Encourage Many Girls to Play Sports

USA Today: Florida State Agrees to pay Winston Accuser $950,000 to Settle Suit

ESPN: Baylor Faces Accusations of Ignoring Sex Assault Victims

CNN: 23% of Women Report Sexual Assault in College, Study Finds

Huffington Post: Federal Campus Rape Investigations Near 200, And Finally Get More Funding

Department of Education: Dear Colleague Letter on Title IX Coordinators

U.S. Department of Education: U.S. Department of Education Releases List of Higher Education Institutions with Open Title IX Sexual Violence Investigations

U.S. Department of Education: Dear Colleague Sexual Violence

Michael Sliwinski

Michael Sliwinski (@MoneyMike4289) is a 2011 graduate of Ohio University in Athens with a Bachelor’s in History, as well as a 2014 graduate of the University of Georgia with a Master’s in International Policy. In his free time he enjoys writing, reading, and outdoor activites, particularly basketball. Contact Michael at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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There were several applause-worthy moments at last week’s Academy Awards, including, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio’s long overdue win for Best Actor and his subsequent speech about saving the environment.

I have immense respect for celebrities who use their public platforms to champion various causes, a phenomenon which has become significantly more common as things like feminism and race equality come to the forefront of political discussions in America.

One such celebrity is Lady Gaga, who has taken on the role of advocate for sexual assault victims, including fellow pop star Kesha, who is undergoing a legal battle with her alleged assailant and producer Dr. Luke.

Lady Gaga, along with Diane Warren, were nominated in the Best Original Song category for “Till It Happens To You,” a dramatic ballad about sexual assault for the documentary film “The Hunting Ground.”

“The Hunting Ground” focuses on sexual assault on college campuses. What the filmmakers found was horrifying, if not surprising: victims of sexual assault are hushed up and discouraged from reporting their assaults, especially when their abusers are high-profile. The documentary received backlash from schools and perpetrators who were featured,  including Jameis Winston, the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whose alleged assault of another Florida State student is covered in the film.

But the producers refused to back down. One of them, Amy Ziering, said in an interview with Salon that campus rape is:

A pernicious, pervasive problem that’s been misunderstood for decades, and we really need to step up our game, rethink it, and figure out how to do something better about it. And just help people. That’s where our interests should be: Let’s help all the victims of this. Let’s acknowledge they exist. Let’s do right by them. Right now, we’re just really damaging everybody.

Watch a trailer for the documentary below:

While the documentary itself may have its faults from a storytelling stand point, the message is clear: nothing is being done about the staggering number of sexual assaults that take place on college campuses.

Which brings us back to Lady Gaga and her Oscar-nominated song.

“Till It Happens To You” has a title that is pretty much self-explanatory. It speaks from the point of view of a rape victim, questioning “What the hell do you know?” to those who dismiss the issue of rape without fully understanding its magnitude.

At the Academy Awards, Lady Gaga accompanied herself on piano, and towards the end of the ballad, welcomed dozens of sexual assault survivors–male and female–onto the stage with her.

The song did not end up winning the Oscar, but the global stage it received last weekend is very important. We need to keep this song and “The Hunting Ground” in the spotlight, and we need to keep the conversation about sexual assault in the news. We need to stop the culture of victim-blaming, and we need to stop glorifying the perpetrators. Only then can a true solution be reached.

Watch the entire performance here:

Morgan McMurray

Morgan McMurray is an editor and gender equality blogger based in Seattle, Washington. A 2013 graduate of Iowa State University, she has a Bachelor of Arts in English, Journalism, and International Studies. She spends her free time writing, reading, teaching dance classes, and binge-watching Netflix. Contact Morgan at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The pop star who brought us such hits as “Tik Tok” and “Your Love Is My Drug” has been going through an intense legal battle over her contract with her producer and alleged rapist, Dr. Luke. Her lawsuit hit a snag last week when a New York judge denied Kesha an injunction that would have allowed her to record with other studios, instead forcing her to remain in her contract until the details of the lawsuit are settled.

Kesha’s fight against Dr. Luke has been in the public eye since 2013, when fans began the campaign to “Free Kesha” from Dr. Luke’s control. The singer soon revealed that her producer had not only restricted her music and lyrics, but verbally, physically and sexually abused her, culminating in a stay at a rehab facility. She filed the lawsuit in 2014 in an attempt to break her contract and record music elsewhere.

After the injunction was denied, Dr. Luke broke his silence on the matter, claiming he has never assaulted Kesha. Despite his statements, the singer has received an outpouring of support from fans and celebrities, including a $250,000 donation from Taylor Swift.

But regardless of whether or not you believe Dr. Luke or you believe Kesha, the denied injunction means the same thing: Dr. Luke and his record label’s money is more important than the well-being and mental state of the singer whom they claim to represent. Given the gravity of the allegations against Dr. Luke, it should not be the case that Kesha must stay in a career-throttling contract with her alleged abuser until he is proven guilty.

Contracts in the music industry are notoriously bad about allowing musicians any sort of artistic freedom, often signing them on for long periods of time with constricting regulations.  Of the injunction, the judge said, “You’re asking the court to decimate a contract that was heavily negotiated and typical for the industry.”

What makes her case atypical, however, are the rape and abuse allegations. Denying her an out is an attempt to diminish her claims, and the action shows a lack of support for rape victims in general. It says to them that, until their claims are proven, it didn’t happen. This is a result of the victim-blaming society in which we live, where rape victims are questioned and their abusers are allowed to go free.

In Kesha’s case, what more proof is needed? She has gone through rehabilitation and treatment for the trauma she experienced, and is pursuing a lengthy and expensive legal solution to her misery. If an artist simply wanted to break a contract, there are simpler ways to do so.

Morgan McMurray

Morgan McMurray is an editor and gender equality blogger based in Seattle, Washington. A 2013 graduate of Iowa State University, she has a Bachelor of Arts in English, Journalism, and International Studies. She spends her free time writing, reading, teaching dance classes, and binge-watching Netflix. Contact Morgan at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Kesha’s contract dispute with Sony Entertainment is off to a rough start after a New York judge denied a preliminary injunction against her alleged rapist and music producer Dr. Luke on Friday. This is inevitably a huge blow for the “Timber” pop star, whose career has been on an indefinite hiatus while she’s battled to be released from her recording contract with Sony and Luke’s Kemosabe Records.

New York Supreme Court Justice Shirley Kornreich sided with Dr. Luke, born Luke Gottwald, and Sony stating, “You’re asking the court to decimate a contract that was heavily negotiated and typical for the industry.” Even though Kesha claims Dr. Luke drugged, raped, and verbally and physically abused her for 10 years, the judge determined there wasn’t sufficient evidence present to support her claims, or release her immediately from the contracts.

During the proceedings Sony stated that, contrary to belief, it has offered to let Kesha work with other producers in order to fulfill her contractual duties, but the singer refused the option saying she feared the label wouldn’t promote her music as heavily if she wasn’t working with their biggest hitmaker, Gottwald. However, it’s highly unlikely that Sony would intentionally sabotage its $60 million investment in Kesha’s career by refusing to promote her work.

Dr. Luke, who has been relatively silent over the scandal, finally broke his silence and publicly denied Kesha’s sexual assault allegations Monday on Twitter.

Imagine if you or somebody you loved was publicly accused of a rape you knew they didn’t do. Imagine that.

— Dr. Luke Doctor Luke (@TheDoctorLuke) February 22, 2016

Kesha and I made a lot of songs together and it was often good but there were creative differences at times. — Dr. Luke Doctor Luke (@TheDoctorLuke) February 22, 2016

But I feel confident when this is over the lies will be exposed and the truth will prevail.. — Dr. Luke Doctor Luke (@TheDoctorLuke) February 22, 2016

Even if Kesha’s case isn’t off to a good start in court, she’s already winning in the court of public opinion. Several singers and celebrities, including Lena Dunham, Demi Lovato, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift have already begun to come to the singer’s defense and lend their support. Swift even donated $250,000 to Kesha to help with her legal fees, but was later criticized by Lovato who argued that speaking out on the issue would have had more of an impact.

Even though Kesha lost the preliminary injunction hearing, the case is hardly over–in fact it’s just starting. Kesha is still free to try her case in court. If she does end up losing the case she will have to continue recording with Sony, but if the association with Dr. Luke is still too much, her only option may be to buy herself out of her contract.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Researchers have determined that there’s a relationship between college football games and incidences of reported rape. The study was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research late last year, but has broken into the news recently, as the conversations around college sexual assault and the violence of football have continued into the new year.

The researchers, led by Professor Jason Lindo at Texas A&M University, discovered that:

Home football games increase reports of rape by 41 percent on the day of the game while away games increase reports by 15 percent. They estimate that Division 1A football games cause between 253 and 770 additional rapes of college-aged victims per year across 128 universities.

The researchers don’t claim this is a direct link–rather they were attempting to look at the connection between events that sparked heavy drinking and partying, and reports of sexual assault. Understandably, then, they found higher reports of rape when something worth “celebrating” happened during a football game–for example, underdog teams upsetting better-ranked rivals. Additionally, game days saw a spike in other crimes–such as disorderly conduct, DUIs, and public intoxication. Given that big college football games usually happen on Saturdays and Sundays–busy party days for college students–the researchers attempted to control for that. According to NPR’s Social Science Correspondent Shankar Vedantam:

Lindo and his colleagues actually tried a control for this by comparing reports of rape on a days the college team was playing to reports of rape on other Saturdays of the year when the team was not playing. So this analysis is focused on the additional rapes being reported to college police and local law enforcement on days the college team is playing compared to what’s reported on a typical Saturday.

In order to conduct the study, the researchers looked at 22 years of FBI data on rape. Given that those statistics have received criticism for being undercounts of sexual assaults, the numbers could be even higher. Additionally, the statistics can’t provide a full picture of all big college football schools, as only 96 of the 128 schools with Division I teams voluntarily reported enough data to be included in the study. However, as they stand, the statistics are certainly worrisome, and worth a look as the fight to prevent sexual assault on college campuses continues.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning was poised to go down as one of the greats after his record breaking Super Bowl win set himself up for a “story book” retirement. But now Manning is struggling to keep his clean-cut image intact after 20-year-old sexual assault allegations from his time at the University of Tennessee were brought back into the national spotlight thanks to a recent lawsuit.

The 39-year-old football star was cited in a lawsuit filed by six anonymous women last Tuesday who claim the University of Tennessee violated Title IX by fostering a “hostile sexual environment” that allowed for sexual assault and rape allegations to be met with “deliberate indifference.”

