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Sen. McCaskill releases campus sexual assault survey findings

One of the recommendations is a campus climate survey, along the lines of the one Professor Freyd wants to do at UO. As Steve Duin reports in the Oregonian, UO *really* does not want her to do that survey.

Press release on the McCaskill survey, with link to full results here. Quoting:

Among the findings in McCaskill’s survey:

  • Investigations:  Federal law requires every institution that knows or reasonably should have known about an alleged sexual assault to conduct an investigation. But 41 percent of schools surveyed have not conducted a single investigation in the past five years. More than 21 percent of the nation’s largest private institutions conducted fewer investigations than the number of incidents they reported to the Department of Education, with some institutions reporting as many as seven times more incidents of sexual violence than they have investigated.
  • Training:  21 percent of institutions surveyed provide no sexual assault response training at all for members of their faculty and staff.  31 percent of schools do not provide any sexual assault training for students.
  • Title IX coordinator:  Colleges and universities are required to assign a staff or faculty member as a Title IX coordinator, with responsibility for coordinating the institution’s compliance efforts, including investigations of sexual harassment and sexual violence, but more than 10 percent of institutions surveyed do not have a Title IX coordinator.
  • Adjudication:  Federal law requires institutions that receive claims of sexual assault to conduct an adjudication process to determine whether an assault occurred and, if it did, to reach a determination. But:
    • 33 percent of schools failed to provide basic training to the people adjudicating claims.
    • 43 percent of the nation’s largest public schools let students help adjudicate cases.
    • 22 percent of institutions give athletic departments oversight of cases involving athletes.
  • Climate surveys:  Confidential climate surveys of students are one of the best ways to get an accurate portrait of assaults on a campus, but only 16 percent of schools conduct climate surveys.
  • Coordination with law enforcement:  Law enforcement officials at 30 percent of institutions receive no training on how to respond to reports of sexual violence, and 73 percent of institutions have no protocols on how the institution & law enforcement work together to respond to such violence.

One Comment

  1. Cheyney Ryan 07/09/2014

    It is important to understand the background to the hostility to Professor Freyd’s campus climate survey. Starting several years ago, some of us that work on Title IX began urging the U of O to conduct an objective assessment of sexual violence/harassment at the U of O. We believed this was mandated by developments in Title IX policy.

    In response to this, Robin Holmes stated in fall of 2012 that this would be a “waste of money”. When some of went ahead and conducted our own survey, we were publicly criticized for “causing turmoil” around these issues. Now, the same Robin Holmes finds fault with Professor Freyd’s methodology, on the grounds that it is not “objective”. An “objective” survey, for Holmes, would be no survey at all. All of the failures noted by Sen McAskill apply to the U of O, under the leadership of Holmes and Penny Daugherty.

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