The Best Way to Address Campus Rape

Article here. Excerpt:

'What explains the nearly universal lack of confidence in these proceedings? Universities share some of the blame, but there’s another culprit too: the United States government. People often wonder why college administrators try to adjudicate these fiendishly difficult cases, rather than putting them in the hands of the criminal justice system.

The reason is that the Department of Education has very forcefully told schools to handle sexual grievances themselves and given them very detailed instructions about how to do so. A report last year from a White House task force on campus sexual assault underscored the importance to a university of following that advice. Even though the D.O.E.’s instructions are presented as recommendations rather than law, its Office for Civil Rights can put any school that fails to follow them on the list of colleges under investigation and even take away its federal funding.
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What should universities do to convince the world that they’re fit to deal with campus rape? First, they should band together and demand that the government rethink its guidelines, especially those that flout the key tenets of due process. Second, they should ask the Office for Civil Rights to clarify its notion of sexual misconduct, now left to each school to define. Is it rape if a man fails to get affirmative consent at every stage of a sexual interaction, or only if he ignores a spoken objection? If a man and a woman are equally drunk, should he be found guilty of assaulting her because she was too intoxicated to agree to sex, even though he himself may have been too drunk to know that? (Right now, at most schools, he would be considered guilty.)
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It is widely believed that the police are insensitive to rape victims. Universities, on the whole, have a great deal of clout in their communities; they also possess considerable intellectual resources. They could be helping policemen and prosecutors do a better job with sexual violence cases instead of squandering money and good will on their own all-too-easily second-guessed shadow justice systems.'