To reiterate that point, testimony was included from Dr. Jamie Naughright, a highly regarded Tenessee trainer, who claims that in 1996 Manning forcefully maneuvered his naked testicles and rectum directly on her face with his penis on top of her head while she was examining him for a foot injury. According to ESPN, Dr. Naughright reported the incident, but Manning was never investigated by the police. She went on to file a lawsuit against him, but in 1997 it was settled and she was forced to leave the university.

Manning apparently wrote about the encounter from his perspective in 2000 in an autobiography titled “Manning: A Father, His Sons and A Football Legacy.” In the book he denies the sexual assault allegations saying instead that he was “mooning” track athlete Malcolm Saxon, he also describes Dr, Naughright as having a “vulgar mouth.”

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Title IX is a federal law that bans gender discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. If the University of Tennessee officials did fail to properly investigate sexual assault allegations in a deliberate attempt to protect student athletes, that would make them in violation of the law.

But Manning wasn’t the only athlete named in the new lawsuit. According to ESPN, the lawsuit names 10 former Tennessee players in total, including Manning and former football players A.J. Johnson and Michael Williams. The latter two are both awaiting separate trials for aggravated rape charges.

Some people have come to Manning’s defense, criticizing the allegations against Manning based on how old they are, but, as ESPN writer Sarah Spain puts it, the matter deserves a second look as more details surface. For example, in the 74-paged court document  Saxon, the supposed recipient of the “mooning”, clearly refuted Manning’s story and even told Manning in a letter that he lost his student athlete eligibility over the matter.

Saxon wrote,

Peyton, you messed up. I still don’t know why you dropped your drawers. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not. But it was definitely inappropriate. Please take some personal responsibility here and own up to what you did.

These potential revelations are the last thing Manning needed, after already suffering a beating to his image when Al Jazeera alleged he was part of an illegal doping ring in an undercover investigative piece. If the football star does in fact intend on hanging up his cleats for good soon, these accusations may end up a permanent stain on his once-clean image.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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After years of having her career suspended in legal limbo, pop star Kesha will finally learn her music’s fate Tuesday when her sexual assault injunction hearing goes before the New York Supreme Court.

The singer announced the update on Instagram with an image of an overpass with “life’s full of bumps” graffitied on it. She captioned the photo with the following message,

The universe is speaking to me today. I am filled with so much anxiety and hope and nerves and doubt and all my emotions are going crazy. if u pray, I could use one this week. I find out the fate of my career Tuesday…

In October 2014, Kesha filed a lawsuit against estranged producer Dr. Luke accusing him of sexually assaulting her for 10 years. Despite the allegations, Sony refused to release the singer from her contract with Kemosabe Records label that obligates her to complete three more studio albums with Dr. Luke. As a result Kesha’s career has been put on pause since she has been unable to to release any new music for over two years because she refuses to work with her alleged abuser.

The pop star has been keeping her eager fans updated on her plight with regular posts on her social media accounts.

Kesha posted this on Instagram #FreeKesha https://t.co/yUS7HwZZ0G/ pic.twitter.com/uNksnN3fSP

— Kesha | FOTP (@FOTPKesha) January 25, 2016

Over the weekend the fan account @KeshaTODAY distributed a cellphone video message in which Kesha sings “Amazing Grace” telling fans, “I can’t put out new music, but I can sing a little something of someone else’s songs.”

Despite the lack of new music, Kesha’s fans have stood by her side and supported her fight. They even created an online petition with over 110,000 signatures and viral hashtags such as #FreeKesha, #FreedomforKesha, and #SonySupportsRape  to protest the injustice. In support of her upcoming court case, her supporters have also planned a protest outside of the New York courthouse for the day of her hearing.

Despite the circumstances, Kesha has put on a brave face for the public by trying to keep a positive outlook on the proceedings, but it’s unclear how the court will decide in her injunction hearing. Unfortunately for fans, if a resolution can’t be made, this could spell the end for her career.

Update:

Winter storm Jonas has pushed Kesha’s hearing back a couple weeks. The singer informed supporters Monday afternoon with a picture of a heart on her Instagram captioned,

I love everyone. Thank you for your support. Due to travel problems with the weather it’s been postponed until feb 19.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Sexual Assault Legal Battle: Kesha Will Find Out Her Fate Soon appeared first on Law Street.

Eight men have been arrested following the hundreds of robberies and assaults that occurred on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany. Over 600 criminal reports were submitted regarding New Year’s Eve in Cologne, and over half of those reports involved sexual harassment or assault. A large number of the victims who reported their attacks described their assailants as Middle Eastern, which triggered fears of backlash against Germany’s refugee population. Angela Merkel has remained firm in her commitment to refugee acceptance and integration but the attacks in Cologne may provide a critical groundswell of support for anti-immigration groups. At this time, one 26-year-old Algerian asylum-seeker is in custody for groping a woman and stealing her phone but the refugee status of the other suspects in custody is mostly unknown. Read on for a closer look at the events of New Year’s Eve and what they may mean for Germany in the coming years.

The Attacks across the City

Over 1,000 drunken men gathered outside of Cologne’s central train station, adjacent to its famous cathedral, to ring in 2016. It was within that neighborhood that a large part of the attacks took place, as young women emerged from the train station and headed off into the night. Groups of men who were reported to be of “North African/Arab” origin surrounded young women, groping and assaulting them. Dozens of men would circle women, both those walking alone and those in groups, forcing them to “run a gauntlet” to escape. In addition to sexual attacks, hundreds of people reported theft of money, phones, and valuables.

The identities of the attackers were initially unclear but in the days following the attacks, a significant number of the victims described their attackers as young men of Middle Eastern origin. The majority of the women targeted were German nationals. One woman reported that her rapist told her “German women are just for sex.” Media reports of the incidents were initially only running in local newspapers but within a few days, the story of the horrific night had spread worldwide.

The police have stated that they have never dealt with this kind of situation before and had not created a plan of action to combat such wide-scale criminal activity occurring at once. The preceding year, police officers were deployed in the same volume and had no problems with crowd control. However, with the influx of people outside the station, there were so many attacks happening simultaneously around the central station that security forces were essentially powerless to stop them. The violence was not confined to Cologne, as hundreds of other sexual assault cases poured in from across Germany on New Year’s Eve. However, the collective nature of the attacks in Cologne and the authorities’ disturbingly lackluster response on the ground outside the station mark them as unique. In the wake of the New Year’s Eve attacks, several German cities cancelled other winter celebrations out of fear of similar widespread violence.

Unexpected Implications

Continued Anti-Immigration Sentiment

Right wing protesters, already against the influx of refugees, have doubled down on their positions. During a recent protest, they clashed with police in riot gear, screaming at police officers for not defending local women–although it was unclear if they meant defending them from assault or defending them from refugees. One supporter of the anti-immigration Pegida movement went so far as to refer to the attacks as “bad for the women, but good for us, because the people are being woken up.” Anti-immigration rallies were held across the country in the wake of the attacks, with hundreds of people carrying signs reading “Rapefugees Not Welcome.” Although few of the women who were assaulted have come forward with anti-immigrant positions, Pegida and other groups have taken it upon themselves to be their voices.

Unfortunately, many onlookers worry that the transparent racism and xenophobia of Pegida undermines the validity of the victim’s reports. One young woman named Selina publicly discussed her attack and her attackers (men of Middle Eastern descent who spoke Arabic and did not seem to understand German) and was accused of being racist by a variety of internet sources. Women seeking justice for the crimes committed against them should feel comfortable reporting physical descriptions of their attackers but in the case of  the Cologne attacks, where race and violence are inextricably linked, those who report their attack may become targets for the vitriol of those who assume they are prejudiced.

An Attack on Women

Two weeks after the attack, The Irish Times published an editorial on the violence in Cologne which stated that

Perpetrators of sexual assault against women do have one thing in common, and it’s not religion or ethnicity, it’s gender…Perpetrators of sexual assault are typified by their diversity. But the common denominator is men. Until we are honest with ourselves about that, and until prevention focuses on stopping men from assaulting women – not blaming one demographic of men, or outlining ways in which women can avoid potential assault – we are kidding ourselves. What happened in Cologne, that mass act, was primarily unusual in its collective nature. But all over the world, in every village, town and city, mass acts of misogyny are fragmented daily, manifesting as individual assaults. We ignore them, because they are not as newsworthy. Victims of sexual assault are just as diverse. Being raped transcends all demographics.

A majority of news outlets have chosen to classify the attacks in Cologne as an issue of sexual assault and violence rather than an issue of race. Evidence from police data shows that refugees have, in fact, committed less crime than native Germans since arriving in the country, therefore outside of the right wing rallies, few news outlets have traced the crimes to be associated with race. While the German government has prioritized deporting refugees who are found guilty of sexual and physical assault, women’s advocacy groups argue that this is not about immigration policy–it is about protection for women. The events of Cologne are being attributed to a massive spike in the number of young men in Germany, which changes the demographics of security.

Regardless of race or socioeconomic status, men are more likely to commit violent acts than women. Considering that the majority of sexual assault cases involve the assault of women by men, the shifting gender dynamics of Germany may affect the country’s future. Cologne has been labeled a potential watershed moment for legal reform and creating protections for all women against all forms of sexual harassment and abuse. As Germany adapts to its new population, the legal processes and security of the nation will have to change in tandem. The brutality of New Year’s Eve in Cologne may inspire German officials to create comprehensive legal protection for women who are sexually harassed and assaulted.

Conclusion

The attacks in Cologne will be remembered as an unprecedented night of terror but the implications of the attacks go beyond criminal activity. Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome over a million refugees (and potentially more in the coming year) into Germany was controversial and she will likely have to keep defending it for years to come. Asylum seekers engaging in criminal activity only fuels the fears of Germans who were already opposed to the influx of refugees. The entire refugee population should not be held accountable for the actions of a few, but as security services are sorting through hundreds of potential suspects who often match the description of Middle Eastern refugees, right-wing xenophobes are gaining public support. The German police presence will need to adapt and expand to deal with its swelling population if they want to avoid a repeat of Cologne in the coming years but that will require not only a new style of training, but an increase in the number of staff they have available for deployment at any given time. Cologne will not only be an important marker for the history of women’s rights and violent crime, it may serve as the trigger for an new era of policing in Germany.

