WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE THEY SHOULDN’T: Another op-ed suggests colleges shouldn’t handle campus sexual assault.
It seems at least once a week an opinion piece is published urging legislators, the media and anyone who will listen to stop giving in to the idea that campus sexual assault is at crisis levels and that the only way to fix the problem is to create pseudo-courts that eviscerate due process rights.
The most recent example comes from the Courier-Journal, the main newspaper in Louisville, Ky., and is written by attorney and blogger Bridget Bush. Bush argues that these campus kangaroo courts are not the right venue for accusations of sexual assault (a felony).
“Sexual assault, when it really occurs, is a crime. It should be investigated by professional law enforcement, not campus police. It should be prosecuted by actual prosecutors — not college administrators,” Bush wrote. “Expulsion from college is not a sufficient punishment for rape: jail is. To the contrary, merely expelling a true perpetrator just sets him free to rape non-students.”
Bush included a story about a friend’s daughter, who was (wrongly) accused of sexual assault. These cases almost always involve a woman accusing a man, but in this case, a woman accused another woman.
The woman’s parents hired an attorney, as every student who is accused of sexual assault in college should do. (Sadly, many students can’t afford to do this, and are at a disadvantage while the accuser has an entire school administration office in her defense free of charge.) The attorney was not allowed to represent her during the campus hearing. She was allowed only to accompany her client as an “adviser” but not make objections or cross-examine the accuser or witnesses.
The accused woman was lucky in that witnesses came forward to dispute the claims from the accuser, and she was found not responsible. Her college degree was not disrupted (though the degrees of many male accused students who are found not responsible are disrupted) and she graduated on time. Perhaps because the accused student was a woman, and this entire “epidemic” is predicated on the “war on women” narrative that women are victims while men are perpetrated, she received leniency.
Perhaps.