"Our Strategy for Dealing With Rape on College Campuses Has Failed Abysmally"

Article here. Excerpt:

'It's the truth. And Jed Rubenfeld, a professor of criminal law at Yale Law School, is preaching it in the pages of The New York Times.

In a lengthy weekend op-ed, Rubenfeld argued that colleges deal with rape foolishly when they hold due-process-free tribunals that merely result in the expulsion of the accused. That's both too harsh a sentence for a student convicted under the shabby evidence standard that colleges use and also too lenient a sentence for an actual rapist—who is free to continue harassing other women.

Instead, colleges should always go to the police. The normal criminal justice system is vastly better equipped to investigate and adjudicate rape, wrote Rubenfeld:

"Moreover, sexual assault on campus should mean what it means in the outside world and in courts of law. Otherwise, the concept of sexual assault is trivialized, casting doubt on students courageous enough to report an assault.

The college hearing process could then be integrated with law enforcement. The new university procedures offer college rape victims an appealing alternative to filing a complaint with the police. According to a recent New York Times article, a “great majority” of college students now choose to report incidents of assault to their school, not the police, because of anonymity and other perceived advantages.

But the danger is obvious. University proceedings may be exacerbating the fundamental problem: the fact that almost no college rapists are criminally punished — which they will never be if the crimes are never reported to the police. Nationwide, the Department of Justice states that about 35 percent of rapes and sexual assaults were reported to the police in 2013. That’s not enough, but it’s a lot better than the 5 percent reported by college women."'