Resources

CNN: Eight in Pretrial Custody in Cologne New Year’s Eve Mass Robberies, Sex Assaults

CNN: Cologne, Germany: Hundreds of Sexual Assault Charges from New Year’s Eve

BBC: First Suspect Held Over Sex Assault Claims

The New York Times: As Germany Welcomes Migrants, Sexual Attacks in Cologne Point to a New Reality

Huffington Post: Here’s What We Know So Far About The Sexual Assaults At Cologne’s Train Station

Daily Mail: Migrant Sexually Assaulted 25-year-old Victim after Telling her ‘German Women are Just There for Sex’

NBC News: Cologne Sex Attacks ‘Good for Us,’ Anti-Refugee Protesters Say

Breitbart: Cologne Sexual Assault Victim called a Racist and Harassed after Identifying Her Attackers

The Irish Times: Cologne Assaults a Mass Act of Misogyny

The Local: Police: Refugees Commit Less Crime than Germans

TIME: Reaction to Cologne Attacks Should Focus on Women’s Rights

Psychology Today: Male Aggression: Why are Men More Violent?

Jillian Sequeira

Jillian Sequeira was a member of the College of William and Mary Class of 2016, with a double major in Government and Italian. When she’s not blogging, she’s photographing graffiti around the world and worshiping at the altar of Elon Musk and all things Tesla. Contact Jillian at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post The Impacts of Widespread Sexual Assault in Cologne appeared first on Law Street.

Approximately 1,000 drunk men kicked off the New Year with a non-consensual furor by sexually assaulting dozens of young women outside of the central railway station in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve.

In between launching dangerous fireworks at one another, the men reportedly groped, molested, robbed, and threatened women near the city’s iconic cathedral. According to the police, one woman was also raped.

German police: New Year assaults may be linked to crime ring https://t.co/TuqZxax5n7 #Cologne #Germany #immigration pic.twitter.com/xwX9cM77Iw

— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) January 6, 2016

Police received a total of 90 criminal complaints from witnesses and possible victims who said women were being surrounded by groups of “20-30 men” of “Arab or North African origin.” Those speculations about their ethnicities has prompted some to label the perpetrators as possible refugees, leading to an intense debate over migrants within the country.

Germany is one of the most welcoming European nations for refugees, and in 2015 alone the country took in 1.1 million asylum seekers. So far there have been no additional measures introduced to prevent their continued arrival, which has begun to bother citizens as sentiments shift with increasing terror threats, and anti-immigration rallies have broken out.

So far there has been no verifiable proof that the drunken mob was in fact full of refugees. Cologne’s Mayor Henriette Reker, who is a prominent pro-refugee politician, isn’t too fond of the hasty conclusions about who the perpetrators were. In between expressing her outrage over the attacks Reker said,

It’s absolutely improper for us or for people who are judging this objectively to immediately link a group that appears to come from North Africa with refugees.

Unfortunately, the mayor then severely backtracked by pissing off feminists with her advice to women on how to avoid future attacks.

Reker said in a statement that women could protect themselves by keeping “a certain distance of more than an arm’s length” from unknown men. She then reiterated her comments to a German public service broadcaster Tuesday saying,

Women would also be smart not to go and embrace everyone that you meet and who seems to be nice. Such offers could be misunderstood, and that is something every woman and every girl should protect herself from.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

The notion that women are somehow to blame, or could have prevented unwanted sexual advances is just preposterous. But rather than get sucked into a rant on the harms of victim blaming, let’s chalk Reker’s comments up to ignorance.

However, Germany’s crisis as whole remains unsettling. The mass assault was horrific and seemingly unprecedented, and the authorities are still scrambling to catch the men involved–in fact no one is even really sure how many men were involved. The added prejudice toward migrants, and the sexist comments from the city’s mayor all amount to one huge train wreck, which is seems to be a pretty fitting word given that this all started outside of a rail station.

Hopefully Germany can find justice for these women and prevent attacks like this from happening in the future.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post 1,000 Men in Germany Spent NYE Sexually Assaulting Women appeared first on Law Street.

“Bob’s Burgers” is a show that boasts positive female role models with the “strong, smart, sensual” Tina, driven, witty, entrepreneurial  Louise, and determined, bright Linda. But, despite its feminist females, the show sometimes includes passing jokes alluding to sexual assault. The problem is that jokes like these encourage lax attitudes about sexual assault in a society that already ignores victims too often.

When a popular show goes on its winter hiatus, it’s time to fill the void by binge watching old episodes on Netflix. Revisiting past episodes reveals that the mostly feminist-friendly “Bob’s Burgers” has some sexist hiccups, which are alarming for such a progressive show. Season 2, episode 8 deals with Bob’s new found love for pat-a-cake. He convinces his friend, Teddy, to “cake,” and almost immediately Teddy begins to protest. He shouts that the hand game hurts him and he doesn’t want to do it anymore. But Bob continues slapping Teddy’s hands and yelling at him to keep his hands up.

The scene’s humor makes Teddy, a large, grizzly man, play the vulnerable role. The joke is that the dialogue (which would normally be spoken by a man and the woman he is sexually assaulting) comes from two men, who are friends, in a non-sexual situation.

Teddy’s line, “I don’t like it! I don’t like it! Stop!” and Bob’s aggressive behavior are meant to spoof an abusive relationship. But, what’s so funny about sexual assault?

The scene is fundamentally not politically correct, a concern that gained strength during last year’s discourse on trigger warnings. The New York Times and The Atlantic weighed in on collegiate trigger warnings this past fall to examine whether they encourage “coddling” or respect–and that debate will probably be continued in 2016.

But, trigger warnings and PC standards leave comics with a dilemma because jokes are designed to not be safe or appropriate. Should there be a line comedy can’t cross or does that ruin the art form? Jokes will push that PC line as far as an audience will allow. For example, comedy has evolved from eventual audience rejection of offensive practices like black face. In this case, the show has plenty of funny material so why can’t it evolve away from jokes like this one? For a show like “Bob’s Burgers” that is often heralded for its feminism, it may be time to consider that evolution.

Ruby Hutson-Ellenberg

Ruby Hutson-Ellenberg is a 2016 Hunter College graduate, where she majored in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. As a native New Yorker, Ruby loves going to the theater and writing plays, which have been particularly well received by her parents. Contact Ruby at staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Political Correctness and Comedy in “Bob’s Burgers”: Where’s the Line? appeared first on Law Street.

2015 really wasn’t Bill Cosby’s year.

Almost overnight the once-beloved television father became widely known as a sexual predator, who unbeknownst to most of America spent the better part of five decades drugging and sexually assaulting young women who once viewed him as their idol. Now after months of highly-publicized exposes, harrowing accounts from over 50 women, and half a dozen civil lawsuits, Cosby is finally facing felony criminal charges for the only assault that’s still capable of putting the disgraced comedian behind bars.

In a press conference Wednesday, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania prosecutor Kevin Steele announced a single charge of aggravated indecent assault against Cosby, stemming from the 2004 assault of a former Temple University employee. The victim, Andrea Constand, claims Cosby drugged and assaulted her in his Elkins Park mansion. The announcement was a relief for many who anxiously watched the approach of the January 16 deadline, that would have marked the end of the 12-year-statute of limitations for trying the case.

Bill Cosby mugshot released after actor freed on $1M bail: https://t.co/IceUQBtARz pic.twitter.com/ZtPARPwjmz

— The Hill (@thehill) December 30, 2015

Constand worked at the University as an operations manager for the women’s basketball team when she caught Cosby’s eye. Cosby reportedly said he wanted her the minute he saw her. After becoming her mentor and friend, Cosby repeatedly made sexual advances toward her that were not reciprocated. So one night Cosby allegedly called her over to his home to discuss “her career plans” and offered her some pills to help her relax. Within 30 minutes Constand told police she’d loss the feeling in her legs, and Cosby was fondling her breasts and putting his hands down her pants.

After she reported the assault to police, the case quickly became a game of “he said/she said” for investigators. However, some newly unsealed court documents revealed new evidence pertinent to the case, and prosecutors had what they needed to reopen the case.

Cosby has never been convicted of sexual assault, despite the dozens of eerily similar claims from women who say he gave them quaaludes and then forced himself on them. Many of the women waited too long to press charges, not knowing that their years of silence wasted precious time that they could have used before the statutes of limitations ticked away.

To this day Cosby denies any wrongdoing, and has accused his accusers of defamation.

Cosby will not return to court until January 14, but is currently out on a $1 million bail. If convicted he could face up to ten years in jail and a $25,000 fine. Even if found not guilty, Cosby’s reputation and career are beyond repair, and the civil lawsuits still pending against him could end up stripping the former star of his fortune.

Without a doubt the upcoming legal proceedings will likely be the most highly anticipated cases of the new year.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Bill Cosby Charged With Felony Sexual Assault Over 2004 Case appeared first on Law Street.

Last week, a report obtained by the Washington Post revealed that there have been seven sexual assaults reported within the last year in a Marine Corps unit that was specifically designed to study how to best integrate women into combat roles. The report rocked the Marine Corps, which had just published a study claiming that sexual assault in mixed-gender units is no higher than in the Marine Corps as a whole. That study was by no means a statistical analysis to brag about–for years, the Marine Corps has had the highest rate of sexual assault against women in the armed forces.

The gender-integrated unit was meant to be a shining example of how much the Marine Corps has matured and adapted to protect women who serve, but it has now become a harsh reminder of the prevalence of sexual violence in combat.  The unit in question was comprised of approximately 100 women and 300 men and underwent training at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, which is the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast, (on a weekday there may be as many as  100,000 people at Camp Lejeune and at the neighboring air station) before training in California.

Six of the seven assaults discussed in the Post report were reported anonymously, which is often considered the safer option among survivors of sexual assault, especially in cases where the survivor has to be in constant contact with the assailant in the workplace. According to a recent Pentagon survey on sexual assault, 62 percent of women who reported being sexually assaulted experienced retaliation.  It is twelve times more likely that a sexual assault survivor in the military will be retaliated against than it is likely their attacker will be prosecuted for a sex offense. Even for those survivors who report their assault, justice is rarely delivered.  A 2014 RAND survey found that 45 percent of survivors were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their chain of command’s response after they reported their assault. Read on to learn about the issue of sexual assault in the Marine Corps, the newest controversial report, and the considerations moving forward.

Welcome to Camp LeJeune

Before the Marine Corps continues its efforts to meet President Obama’s goal to integrate women into all combat positions or provide specific exemptions by 2016, a spotlight must be placed on the unit that trained at Camp Lejeune. Camp Lejeune is not the only military base where sexual assault has taken place (and the report does not cite specifically where the assaults took place) but as one of the largest bases in the country, its policies provide an important glimpse into the culture of sexual assault awareness in the Marine Corps.  It is obviously easier to police smaller bases, but one would hope that the larger Marine bases serve as models for procedure across the country.

