When College Sexual Assault Panels Fall Short, And When They Help

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2014-05-02 02:26

Article here. Excerpt:

'"There is a level of absurdity in making universities handle serious sexual violence cases," Lisak says. "We wouldn't ask universities, of course, to handle a homicide. We don't even ask them to handle serious aggravated assaults."
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In many ways, colleges have less power than law enforcement. They can't subpoena evidence or witnesses, for example.

In other ways, colleges have a lot more leeway. For example, while prosecutors routinely drop criminal cases that would be hard to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt," campuses have a lower bar. They need only a "preponderance of the evidence," which means that an offense was more likely than not to have occurred.

Also, in the courts, the onus is on the accuser to prove a crime, but campuses can put the burden on the accused to prove they actually had sexual consent.'

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... they punt to someone else. This is what has happened here. Law enforcement/the judicial system doesn't want to find itself on the down side of some kind of controversial decision about whether or not an accusation of sexual assault on a campus is supportable, so they punt it to the college's administration. They, in turn, to avoid being accused of negligence or wickedness or of course, the biggest sin, not being sympathetic with campus feminists/the accuser/both, simply throw any male accused of anything under the nearest bus and wash their hands of the whole thing.

Basically, the courts are too cowardly to take on actual cases of accusations of sexual assault on college campuses. So they have pusillanimously abrogated their critical, core-mission duty of dealing with actual criminality (at least when it's involving alleged sexual assault on a college campus) to even more pusillanimous college administrators who have less of a backbone than the bench appears to. And they do the first thing craven weasels do when faced with a challenge: tuck tail and head for the hills. Such comes in the form of kicking any male student out of school accused of any criminal act against a female, no evidence needed aside from an accusation.

"Pusillanimous". A word that needs to be used more often these days, if for no other reason than the shoe doth fit.

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2014-05-02 02:50