Following President Obama’s formation of a White House Task Force on Protecting Students from Sexual Assault, GUSA released a list of thorough, practical suggestions for improving policies and services for survivors of sexual assault at Georgetown. The statement’s recommendations include providing closed-circuit cameras to reduce interaction between survivors and perpetrators in hearings, allowing administrators to replace students on the hearing board, mandating bystander education for students and staff, and outlining when the University would proceed with a hearing against the survivor’s wishes.
These recommendations make great strides toward improving the hearing process for sexual misconduct and preventing sexual assault through education. The strength of these suggestions derives from their support of survivors. Making sexual history and dress inadmissible in sexual misconduct hearings would keep the blame away from the survivor and reduce victim-blaming. GUSA also recommends hiring trauma specialists at Counseling and Psychiatric Services and confidential Health Education staff, which would offer survivors further support both during and after hearings.
Another suggestion important to making campus safer yet easy to implement is making bystander education mandatory for students and staff at the beginning of the year with follow-up sessions throughout the year. To do so, GUSA plans on increasing funding for RU Ready, an educational program sponsored by Health Education Services, the Women’s Center, and other groups, in addition to including sexual assault discussions as a part of GUSA’s What’s a Hoya program. Though Nate Tisa (SFS ‘14) and Adam Ramadan (SFS ‘14) led the campaign for New Student Orientation to hold mandatory sexual assault and bystander education this past fall, NSO instead held a voluntary sexual assault ice cream social as part of Welcome Week. This second attempt to have mandatory education as part of Welcome Week reflects GUSA’s dedication to this issue. Systematic changes would be instrumental in shifting campus culture away from victim-blaming.
According to the Washington Post, the White House report found that one in five women on college campuses is sexually assaulted, and, of those, only one in eight report the incidence. Obama gave his task force 90 days to come up with recommendations for colleges in order to ameliorate these issues—GUSA responded within hours. While the University should look toward the recommendations the governmental task force will make, it should first consider the suggestions GUSA has made, because they are campus-specific and many are easy to implement. Georgetown must show a greater commitment to preventing sexual assault and improve the process of misconduct hearings, and GUSA needs to ensure the University will follow through with action. The administration should implement these changes as soon as possible in order to create a safer campus.
I don’t quite understand how allowing administrators to replace students on the hearing boards is an improvement in the process for handling sexual assaults. In my experience as a board member who has participated in sexual assault cases, I have found that there can be a divide in how students and faculty/administrators view sexual assaults– and in fact it is the students who show a better and more realistic understanding of the dynamics of sexual assault today. Whether because of a lack of training or because they grew up during a time when views on sexual assault were different, some faculty/administrators on the board seem to have outdated views and do not understand the dynamics of today’s “hook up culture” as well as student representatives on the board do–and consequently may hold survivors’ accusations to unfair standards not in line with current (and evolving) views on this issue. The role of students on the board is critical, in my view, to ensuring sexual assault cases are adjudicated in line with contemporary, more “enlightened” views on the issue rather than based on outdated views of hook ups and what constitutes consent.
Further, I have seen no examples of students not taking the process seriously or engaging in other actions that would make them unfit to serve on boards. Indeed, the fact that one is tried (at least partially) by ones peers lends legitimacy to the hearing boards and ensures that survivors (and the accused) are not judged purely on the basis of outdated views, or based on perceptions of what college social life is like that stem from popular culture. Rather, both sides are questioned by their peers who have a much butter understanding of what is a normal, consensual hookup and what crosses the line into sexual misconduct or assault.
GUSA and the administration should think very carefully about making such a change, which, although well intended and designed to combat the far too high prevalence of sexual assault by better holding perpetrators accountable, may actually have the opposite effect.