Camp Lejeune, built in 1941, has a history of conflict and scandal. From 1957 to 1987, the water on base was contaminated with over 70 chemicals that poisoned Marines and their families (the staff on base did not comply with regulations on the dumping of chemicals). In 2012, the Janey Ensminger Act was passed to compensate the hundreds of people who were victims of the contamination but Camp Lejeune will forever be remembered for its failure to respond to residents’ claims sooner. Camp Lejuene was also the site of a military riot between black and white Marines on July 20, 1969 during which fifteen Marines were injured and one man was left dead. In the wake of the riot, the Marine Corps reformed race relations, but once again it was criticized for taking too little action, too late.

The modern Camp Lejeune is a thriving military community that usually makes headlines for its major pediatrics center, innovative renewable energy program and commitment to Marine families. However the size of the base, and the constantly rotating military population, makes it difficult to police effectively. Camp Lejeune was the site of 70 cases of sexual assault in 2012, a figure that has held relatively consistent in the intervening years.  Sexual assault cases account for approximately 60 percent of the caseload for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) unit on base. Earlier this year, Camp Lejeune hosted a 5K run to raise awareness for sexual assault and promoted April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month. However, the administration on base has yet to release a statement on the sexual assaults that were reported by the Post.

Camp Lejeune is as large and well-organized as a medium-sized city (in fact, Jacksonville, NC, the nearest city, has a smaller population than that of the base–only 70,000 people) and therefore it has to address sexual assault as a serious threat to its population. Camp Lejeune operates a 24/7 Sexual Assault Hotline and connects military families with support groups, as well as all the resources that the Marine Corps offers on a national level. Yet in 2012, it was the site of more sexual assaults than any other Marine base in the world. Critics hope that the disproportionate number of sexual assaults that occur at Camp Lejeune will encourage Marine Corps leadership to funnel more resources into sexual assault awareness and prevention, but at this point, Camp Lejeune’s efforts at reform are underwhelming.

Reporting Sexual Assault in the Marine Corps

The Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Program (SAPR) performs outreach to military members who have been victims of sexual assault, connecting survivors with advocacy groups, medical aid, and legal advice.  In a 2013 meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee, General James F. Amos claimed that the Marine Corps has witnessed measurable improvements in handling sexual assault cases, but Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) has repeatedly argued that there is a need for reform and restructuring of the SAPR and other outreach initiatives. In 2013, Gillibrand introduced the Military Justice Improvement Act, which aimed to reform the procedures for the process of trial by court-martial, setting up an independent tribunal where survivors can report assault without fear of retaliation. Taking the judicial process out of the original chain of command was a controversial move on Gillibrand’s part–some of her fellow Democrats disagree with implementing a different process. However, Sarah Plummer, a survivor of military sexual assault has stated that:

Having someone within your direct chain of command handling the case, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s like your brother raping you and having your dad decide the case.

For the past two years, the Military Justice Improvement Act has fallen short of the votes needed for it to pass in the Senate–but it has put pressure on the military (specifically the Marine Corps) to improve its sexual assault response programs. According to a 2014 SAPR report, the primary goals of the Department of Defense’s Strategic Plan are prevention, investigation, accountability, advocacy/victim assistance, and assessment. SAPR focuses on developing the advocacy/victim assistance portion of the plan but there have been several concerted efforts to improve prevention: standardizing procedures that prohibit inappropriate relations between recruiters/trainers and recruits/trainees, adapting alcohol policies, and designing a collaborative forum for sexual assault prevention.

Integrating Women in Combat

The Marine Corps is considered the most difficult sector to integrate out of all of the military branches trying to introduce women to combat units. The Marines are 93 percent male, have only a handful of integrated units, and still train male and female recruits separately. The ongoing debate on integrating women into combat (examined in depth by Law Streeter Jessica McLaughlin) has been influenced in recent months by a leaked Marines Corps report that states women in combat may reduce performance, but may also increase decision making in the field. This report did not find sufficient evidence to change the traditional mentality of Marine Corps leadership on integrating women, and it has been predicted that the Marine Corps will ask for exemptions from President Obama’s order (keeping some positions male-only). The Marine Corps have not announced any plans to disband the units designed to test the integration of women in combat, yet once President Obama leaves office, his successor may not place sufficient pressure on the Marines to integrate. If that happens, many fear that the Marine Corps will almost definitely return to their segregated, traditional employment practices. For women who have begun training in combat practices, this would be a major step backwards professionally. Integrating more women into combat positions would not only create parity in the armed forces, it would place massive pressure on the Marine Corps to improve its sexual assault prevention program.

Conclusion

Women have served in the Marines since 1918 (in clerical positions) and were integrated into the Marine Corps in 1948. Their service to their country has paralleled that of their male counterparts, and participating in combat scenarios would let them reach the ultimate level of commitment to their profession. However, if sexual assault continues to plague the Marine Corps’ combat units, women cannot perform their duties and contribute to the mission of the armed forces. The deadline for the armed forces to integrate women into combat is January 2016. If the Marines commit to full integration, they will need to reexamine their approach to sexual assault in order to protect Marines both at home and abroad.

Resources

Primary

Kristin Gillibrand: Comprehensive Resource Center for the Military Justice Improvement Act

Department of Defense:  Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, Fiscal Year 2014

Additional

The Washington Post: In Marine Unit Focused on Integrating Women, Seven Sex Assaults Reported

Scribd: Marine Corps Analysis of Female Integration

Stars and Stripes: Reports of Sexual Assault Made by Marines in Unit Focused on Integration of Women

MarineCorpsTimes: New Data Shows Marine Corps has Highest Rate of Sexual Assault Against Women

Human Rights Watch: US: Military Whistleblowers at Risk

Huffington Post: Military Rape Cases Will Stay Within The Chain Of Command

Huffington Post: The Military Justice Improvement Act Ensures Justice, Despite What Its Critics Say

Jillian Sequeira

Jillian Sequeira was a member of the College of William and Mary Class of 2016, with a double major in Government and Italian. When she’s not blogging, she’s photographing graffiti around the world and worshiping at the altar of Elon Musk and all things Tesla. Contact Jillian at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Still Not Good Enough: Sexual Assault in the Marine Corps appeared first on Law Street.

The state of New York and the U.S. Department of Justice are now investing millions in testing backlogged rape kits. The grants will be allotted to local jurisdictions across America in hopes of bringing justice for rape victims. New York was the first state to start this process and is at the forefront of the effort. The grants will not only serve to convict rapists, but will also prevent future crimes by putting criminals behind bars.

Overview

Prevalence of Sexual Assault in the United States

It is commonly known that the number of sexual assault crimes are grossly underestimated. Due to the nature of the crime, victims are often reluctant to report what happened to them. But according to a 2010 report by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, one in five women in the U.S. will be raped in their lifetimes. Statistics show a sexual assault crime occurs every two minutes, but only 39 percent of those crimes are reported.

What is Rape Kit?

When a victim of sexual assault does report the crime, a sexual assault kit (SAK), also known as a rape kit, is used by a doctor or nurse (usually in a hospital) to preserve possible DNA evidence. Then the SAK is turned over to the police. The process is extremely invasive and can last between four and six hours. First, the victim stands on a large paper sheet, while undressing, in order to contain any stray fibers or hairs that could be used as evidence. According to ENDTHEBACKLOG, the examiner collects biological evidence from the victim’s “saliva, blood, semen, urine, skin cells and hair by taking swabs of the victim’s skin, genitalia, anus and mouth, scraping under the victim’s fingernails and combing through the victim’s hair.” The victim is also photographed from head to toe to document any and all injuries. In order to preserve evidence, victims are asked to not eat, drink, or urinate until the exam in over.

Generally, a state SAK will include: Detailed instructions for the examiner, forms for documenting the procedure and evidence collected, tubes and containers for blood and urine samples, paper bags for collecting clothing and other physical evidence, swabs for biological evidence collection, a large sheet of paper, dental floss and wooden sticks for fingernail scrapings, glass slides, sterile water and saline, and envelopes, boxes and labels for each part of the exam.

Some states have highly trained staff to conduct these procedures called Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners (SAFEs) or Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs). Not only are they trained on how to be more specifically sensitive to sexual assault victims, studies show that SAKs conducted by SAFEs or SANEs are more consistent and of higher quality. If examiners aren’t extremely careful, the experience could feel like a re-victimization to the patient or the SAK could be inadmissible in court due to mishandling.

After the SAK is completed and given to local law enforcement, DNA from the kit and alleged rapist is entered into the FBI’s national database CODIS (Combined DNA Index System). CODIS allows authorities to track serial rapists across the United States.

Untested SAKs

There are several different reasons for the large backlog of untested rape kits. They may not have been sent to a public or private crime lab in a timely fashion and remain in storage–including police department evidence rooms, crime labs, hospitals, clinics, rape crisis centers–or the SAKS remain at the lab without being processed. Although the exact number of backlogged SAKs across the country is unknown, the numbers found in specific cities are quite staggering. In 2009, 11,000 forgotten SAKs were found in a Detroit police warehouse. In addition, Los Angeles has almost 12,500 backlogged kits, Houston has approximately 6,500, and Memphis has over 12,000.

SAK backlogs have become a significant issue for local police departments, a National Institute of Justice (NIJ) survey of more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies found:

18 percent of unsolved alleged sexual assaults that occurred from 2002 to 2007 contained forensic evidence that was still in police custody (not submitted to a crime lab for analysis).

The NIJ study noted that some SAKs remain in law enforcement custody when the case is a matter of “consent.” In that case, the suspect admits to sexual intercourse, but maintains that is was consensual. A SAK will not shed light on that matter. Cases could have also been dropped, or a guilty verdict was already rendered.

Other reasons are far more alarming. Forty-three percent of the agencies claimed they did not have a computerized system for tracking forensic evidence, either in their inventory or for after it was sent to the crime lab. Nearly 45 percent of the law enforcement agencies admitted that one of the reasons they kept SAKS was that they didn’t have a suspect. And fifteen percent reasoned that the analysis had not been requested by a prosecutor. Three in 10 officers claimed they did not turn in the SAK because they were unsure of its usefulness. Another 11 percent of the agencies claimed one reason they didn’t submit evidence was due to consistent untimely results of the lab, while another six percent claimed the lab wasn’t accepting more evidence because of a backlog. The NIJ study also argues that biases contribute to the problem. For example, SAKs may have gone untested if the victim was a prostitute, a drug user, or was mentally ill.

There are several explanations for the backlog of SAKS, but one thing is clear–law enforcement agencies across the country are not on the same page whether from a lack of training, funding, or personal prejudices.

New Funding

Earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced that $80 million worth of grants would be invested into radically reducing the number of backlogged SAKs across the United States. In the announcement, Vance said that the state of New York is donating $38 million to 32 jurisdictions in 20 states, while Lynch pledged $41 million to investigate the reasons behind the backlog. “I’m saying today to all the women awaiting justice,” Vance stated, “you are not forgotten.” Together, the funds from Department of Justice (DOJ) and state of New York are expected to help test 70,000 untested SAKs in 43 jurisdictions in 27 states.

