Gillibrand, McCaskill Hope to Derail Greek-Backed Campus-Sexual-Assault Bill

Article here. Excerpt:

'Sens. Kirsten Gil­librand and Claire Mc­Caskill will sit down Thursday with the lead­ers of na­tion­al fra­tern­it­ies and sor­or­it­ies, hop­ing to earn al­lies and to kill le­gis­la­tion sponsored by the Greek groups to com­bat cam­pus sexu­al as­saults—a bill that, the sen­at­ors say, would ac­tu­ally be harm­ful to vic­tims.

The Safe Cam­pus Act, writ­ten by Re­pub­lic­an Reps. Matt Sal­mon and Pete Ses­sions, would re­quire vic­tims of sexu­al as­sault on col­lege cam­puses to re­port their at­tack­ers to the po­lice. It also al­lows schools to in­crease their stand­ar­ds of evid­en­ce for sexu­al-as­sault cases. The bill is backed by the na­tion’s ma­jor fra­tern­ity and sor­or­ity or­gan­iz­a­tions, who hired a lob­by­ing team, in­clud­ing former Sen­ate Ma­jor­ity Lead­er Trent Lott, to sup­port the bill just last month.

But the le­gis­la­tion is op­posed by hun­dreds of ad­vo­cacy groups for the vic­tims of sexu­al as­sault. On Monday, 220 of those groups co-signed a let­ter to mem­bers of Con­gress de­rid­ing the bill as well as sim­il­ar le­gis­la­tion. The groups ar­gue that re­quir­ing vic­tims to re­port sexu­al as­saults to the po­lice will re­duce the num­ber of as­saults that are re­por­ted.'