Article here. Excerpt:

'There’s not much to get excited about in the new version of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, introduced last year in the Senate, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The group praises small improvements in the new version, like removing the word “assailants” to refer to students accused of sexual assault, and notes that at least it doesn’t codify the “more likely than not” legal standard for guilt or “affirmative consent” regime.

But it’s thin on due-process protections, doing nothing to protect students whose schools have “inadequate” or “biased” institutional policies for adjudicating assault claims.

It gives “substantial resources” only to students who make accusations, including a “confidential advisor,” which “potentially” violates regulations implementing the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and even Department of Education guidance, FIRE says.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is teaming up with the makers of a new documentary to help pass her bill combating sex attacks on college campuses.

The New York Democrat and a bipartisan group of 11 other senators are rolling out legislation to coincide with the release of “The Hunting Ground,” which opens around the country later this month.

A day before the movie’s premiere in New York and Los Angeles, Gillibrand, who appears in the film, took in a Washington screening. The director and producer attended a press conference last week where the senators outlined their bill.

Lawmakers hope to use the reaction to the documentary 'The Hunting Ground' to push universities to step up action against sex assault.
...
The film has earned positive reviews but also has been slammed for its use of disputed statistics on the prevalence of college assaults and for condemning colleges across the board for failing to help victims.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A “Confronting Campus Rape” discussion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Monday night delved into the rights of the accused versus the rights of the accuser, a panel discussion during which participants suggested campus rape victims are largely mistreated and dismissed.

Some in the audience even suggested that the accused should not be innocent until proven guilty, and the emotionally charged talk included suggestions by UW-Madison professor Anne McClintock that “men on campus … are at greater risk of being assaulted on campus than they are of being falsely accused of a rape” and that “this university does expel students for plagiarism, but not for rape.”

A UW-Madison student on the panel who described herself as a rape survivor said she had, however, successfully gotten the first male student ever expelled from UW-Madison for rape.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Nationally, the percentage of men ages 25 to 54 who are not working has fallen over the past year, but it isn’t back to prerecession levels and remains far above where it was for past generations. As of January, 15.6% of men in that age group weren’t working. That’s a percentage point lower than a year ago, but above the less than 13% seen in late 2007 before the recession hit and not close to the 6% seen in the early 1970s.
...
Related reading:

More Men in Prime Working Ages Don’t Have Jobs*'

*To jump the login wall, Google the first paragraph text on the linked page and click the first search result link.

Press release here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON / March 3, 2015 – SAVE, a national organization working to end sexual assault, is criticizing the recently released movie The Hunting Ground for presenting false statistics, offering a one-side portrayal of the problem, and failing to call for greater police involvement in campus sex cases.

Produced by CNN Films, The Hunting Ground purports to be a documentary. In fact, the movie contains numerous factual errors and omits essential perspectives. The film does not attempt to verify the accuracy or completeness of persons’ accounts.

The film makes the claim that 20% of college women are sexually assaulted, even though the U.S. Department of Justice reports a woman’s risk is under one percent each year: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5176

Story here. Excerpt:

'Bykewich said every once in a while there is a case that is so horrific, a person with any kind of empathy simply cannot fathom it.

Bykewich asked for a sentence of 23 to 25 years, saying the only mitigating factor is the guilty plea, which came late and only after the woman's husband pleaded guilty and accused her of inflicting all of the children's physical injuries.

Earlier in Monday's hearing, an Alberta Children and Youth Services social worker testified she and her colleagues "could never have prepared for such a horrendous case" of child abuse as that of child "M" and her twin sister.
...
The two-year-old girl, who can only be identified as “M” under Alberta child welfare legislation, died after being removed from life-support following a lengthy court battle between the parents and doctors.

The twins had been beaten and starved.

Article here. Excerpt:

'What would happen if someone posted an article about how a particular ethnic group was poised to destroy a city? Imagine for a moment the outcry and outrage that would flow in the blogosphere if a columnist claimed, for example, that Chinese immigrants were ruining a city’s culture or that a particular company, dominated by women, was consigning a large American city to “doom” by causing housing prices to skyrocket.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Several left-leaning news sites recently reported that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants universities to stop reporting instances of sexual assault to the feds – a factually incorrect assumption that spread across the Internet like wildfire before the stories were retracted.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A woman, found guilty of lodging a false rape case against a man with whom she later on tied the knot, has been spared of perjury proceedings by a Delhi court which hoped that as they were legally married they would start living happily without any bitterness.