Vice President Biden praised the effort saying,

When we solve these cases, we get rapists off the streets… For most survivors, seeing their rapists brought to justice, and knowing that they will not return, brings peace of mind and a sense of closure. The grants we’re announcing today to reduce the national rape kit backlog will bring that sense of closure and safety to victims while improving community safety.

The issue hits close to Biden’s heart; he and Senator Barbara Boxer co-authored the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) back in 1994. Biden and Boxer condemned the lethargic response from police and prosecutors as well as the skewed attitudes toward violence against women in general.

History has shown a correlation between testing backlogged SAKs and convictions. New York was the first state to eliminate its backlog, testing 17,000 SAKs between 2000 and 2003. It resulted in 49 indictments. The grants will not only prevent future rapes but will give thousands of women across the country the justice they deserve.

Related Legislation

Over the last five years, Congress has passed several laws to address SAK backlogs across the country. The DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act of 2000 authorizes the Attorney General to make grants to eligible states in regards to SAK backlogs. The grants are specifically aimed toward the collection, analysis, and indexing of DNA samples in CODIS as well as for increasing state and local lab capacitates. To receive such grants, states must adhere to certain provisions, including the timely delivery of tested SAKs.

In 2013, President Obama signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. It was the third time the act has been reauthorized. Among other things, the reauthorization addressed new provisions to tackle the rape kit backlog across the country. First, it amended the aforementioned Backlog Elimination Act of 2000 by increasing audit requirements for SAK backlogs, increasing grants, and increasing state and local lab capacities. It expanded the focus of VAWA grants to include fortifying law enforcement and forensic response. The act also required states to minimally allocate “20 percent of funds within the STOP (Services, Training, Officers, Prosecutors) program and 25 percent of funds within the Grants to Encourage Arrest Policies and Enforce Protection Orders program be directed to programs that meaningfully address sexual assault.”

More than ever, states are dedicated to ending their respective SAK backlogs. Colorado, Illinois, and Ohio have all passed legislation to reduce backlogs. Arkansas, Kentucky, Virginia, and Louisiana passed legislation that requires an inventory of untested SAKs. California and Michigan enacted guidelines for processing evidence derived from SAKs. Texas allocated $10.8 million to untested SAKs in its 2014-15 state budget. It is also within a state’s jurisdiction to define statutes of limitation. Some advocates fight for the clock on statutes of limitations to start only once a SAK has been tested, as addressed in this video.

Proponents of this change argue that rapists should never benefit from a SAK that remained untested for so long that the respective crime exceeded a statute of limitation law.

Conclusion

It seems like a number of things need to come together to eradicate the backlog nationwide. For the most effective standards, the United States needs a uniform system of analyzing and indexing evidence in addition to regularly trained teams of trained nurses, doctors, law enforcement, and prosecutors. Funding is also necessary to allow all the different parts of the process to come together effectively. The recent $80 million investment in SAK testing can bring justice and closure to thousands of women.

Resources

Primary

Congressional Research Service: Violence Against Women Act

DOJ: Unanalyzed Evidence in Sexual Assault Cases

Additional

EndtheBacklog: Defining the Rape Kit Backlog

EndtheBacklog: State Respones

EndtheBacklog: What is a Rape Kit and Rape Kit Exam?

EndtheBacklog: Where the Backlog Exists

Govtrack: Summaries for the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act of 2000

Huffington Post: Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch Pledge Millions To Resolve Rape Kit Backlog

National Center for Injury Prevention and Control: Statistics about Sexual Violence

NRC on Domestic Violence: The Effectiveness of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Programs

Time: Authorities Invest $80 Million in Ending the Rape Kit Backlog

Time: Here’s What Happens When You Get a Rape Kit Exam

Jessica McLaughlin

Jessica McLaughlin is a graduate of the University of Maryland with a degree in English Literature and Spanish. She works in the publishing industry and recently moved back to the DC area after living in NYC. Contact Jessica at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Rape Kits: New Funding to Bring Victims Justice appeared first on Law Street.

As mass incarceration and state violence vis a vis police brutality are coming increasingly under fire, even in mainstream media, many communities are turning toward alternative methods of addressing violence. Transformative justice–as opposed to criminal justice–seeks to create alternatives to incarceration in a similar manner to its less-radical cousin, restorative justice. But transformative justice does something else, as well: transformative practices encourage communities to avoid involving police in crimes, even in instances of violence.

How can community practices of transformative justice transform the larger criminal justice system? Can community-based methods of addressing violence be the key to transforming this society?

What is Transformative Justice?

According to Generation Five, an organization dedicated to transformative justice in cases of gender-based violence, especially child abuse, transformative justice is described as the following:

Transformative justice [is] a liberatory approach to violence…[which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing.

Three core beliefs:

Individual justice and collective liberation are equally important, mutually supportive, and fundamentally intertwined—the achievement of one is impossible without the achievement of the other.

The conditions that allow violence to occur must be transformed in order to achieve justice in individual instances of violence. Therefore, Transformative Justice is both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice.

State and systemic responses to violence, including the criminal legal system and child welfare agencies, not only fail to advance individual and collective justice but also condone and perpetuate cycles of violence.”

Because of these core beliefs, rather than seeking to integrate transformative practices into the current criminal justice system, transformative justice practitioners actively advocate for remaining outside of state intervention.

Transformative Justice is a response to the State’s inability to provide justice on either individual or collective levels. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a model that responds to experiences of violence without relying on current State systems. We believe this to be a liberating politic that creates opportunities for healing and transformation rather than retribution and punishment. Transformative Justice moves us toward equity and liberation rather than maintaining the inequality that the current State and systems maintain.

Transformative justice practitioners argue that there is a choice, however: by equipping communities to engage in transformative practices instead of resorting to the only option often presented to people–involving the police in cases of violence–harm can actually be repaired and further harm can actually be prevented.

Can Transformative Practices Achieve Justice?

While many people across the country increasingly accept alternatives to incarceration for youth who are convicted of minor, nonviolent offenses–indeed, restorative practices dealing with those kinds of cases are becoming more common–many are skeptical about transformative justice advocates’ claims that alternatives to incarceration should also be used in cases as grave as rape and child abuse.

But does anyone actually practice transformative justice?

In one example of transformative justice principles being used in an effort to keep targeted communities safe without resorting to state intervention, the Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn queer of color youth collective Safe OUTside the System launched a campaign in 2007 in line with transformative justice principles and practices:

In 2007, the collective launched the Safe Neighborhood Campaign. Similar to the Dorchester Green Light Program of the 1970s, the campaign provides safe havens from sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and racist language, behaviour, and violence of all sorts. The campaign has three phases. In the first, neighbourhood public spaces such as restaurants, schools, churches, and businesses agree to visibly identify themselves as safe havens for those threatened with or fleeing from violence. In the second phase, the campaign incorporates an educational component to address some of the causes of anti-gay and anti-trans violence. Members of the campaign train the owners and employees… [on] ways to prevent violent without relying on law enforcement. In the third phase, Safe Space advocates recruit other community members and public figures into the campaign.

In ways that are formal–like these Safe OUTside the System’s effort–and informal, strategies of transformative justice are providing alternatives to the criminal justice system across the country.

Transforming criminal justice?

While transformative justice can be criticized for not offering a structured, consistent approach to providing alternatives to policing, transformative justice advocates continue to emphasize the importance of promoting truly individual and community-based alternatives–which vary with each circumstance–rather than attempting to dictate what is best for different communities. This is because ultimately, the priority of transformative justice advocates is not to transform the criminal justice system, but rather to work outside of it until it can be dismantled and rebuilt in a transformative way that does not continue to target already marginalized peoples.

Resources

Generation Five: Transformative Justice

Generation Five: Toward Transformative Justice

Huffington Post: Seeking Transformative Justice in Ferguson, Dearborn, and Beyond

Huffington Post: Criminalizing Victims: How the Punishment Economy Failed Marissa Alexander

Philly Stands Up!: Transformative Justice Anti-Sexual Assault Action Camp!

US Prison Culture: Thoughts About Community Support Around Intimate Violence

Safe OUTSide the System: The SOS Collective

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Transformative Justice Transforming Mass Incarceration? appeared first on Law Street.

Attitudes toward prostitution in the United States have long been based on the Judeo-Christian tradition arguing that selling sex is immoral; however, global trends arguing for sexual self-determination and changing attitudes toward the sex industry have become more popular. The United Nations Secretary General has even called for the decriminalization of sex work. These changes pose the question: how should the United States address the issue of prostitution?

The U.S. still criminalizes sex work, but the urgency of making changes in this sphere is evident in the growing sex worker rights movement that strives to define the legal status and rights of prostitutes. Read on to learn more about different models of regulating prostitution, and the arguments for and against them.

What are the real numbers behind prostitution?

Prostitution is “the act of offering one’s self for hire to engage in sexual relations.” In other words, it’s an exchange of a sexual act for money.

It’s hard to determine the real numbers behind prostitution due to the fact that sex work is criminalized in the United States. As most of the actors involved in this business operate underground, statistics are rather scarce. Some estimates of the current number of prostitutes range from 230,000 to 350,000, but others put the number closer to one million.

Prostitutes come from a variety of backgrounds. Indisputably, there are those who come from marginalized and impoverished environments, were sexually abused, homeless, poorly educated, or drug addicted. In addition, some women and men are coerced or trafficked into prostitution. Every year thousands of people are trafficked for the purposes of exploitation, including sexual exploitation. However, this doesn’t mean that all prostitutes are forced or trafficked. There are also those who chose to become involved in sex work of their own volition. These people can have different motivations to enter the sex industry, citing high earnings, flexible work hours, or genuine passion for this line of work.

Should prostitution be decriminalized, legalized, or none of the above?

Generally, you hear about three distinct approaches to prostitution: criminalization, decriminalization, and legalization. All of them are rooted in different ideological perspectives and include diverse goals and contrasting methods of achieving their desired objectives. Watch the video below to learn more about the ongoing debate over prostitution.

Criminalization

Prostitution is criminalized in most parts of the United States. Proponents of this view often believe that prostitution is immoral, and therefore label it as a criminal behavior. In their view, prostitution endangers marriages and is simply wrong. Prostitutes are viewed as criminals who behave illegally. The rhetoric of those who support criminalization is often centered on the notion that such alternatives as legalization will have devastating consequences on the American morale.

