Americans Support Campus Due Process
For years, campus activists have promoted a flawed narrative about campus sexual assault using inflammatory language like "rape culture" and saying that one out of five women will be sexually assaulted. But is this really the case? Do young men become sexual predators the moment they arrive at their local universities? Some seem to think so.
The Obama administration turned a blind eye to fact and reason, relying on hyperbole to remove due process from our college campuses. Thankfully, the Trump Administration corrected some of the overreach by forcing schools to do things like notifying accused students what they are being charged with, conducting unbiased investigations, and assuring impartial adjudications. It's imperative that the Biden Administration doesn't return our campuses to the kangaroo courts of the Obama era.
Unbiased analyses reveal that the shrill claims used to sway the Obama Administration were false. For example, activists claimed that campus sexual assault is exclusively a male-on-female problem, that only 2% to 10% of sexual assault allegations are false, and that constitutional due process protections are an obstacle to justice for complainants.
In reality, men can be sexually assaulted-usually by women. According to the Centers for Disease Control's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, every year, 1.27 million women are raped, and 1.267 million men are "made to sexually penetrate" by their female partners. That's a difference of less than half a percent, but the hoary, one-sided sexual assault myth still persists. A 2014 article in the American Journal of Public Health identified the following as factors that perpetuate the misperception about male victimization: reliance on traditional gender stereotypes and outdated and inconsistent definitions.
Another claim that activists hang their hats on is that only 2% to 10% of sexual assault allegations are false. But there is reason to believe the actual number is much higher, especially on college campuses. According to Brett Sokolow, head of the Association of Title IX Administrators, "probably 40% or 50% of allegations of sexual assault [on campus] are baseless." This may explain why there have been hundreds of lawsuits brought against universities by accused students claiming the schools used unfair methods to find them guilty and punish them, often with expulsion. And over 200 of them decided in favor of the accused student to date.
This brings us to activists' seeming belief that due process is an obstacle—not a facilitator—of justice. According to this theory, the key to ending campus sexual assault was to remove due process protections for accused students. Supposedly, that would lead to an increase in the reporting of incidents, convictions would soar, and sexual assault would end.
But this theory backfired. A survey sponsored by the American Association of Universities showed an increase in the number of campus sexual assaults among undergraduate men and women after the Obama policy went into effect in 2011. Here's the real shocker: Despite all the efforts to make it "easy" for students to report their assaults, by 2019, less than 12% of sexual assaults were being reported to campus police, and fewer than half of victims believed that school officials were "very" or "extremely" likely to take their report seriously.
Armed with that information, it's no wonder there is strong bipartisan support among lawmakers and other Americans to support due process on campus. SAVE's 2020 YouGov survey showed that more than two-thirds of Americans believe that "students accused of crimes on college campuses should receive the same civil liberties protections from their colleges that they receive in the court system"; three-fourths think "students accused of sexual assault on college campuses should be punished only if there is clear and convincing evidence that they are guilty of a crime,” and 80% believe "students accused of sexual assault on college campuses should have the right to know the charges against them before being called to defend themselves." Both Republicans and Democrats endorse these measures, according to the poll.
The facts are clear: activists used false data to force colleges to embrace an Alice-in-Wonderland theory of justice: "sentence first, verdict afterward." We cannot let the Biden Administration take us back. After all, due process is one of the principles this country was founded on. If it's removed from college campuses, how long can we expect it to remain in our courts of law?