Additional Sessions Judge Virender Bhat, while sparing the woman from prosecution, observed that the present case was "another classic illustration of the misuse of rape laws."

"The prosecutrix (woman) deserves to be prosecuted for having set the police machinery in motion on false information and for giving false evidence before this court but I refrain from doing so for the reason that prosecutrix and accused are legally married couple and in the hope that they would forget their bitterness....And would start living together as husband and wife peacefully," the judge said.
...
It said that the woman had used the police machinery to create pressure upon the accused to marry her at the earliest. 

Article here. Excerpt:

'The share of American men with criminal records — particularly black men — grew rapidly in recent decades as the government pursued aggressive law enforcement strategies, especially against drug crimes. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, those men are having particular trouble finding work. Men with criminal records account for about 34 percent of all nonworking men ages 25 to 54, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Yusuf Derios’ nightmare started in January 2014.

“It was pure hell, to be honest with you,” Derios said of the four months in which he was arrested 10 times -- sometimes within several days -- on warrants signed by his ex-girlfriend, despite his contention that he never assaulted or threatened her.

Each time when he went to court, prosecutors agreed and dismissed the charges, but not before the damage was done.

“I lost my job. It's hard to find work now. It's horrible,” Derios said.

Finally, after he spent a total of about 30 days in jail, Derios sought a court order that would stop his ex from taking out warrants. In September, Chief District Court Judge Regan Miller granted the order against Lechez Little on the grounds that she had misused the warrant process.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Joshua Strange, of Spartanburg, SC, couldn't wait to receive a college education from Auburn University. However, his dream was cut short when he was accused of assaulting and raping a former girlfriend.
...
After a lengthy legal battle, Strange was cleared of his charges. A grand jury handed up a "no bill” for the sodomy charge and when the assault charge went to trial, the accuser did not show up.

"Josh never got to prove she was liar," says Strange's mother, Allison, "He didn't get to tell his story in court."

However, Strange was punished for the unproven crimes by being expelled from AU and he can never step foot on campus again.
...
Strange's experience comes in contrast to those being followed in a documentary, The Hunting Ground. The film follows survivors as they pursue their education while fighting for justice. Strange's story is not featured in the documentary.

"We just want people to understand there is another side to every story," explains Allison.

Article here. Submitter's comments appear as first comment to this item. Excerpt:

'The U.N. children’s agency said on Saturday that hundreds of children were abducted two weeks ago by an armed group in South Sudan that is suspected to have ties with the country’s military.

UNICEF had previously said about 89 boys, some as young as 13, were forcibly recruited by an armed group near the town of Malakal, the capital of Upper Nile state, in mid-February. The agency said *the boys were taken while doing their exams, in a recruitment operation that appeared to target mostly adults in the area known as Wau Shilluk.

UNICEF said in a statement Saturday that it is now “confident that the armed group which took the children ... is aligned with” South Sudan’s military. It said the group is led by Johnson Oloni, a general who once fought against the government but joined the national army in 2013.'

Letter here. Excerpt (starts on pp. 6-7 of the .pdf file):

'3. OCR misstates applicable law on sexual assault and harassment on campus, encourages unfair treatment for some accused students, and gives colleges and universities a green light to trammel students’ First Amendment rights.

We hate to pile on here. But when members of the law faculties of both Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania—hardly bastions of conservative thought—express deep misgivings over the sexual harassment policies adopted under pressure from OCR by their respective institutions, it is clear that something is wrong.

OCR has pushed past the limits of its legal authority in addressing sexual assault and harassment on college and university campuses. This letter has already addressed the expansive and problematic definition of harassment found in OCR’s October 26, 2010 Dear Colleague letter on harassment and bullying, which discusses harassment/bullying in both K-12 public schools and on college and university campuses. In addition to that letter, OCR has released an important Dear Colleague Letter on Sexual Violence on April 4, 2011. In addition, it published documents titled “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence” (April 29, 2014) and “Know Your Rights: Title IX Requires Your School to Address Sexual Violence” (April 29, 2014.) OCR also published a highly burdensome settlement agreement with the University of Montana (“Montana Agreement”) that it labelled as a “blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country to protect students from sexual harassment and assault.” OCR has since sometimes backed away from its characterization of this document as a national model, although its signals to regulated universities about the Montana Agreement’s intended effect have been mixed.

Article here. Excerpt:

'There are now at least 17 states that have introduced shared parenting legislation. This is a sure sign that shared parenting is now a mainstream issue. The bills are quite different from each other.

YOU are the most effective person to get your state Legislators to act. If you push them, we will win.

Here are the states, and how you can get involved.'