The supporters of criminalization also connect legal prostitution with increased sex trafficking, the spread of STDs, and a greater number of children being coerced into the sex industry. Watch the video below to learn more about Catharine MacKinnon’s arguments against the legalization of prostitution and its connection with human trafficking.

Decriminalization

Decriminalization means the removal of certain criminal laws related to the operation of the sex industry. When prostitution is decriminalized, consensual adult sexual activity in a commercial setting is no longer viewed as a crime. Decriminalization can be considered a half step toward legalization as individuals engaged in the business can be required to obtain a special permit or be subjected to penalties. Essentially, if a person is caught in the act, his punishment will be no more than a fine, something along the lines of speeding or a parking ticket.

At the same time, decriminalization doesn’t legalize sex work, but does instruct law enforcement to give low priority to prostitution cases. This approach intends to use the already existing legal mechanisms to support the health and safety of prostitutes. Many advocates of decriminalization cite labor and anti-discrimination laws as arguments to grant prostitutes certain rights, including freedom of choice and self-regulation.

Decriminalized systems often still impose criminal penalties for all other actors involved in the business, including clients and pimps. This perspective is rooted in the abolitionist movement that historically rescued women from prostitution and trained them for alternative careers. In this view, prostitutes are victims of male exploitation and supporters of this approach often consider prostitution demeaning to women.

The ultimate goal of decriminalization is to uproot the profession by targeting those who purchase sex in the first place. It’s believed that by eradicating the demand, the supply will subside on its own. The advocates of this form of decriminalization usually strongly oppose legalization that will make the sex business flourish instead of extinguishing the industry.

The Swedish Model

The Swedish model is the most influential decriminalization example. Since 1999, buying sex in Sweden is a criminal offense punishable by fines or up to six months imprisonment. Contrarily, selling of sexual services is not a criminal offense, meaning that prostitutes are not subjected to criminal law proceedings. The law is popular in Sweden–80 percent of the Swedish population supports the initiative, but many are still skeptical of its effectiveness.

The Swedish model was also adopted in Norway and Iceland. In 2014, Canada moved to this model of controlling public solicitation of prostitution and restricting demand on sexual services. In addition, similar decriminalization models were adopted in Nepal, India, American Samoa, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Fiji, Guam, Republic of Korea, Palau, and Taiwan.

What are the arguments in favor of decriminalization?

Decriminalization of prostitution can arguably decrease violence against prostitutes. A study in San Francisco found that 82 percent of prostitutes have been assaulted and 68 percent were raped during their time working in the sex industry. Another study in Colorado Springs found that prostitutes were 18 times more likely to be murdered than non-prostitute women of their demographic. If sex work is criminalized, prostitutes are reluctant to ask for help or go to the police if victimized. If decriminalized, prostitutes and law enforcement will have an avenue for communication, and if a prostitute is victimized she can report the crime to the police without the fear of being charged and detained for prostitution.

Decriminalization can also benefit the investigation of sex trafficking cases as prostitutes can aid law enforcement with information from the inside. In addition, law enforcement can save valuable resources as police departments won’t need to deal with as many prostitution cases. In 2011, Texas alone spent $8 million on prison expenses related to prostitution. Decriminalization won’t eliminate the financial burden completely as pimps and johns are often criminalized in those countries who adhere to decriminalization model, but it can decrease expenses overall and re-direct resources towards other crimes.

What are the arguments against decriminalization?

Criminalization of sexual services for clients, and not for prostitutes, can be challenging as both those who purchase and provide sexual services are unlikely to admit to the transaction. Clients will be reluctant to do so due to the existing criminal laws, while prostitutes can lose their income and clientele if they aid law enforcement. In fact, several independent studies have shown that current laws have pushed some Swedish prostitutes underground, resulting in an increased danger of victimization.

Those who oppose the Swedish approach to prostitution are also concerned with its unintended consequences of stigmatization and marginalization of those who enter the sex industry of their own volition. The Swedish model doesn’t acknowledge that prostitutes can choose this occupation out of their free will, but view all prostitutes as passive victims of violence and abuse.

Overall, there isn’t much evidence that this approach improves the quality of work and life of sex workers, or decreases HIV or STD transmissions. Even through the Swedish model is popular around the world, both the Swedish and the international experiences don’t provide enough indications of decline in prostitution.

Legalization

Legalization usually involves a system of laws and government regulations that define the operation of the sex industry. Such a system can be highly regulated or merely define the legal conditions under which prostitutes can operate. Legalization is often accompanied by strict criminal penalties for those who operate outside the established framework. Prostitutes are often required to pay special taxes, can work only in specified zones, and to register with the government. In addition, prostitutes are often obligated to regularly undergo health checks, and to obtain special licenses to legally operate as a sex workers. Thus, the legalization of prostitution seeks to control, regulate, and define the rules of the sex industry.

The legalization model emphasizes freedom of personal choice and regards prostitution as a form of work. The supporters of this approach maintain the belief that sexual relations between two consenting adults should’t be criminalized as those who engage in this type of relations do so voluntarily. This rhetoric is centered on the notion that people are free to choose what to do with their bodies and, therefore, entering into contracts to provide sexual services is their right that shouldn’t be undermined by the views of those who don’t agree with their decision. At the same time, advocates for legalization acknowledge that people can be forced or coerced into prostitution. They also acknowledge the existence of trafficking and exploitation, but don’t believe that all women are victims, and that prostitution automatically leads to violence.

European Experiences

The Netherlands and Germany are, probably, the most prominent examples of legalization. The Netherlands legalized prostitution in 2000, and it’s now regulated by the country’s labor laws. Germany followed in 2002 by providing prostitutes with legal protections and social insurance. In both countries the sex industry boomed, resulting in increased numbers of legal brothels and prostitutes, but also prompted concerns over increased cases of human trafficking.

Nevada’s Legal Brothels

The state of Nevada has a long history of regulating prostitution in some counties, starting in  1937 when a law was enacted to require weekly health checks for all prostitutes. In 1971, Nevada began taxing brothels, thus legalizing the sex industry in rural counties of the state. As of now, there are around 500 prostitutes who are working in 30 brothels. A recent study found that 84 percent of the surveyed prostitutes in Nevada felt safe working in the legal brothels, and were not trafficked or coerced into prostitution. Contrary to the European countries that have legalized prostitution, Nevada’s sex workers are considered independent contractors. Consequently, they don’t receive unemployment, retirement, or healthcare benefits.

What are the arguments for legalization?

All arguments cited earlier in support of the decriminalization model, such as decreased violence, better cooperation with police, and re-direction of valuable law enforcement resources, can be relevant when taking about legalization, as well.

The advocates for legalization argue that such a model of regulating prostitution can provide even more safety for prostitutes. Legal brothels are often closely observed and monitored by the law enforcement agencies to ensure compliance with safety regulations and to prevent sex trafficking cases. Legalization can also completely eliminate  the financial burden from police departments as there will be no prostitution cases to pursue. It’s estimated that in 2010, California alone arrested 11,334 people for prostitution. In Texas, an average of 350 prostitutes are sentenced to serve time in state prisons yearly. Proponents argue that legalization can decrease the prison population and save state resources that otherwise would be used to investigate, prosecute, sentence, and house those who are charged with this “victimless” crime.

In addition, legalization advocates argue that condom requirements and mandatory HIV and STD testing can reduce health risks for prostitutes and clients alike. If sex work is criminalized, fewer prostitutes will have access to testing services and fewer of them will practice safe sex. It was found that in the United States only three to five percent of STDs can be attributed to prostitution, supporting the argument that prostitutes are not vehicles of HIV and STD transmissions. The number of prostitutes infected with STDs in New Zealand and New South Wales, where prostitution is legalized, is very low or non-existent. In Nevada, there were no registered cases of HIV among legal sex workers. Watch the video below to learn more about Nevada’s health regulations and condom requirements for legal prostitutes.

Another argument is the revenue that legalized prostitution can bring in the form of income taxes. According to some estimates based on the current income of Nevada’s legal prostitutes, legalization can generate $20,000 in federal income taxes per person per year. Not only could this money be used to provide more social and health services for prostitutes, but could be spent on other governmental needs as well.

Perhaps the biggest and the most controversial argument in support of legalization of prostitution is the extension of labor rights and other occupational benefits to prostitutes. If prostitution is treated as any other profession, legal sex workers can be entitled to minimum wage, freedom from discrimination, and safe work environments. They can claim benefits, form or join unions, and get access to medical insurance and pension plans.

Lastly, supporters of legalization believe that prostitution is no different than pornography, lap-dancing, tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, which are all legal in the United States.

What are the arguments against legalization?

The most common argument against legalization of prostitution is its close connection with human trafficking and organized crime. The Netherlands’ legalization of sex work is cited as an example of a failing experiment as Amsterdam became a hub for traffickers and organized crime groups. The Dutch Justice Ministry closed over 320 prostitution windows as a part of the initiative to curb violence against migrant women, who are often forced by traffickers and pimps to work as window prostitutes in the city’s Red Light District.

The increase in child sexual exploitation is another point of concern for those who advocate against the legalization of prostitution. The adult sex industry is viewed as perpetuating the recruitment of children as sex workers, who also could be trafficked and coerced into sexual exploitation.

Prostitution is also thought to increase crime rates as it is a magnet for ancillary crimes, including drug, sex, and violent crimes. In this view, with any form of legalization those crimes can only increase as pimps and traffickers would have more legal avenues to conduct their illicit businesses.

Together with increased crime rates and  human trafficking, legalization can give more power to pimps as they are transformed into businessmen. According to this assumption, working in legal brothels can increase the likelihood of victimization as women spend their time in closed spaces and have fewer resources to ask for help or seek protection against abuse. Prostitutes in one of Nevada’s brothels compared their working conditions to a prison environment as most of the time they were locked inside their rooms waiting for clients and could leave the premises only with their male pimps.

Those who oppose legalization of prostitution also state that prostitutes will continue to spread diseases, even if their services are legalized. As it can take up to two weeks to process STD tests, sex workers can continue to infect their clients, prompting the spread of infections and STDs, regardless of their legal status.

Conclusion

How to deal with prostitution is an endless topic of debate. As decriminalization has its benefits and pitfalls, so does legalization. Even though each model has a different set of goals, both converge on the opinion that prostitutes shouldn’t be criminalized. The United States needs to start participating in the international discussions and may soon consider an alternative to the outdated criminalization model.

 Resources

Primary

UNODC: Human Trafficking

Additional

RNW: FAQ – Prostitution in the Netherlands

Alternet: Should Prostitution be Legalized?

Business Insider: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Prostitution in Nevada

Business Insider: Seven Reasons Why America Should Legalize Prostitution

California State University Northridge: Should Contractual Sex Be Legalized?

CBS News: Prostitution Laws: Europeans Debate Whether Criminalization or Legalization Works Better

Difference Between Net: Difference Between Legalization and Decriminalization

Digital Journal: Amsterdam Courts Ready to Clean Up Red Light District

The New York Times: Labour Laws, Not Criminal Laws, Are the Solution to Prostitution

The New York Times: Legalizing Prostitution Leads to More Trafficking

The New York Times: Nevada’s Legal Brothels Make Workers Feel Safer

The New York Times: Nevada’s Legal Brothels are Coercive, too

Prostitution Education Network: Prostitution Law Reform: Defining Terms

The NAYked Truth: Prostitution: The Economic and Criminal Justice Benefits of Legalization

Valeriya Metla

Valeriya Metla is a young professional, passionate about international relations, immigration issues, and social and criminal justice. She holds two Bachelor Degrees in regional studies and international criminal justice. Contact Valeriya at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Prostitution: Should it be Legalized or Criminalized? appeared first on Law Street.

In the past six months, if you were to Google the keywords college rape scandal, a disturbing amount of articles would pop up. Whatever side people stand on for the debate on college rape, every can agree that system is virtually broken. Previous notions of college campuses being an oasis for intellectual development and personal growth have begun to crumble as concerns over the sexual victimization of students are heightened. So the next question is, what do we do about it? Should we address rape culture, universities’ policies on sexual assault, or place all the burden on the individual? So far, it has been a combination of the three–here are all the facts on the college rape epidemic.

UPDATE: July 17, 2014

Statistics

Multiple organizations and government agencies have conducted surveys to gather data on the staggering amount of rapes that occur on college campuses:

Rape

• According to a survey conducted by the National Institute of Justice, one in four college women have survived rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.
• Estimated a college with a population of 10,000 students could experience more than 350 rapes a year.
• Fewer than 5 percent of attempted and completed rape incidents were reported to law enforcement officials. Victims commonly do not want their family and friends to know about the assault. Additionally, victims who do not report their attack, commonly fear of being treated with hostility by the police, that officials will not believe their account of the incident, and retaliation from their assailant.
• 7 percent of college men admitted to attempting rape, and 63 percent of those men admitted to multiple offenses, averaging six rapes each.
• 58 percent of incapacitated rapes and 28 percent of forced rapes took place at a party.
• On average only 12 percent of student victims report the assault to law enforcement.

College Involvement

Schools are suppose to follow ordinances in providing information about sexual assaults that happen on their campus, however that is not always the case:

• Only 37 percent of colleges and universities nationwide reported crime statistics that fully complied with the requirements of the Clery Act.
• 64 percent of schools do not provide new students with sexual assault awareness education.
• Fewer than 2 in 5 schools train campus security personnel to handle sexual assault.
• Only 46 percent of schools provide the option of anonymous reporting.
• Less than 50 percent of schools tell students how they can file criminal charge.

Mishandling by Colleges and Universities

Case Study: Amherst College

In May 2011, an acquaintance and fellow Amherst student raped Angie Epifano. A year after her assault, she published in a school newspaper her account of the attack and the callous treatment she received by college administrators. She wrote that she was questioned if she was really raped, her requests to change dorms and study abroad were denied. Furthermore, she was discouraged from pressing charges, and eventually brought to a psychiatric ward. These events led her to withdraw from Amherst while her alleged attacker graduated with honors.

The schools counseling center told her that,

“We can report your rape as a statistic, you know for records, but I don’t recommend that you go through a disciplinary hearing.”

This is only one example of how the college incompetently treated her.

Her wrenching account prompted other Amherst students and alumni to come forward and announce they, too, had been sexually assaulted at Amherst.

Another incident at Amherst is Trey Malone, a student who committed suicide after he could no longer cope with the sexual assault he endured while at school. His family released his suicide note for publication, where he alludes to Amherst’s incapability to help him,

“What began as an earnest effort to help on the part of Amherst, became an emotionless hand washing. In those places I should’ve received help, I saw none.”

Since Epifano, Malone, and others have stepped forward with their accounts of assault, Amherst has employed new measures to assist students who undergo such traumatic incidents.

Case Study: Occidental College

Students and alumni of Occidental College filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education stating the school failed to protect women from sexual assaults in April 2013. In their complaint, it was stated that they were, “raped, sexually assaulted, battered, harassed or retaliated against for speaking out against sexual violence.”

After the complaint was filed, the college was accused of tracking down students who had used anonymous sexual assault reports. When a student who had used the anonymous report was brought in to the college’s Title IX coordinator to discuss her accusation, she was denied information on how the college had been able to track her down.

Also, Occidental admitted that they failed to report 19 sex crimes to the annual Clery report statistics in recent years.

While the college has implemented new measures to combat sexual misconduct, many find these changes to be superficial and an attempt to salvage their reputation.

Omitting the incidents at other schools does not trivialize the horrific events those victims endured; there regrettably has been too many to thoroughly cover. Schools such as Wesleyan University and Tufts University have also been in the news for sexual assault.

Government Involvement

Department of Education Investigation

On May 1, 2014 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released a list of 55 colleges and universities under investigation for potential violations of federal law over the handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints. The Office of Civil Rights compiled this list to create more public awareness and transparency to enforcement work.

The release of the list works to advance a key goal of President Obama’s White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. It is hoped that this will increase discussion among communities about the issue and the best ways to combat assaults.

By having a college or university on the list does not indicated that the institution has violated or is violating Title IX. The schools under investigation will be continuously updated and accessible to the public upon request.

White House Involvement: President Obama

President Obama has taken great measure to combat sexual assault compared to previous administrations. He has publicly spoken out against sexual crimes, bringing to the nation’s forefront how it is an attack to the basic humanity and decency. The president has signed a memorandum creating a task force to respond to campus rapes.

The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault was created with the objectives of:

• Provide educational institutions with best practices for preventing and responding to rape and sexual assault.
• Build on the federal government’s enforcement efforts to ensure that educational institutions comply fully with their legal obligations.
• Improve transparency of the government’s enforcement activities.
• Increase the public’s awareness of an institution’s track record in addressing rape and sexual assault.
• Enhance coordination among federal agencies to hold schools accountable if they do not confront sexual violence on their campuses.

As of April 3 the task force has received 30 Title IX complaints, equal to the total number of complaints in all of fiscal 2013.

The government also made a website, NotAlone.gov, to track enforcement and provide victims with information.

White House Involvement: 1 is 2 Many Campaign

Developed by Vice President Biden, the 1 is 2 Many Campaign focuses on dating violence and sexual assault suffered by teens and young women. After seeking ideas from students on how to prevent violence on campuses, it was found that an abundant amount of respondents answer was to get men involved.

Biden and Health and Human Services started an “app challenge” that in turn created apps geared toward young people. An example is Circle of 6 that puts a group of friends instantly in touch with each other. This is incase someone is in trouble they are able to send a “come and get me” message, complete with a GPS map to show the exact location.

Legislation: Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013

The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 is federal law that was signed by President Clinton on September 13, 1994. It is a part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. President Obama signed on March 7, 2013 imposes new obligations on colleges and universities under its Campus Violence Elimination Act (SaVE Act) provision. The provision states that, “Most higher education institutions – including community colleges and vocational schools – must educate students, faculty, and staff on the prevention of rape, acquaintance rape, domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking.” Under the new requirements, colleges and universities are required to:

1. Report stalking, domestic violence, and dating violence further than the Clery Act already has mandated
2. Accept certain student disciplinary measures
3. Enhance or adopt institutional policies that will address and prevent campus sexual violence

Legislation: The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act

Commonly referred to as the Clery Act, the federal statute requires all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial aid programs to keep a daily public crime log provisions, maintain reporting obligations, and have extensive campus security-related provisions.

Legislation: Title IX

Signed into law in 1972 as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, Title IX prohibits schools receiving federal funding to discriminate based on gender. Under Title IX discrimination on the basis of sex can include sexual harassment, rape, and sexual assault.

Student Activism

Students Active for Ending Rape

Started in 2000 at Columbia University students, Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER) battles sexual violence and rape culture by empowering student-led campaigns to improve college sexual assault policies. The organization released a report in April 2013 examining how schools fail to completely address the problem, giving more than 80 percent of college policies a grade C or below, an F to nearly one-quarter, and said one-third don’t fully comply with the Clery Act.

Know Your IX

The mission of Know Your IX is to inform students in the United States of the rights guaranteed to them under Title IX. Survivors and activists who wish to share their expertise of their first-hand experience with violence, the law, and activism built the campaign. The ED ACT NOW campaign is a part of Know Your IX as an advocacy measure to better federal enforcement of Title

End Rape on Campus

Activists a part of End Rape on Campus (EROC) strive to assist individuals who are filling Title IX and Clery complaints. They want to hold schools accountable for the mishandling of sexual wrongdoing.

Of the 55 schools being investigated by the Department of Education, it cannot be ignored that some of the country’s highest ranked institutions make up a significant portion of the list. Why is that? Why are the schools that should be the pinnacle of our education system conducting themselves in such a lowly manner? Is it to preserve the good name of the school, even if that means endangering the very students that give it such a respected reputation? Thankfully students, organizations, and (some) government officials have taken measures towards reform. If the school administration will not mend their ways, then hopefully, newly enacted  legislation and courageous activists will led the charge.

UPDATE: July 17, 2014

Since this post was originally published, more stories have been reported about sexual assault taking place on colleges. In a particularly high-profile case, a freshman named Anna at Hobart and William Smith Colleges was reportedly raped by three football players during a fraternity party. Before this story broke, Hobart and William Smith Colleges was already one of the schools under investigation by the Department of Education.

Compared to the 60 days that are typical of a sexual-assault investigation, the Hobart and William Smith Colleges cleared the accused of all charges after only 12 days. The school’s disciplinary panel was ill equipped to handle this case, lacking tact and omitting evidence such as Anna’s rape kit and medical records. As with many individuals who are assaulted, Anna has been re-victimized by the community, receiving “physical threats and obscenities on her dormitory door, being pushed in the dining hall and asked to leave a fraternity party. Her roommate moved out with no explanation.”

Anna’s story has become all too common. It should not be a regular occurrence for these horrific acts to take place. Colleges need to reform their handling of sexual assaults, and fast.

 Resources

Primary

Amherst Student Newspaper: An Account of Sexual Assault at Amherst College 

Good Men Project: Lead a Good Life, Everyone: Trey Malone’s Suicide Note

U.S. Congress: Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013

U.S. Department of Education: List of Higher Education Institutions with Open Title IX Sexual Violence Investigations

Additional

One in Four USA: Sexual Assault Statistics 

Associated Press: Obama Targets College Sexual Assault Epidemic

National Institute of Justice: The Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study Final Report

Medical University of South Carolina: Drug-facilitated, Incapacitated, and Forcible Rape: A National Study 

National Institute of Justice: Sexual Assault on Campus: What Colleges and Universities Are Doing About It

Huffington Post: Occidental College Accused Of Secretly Tracking ‘Anonymous’ Sexual Assault Reports

Huffington Post: USC, Occidental Admit Underreporting Campus Sex Offenses 

Los Angeles Times: Occidental College Settles With Students in Sexual Assault Case

Los Angeles Times: Occidental College Fell Short In Rape Response, Victims Allege

Clery Center for Security on Campus: Summary Of the Jeanne Clery Act

ACLU: Title IX and Sexual Violence in Schools

Campus Save Act: The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act of 2013

American Council on Education: New Requirements Imposed by the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act

White House Council on Women and Girls: Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action

Students Active for Ending Rape: Moving Beyond Blue Lights and Buddy Systems: A National Study of Student Anti-Rape Activists

Alex Hill

Alex Hill studied at Virginia Tech majoring in English and Political Science. A native of the Washington, D.C. area, she blames her incessant need to debate and write about politics on her proximity to the nation’s capital.

The post College Rape Crisis: All the Facts on the Rape Epidemic appeared first on Law Street.

It is sexual assault awareness month, and the accusations against Universities’ policies on sexual crime continue to come forth. Before we get caught up in the rage, maybe we should start by asking the obvious question: what role should universities actually play in handling sexual assault crimes?

 At the current moment, universities handle sexual assault cases mainly in two ways. One, they either attempt to squash the complaints of the victims, because the mere appearance of sexual assault on campus is bad for business. Or two, universities process the accusations, commit to an investigation, and set a trial for the accused. This alternative option can be ‘beneficial’ for business, because it makes the university appear to be tough on ‘rape culture’. For obvious reasons, I have a serious problem with the first avenue of simply trying to downplay the accusations of a possible victim. However, there is good reason for us to be skeptical of the alternative.

Universities should have zero involvement in the initial handling of sexual assault crimes, and for the reason mentioned before: colleges can benefit from looking tough on rape culture, and thus, they may institute policies that ensure this desired outcome, at the harm of the school’s own students, specifically the accused. To be fair, universities are in a difficult spot. When you take into account that sexual assault is extremely present on college campus — Sarah Lawrence College reports, “at least 1 in 4 college women will be the victim of a sexual assault during her academic career” — and the fact that sexual assault cases are extremely hard to prove, many women or men can feel helpless and turn to the university to deal with situation.

However, this is also a problematic solution. Since universities have interests outside of justice, they could very easily lose sight of the fact that we assume innocence until proven guilty within our nation’s conception of justice. Unfortunately, we already see this trend starting to actualize, as there are many cases where men have been convicted of sexual assault by their university, while considered innocent in a legal context. Consider the case of Dez Wells where, “local authorities have gone so far as to proclaim the defendant’s innocence[ and yet, he was] expelled from Xavier University on a disciplinary charge of sexual assault.”

If universities begin to convict students of sexual assault crimes, without their guilt being proven in court, two new major problems arise. The first would be those who may be innocent still carry the weight of the conviction. A student like Wells will leave Xavier with no degree, and the marking of a sexual predator. This has profound implications. Wells will most likely struggle to be accepted into another University with an explosion from Xavier — due to sexual assault — on his record. (Dez Wells has since been accepted to University of Maryland, however, his value as an athlete may have helped him in this endeavor. However a student like Peter Yu at Vassar College, who was convicted and expelled in a similar manner, may not be so lucky). The second problem arises from the fact that someone like Wells will have to carry the psychological burden of being identified as a ‘rapist’, yet his innocence was proclaimed by legal authorities, therefore, he shouldn’t have this problem.

These worries make way for another implication of relying on universities to handle sexual assault crimes. Universities cannot offer due process nor due punishment. I feel as though there is no need to say that rape is a serious crime, but I think we forget that it is when we expect an institution like a university to process such an offense. There is a reason that ‘murder’ would never be processed solely on a university campus, for the simple reason that such a serious crime requires proper due process and punishment. It seems apparent to me that we should view sexual assault in the same light. To convict someone of a crime as serious as rape, they should be protected by legal safeguards. Additionally, to ensure that proper justice is served, in the event that sexual assault was committed, we can only rely on the legal system to ensure the proper level of moral reciprocity.

These problems associated with colleges carrying out their own investigations and convictions of sexual assault crimes should deter us from demanding that they commit to action. We must remember that universities have goals outside of upholding justice, which can lead to unfair trials and convictions, ultimately harming students. Thus, students and activists against sexual assault should refrain from pointing fingers at the university. Instead, we need to establish a new avenue that makes it easier to process sexual assault cases, but within the legal domain. This is the only way to ensure proper due process and justice, and treat rape like the serious crime  that it is.

[Reason] [SLC] [ThinkProgress]Shortcode Generator

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Bo Donoghue

Bo Donoghue

Bo Donoghue is a student at The George Washington University. Contact Bo at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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It’s been a busy few days for rape culture, folks.

This past weekend, the Kansas City Star published a long and revealing feature detailing the story of the Colemans—a family who moved to Maryville, MO following a personal tragedy, only to be driven away months later when their daughter, Daisy, accused a prominent football player of rape. Their house has since been burned to the ground.

That’s right. The rape victim and her family were driven out of town—not the rapist. Despite an overwhelming amount of evidence to support the rape accusations, all of the charges were dropped, and Daisy’s attacker got off scot-free. He’s currently studying at the University of Central Missouri.

The story went viral. News outlets across the country jumped on it, Anonymous picked it up on Twitter, sparking the hashtag movements #OpMaryville and #Justice4Daisy, and a demonstration is scheduled to happen on October 22 at 10 a.m. outside of the Maryville Courthouse. (Are you in Missouri? You should go.)

But, as awful as this story is, it’s not the first time a similar case has hit the Twittersphere. It’s been less than a year since the infamous Steubenville case—and while Maryville headlines have only just appeared, the actual rape occurred earlier in 2012 than Steubenville.

So let’s take a few minutes, and forget about the government shutdown and the debt-ceiling crisis. Let’s take a minute and redirect our focus. Because every time a political brouhaha like this happens, we all tend to get obsessed with the crazies who are throwing a tantrum in the capitol—and we forget that there are a hell of a lot more of them wreaking havoc right here, in our daily lives.

So what happened in Maryville, and why do we care? You should really read that Kansas City Star article—it’s incredibly well written. But, if you don’t have time to read nearly 5,000 words, here’s a quick summary.

Melinda Coleman lived in Albany, NY with her husband and four children. They had three boys and one girl, named Daisy. Then, tragically, Dad died in a car accident. Looking for a fresh start, Melinda moved with the children to Maryville, MO at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year. At first, everything went well.

Then, one night, Daisy and a childhood friend from Albany went to a party with a group of older boys—senior year football players, to be exact. Once there, they were both raped, while some of the boys took videos. Afterwards, they were returned home, where Daisy was left out in the front yard, drunk and literally freezing, overnight.

There was plenty of evidence to support the rape charges—depositions from the two girls and a number of partygoers, rape kits, and confiscated iPhone videos. But Matthew Barnett, Daisy’s accused, was a Maryville fixture. He was popular, star of the football team, and his grandfather was a former representative in the state legislature.

Simply put, the Barnetts were one of a few key families in Maryville—influential and untouchable—and the Colemans were recent transplants, outsiders. Add that to the frighteningly commonplace practice of victim blaming in sexual assault cases, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for charge-dropping.

And that’s exactly what happened. All of the charges were dropped, allowing Barnett to go on living his life, while Daisy and her family were left to deal with the horror of their own. Melinda was unceremoniously fired from her job. Daisy and her siblings were tormented, harassed, and threatened with physical violence. Ultimately, Melinda decided to move the family back to Albany.

In a not-so-convincing coincidence, their house—empty and up for sale—burned down shortly after. The charred remains have yet to be cleaned up.

But why do we care? This kind of bullshit happens all the time. How is this any different?

It’s not. And that’s exactly why it’s so important.

1 out of every 6 women in the U.S. has been a victim of attempted or completed rape. Every 2 seconds, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. Victims of sexual assault are more likely to suffer from depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to contemplate suicide. And that’s only accounting for the victims themselves—their families and loved ones can be severely affected as well.

Sexual assault is a very, very big problem, devastating the lives of millions of people in this country alone.

But 97 percent of rapists will never spend a day in jail. Matthew Barnett is just one of millions.

To say that this is unacceptable would be the understatement of the year. As a nation that likes to pat itself on the back as the leader of the free world and the harbinger of human rights, this is incredibly disheartening.

After all, if the land of the free and the home of the brave doesn’t take this shit seriously, then who the hell does? Virtually no one, that’s who.

How does our legal system only hold 3 percent of rapists accountable for their actions? How is this the kind of reality that our justice system supports and creates?

I’ll tell you how.

Patriarchy. That’s how.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, patriarchy is basically the opposite of feminism.

If we accept Rebecca West’s statement that feminism is the radical notion that women are people, then we can understand patriarchy as the douche-y notion that women are not people.

Or at least, not people who are valued as highly as men.

Patriarchy is what’s at work when women get paid 77 cents to a man’s dollar, or when men offer us their seat on the subway, because ugh my weak lady legs can’t support my body for three stops.

Patriarchy is what’s at work when the Supreme Court can rule in favor of a woman’s right to choose, and more than 40 years later, Roe v. Wade is still legally imperiled by gazillions of restrictions across the nation.

Patriarchy is what’s happening when women work a double, triple, or quadruple shift, and no one raises an eyebrow. It’s what’s happening when the Hate Crime Statistics Act doesn’t include gender-based crimes, because violence against women is so commonplace that to track those numbers would be way too hard, so let’s not even bother trying.

And—say it with me now—patriarchy is what’s happening when a 14-year-old girl named Daisy can get raped, on videotape, by a 17 year-old-boy, and her attacker does not go to jail. Instead, she’s verbally abused, run out of town, and her house gets burnt to the ground. Meanwhile, her rapist happily attends college and writes disgusting Tweets about women and their sexuality.

Gross.

This shit is awful, and it’s got to be changed.

So come on, good lawyer folks. Get on that.

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Featured image courtesy of [Mike via Flickr]

Hannah R. Winsten

Hannah R. Winsten is a freelance copywriter, marketing consultant, and blogger living in New York’s sixth borough. She hates tweeting but does it anyway. She aspires to be the next Rachel Maddow. Contact Hannah at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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