Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of investigative reporting.
This Week: Sexual Assault on Campus, 2009
- Center for Public Integrity and NPR
The pendulum seems to be swinging toward the rights of the accused in campus sexual assault cases. As articles and books like “The Campus Rape Frenzy” by K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. portray defendants being railroaded, some accused male students have started taking their female accusers to court.
The landscape was far different less than a decade ago. Back then many prestigious news outlets produced stories warning of an epidemic of campus rape. Perhaps the most important and celebrated of them was the 2009 collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and NPR, “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice.” Its honors included a Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Justice and Human Rights Reporting and the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma.
The 105-page published report, which included extensive use of surveys and interviews, was based on a now widely challenged claim: “According to a report funded by the Department of Justice, roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates.”
What’s most striking is how this reporting about the injustices faced by alleged female victims echoes so much of the recent reporting about alleged male perpetrators. The report states:
Official data from the schools themselves doesn’t begin to reflect the scope of the problem. And student victims face a depressing litany of barriers that often either assure their silence or leave them feeling victimized a second time, according to a 12-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. …
Victims’ advocates say that these institutional barriers have become the norm at universities nationwide, and are a telling sign of schools’ priorities. By silencing victims and turning judicial hearings into something like kangaroo courts, colleges prioritize their own reputations over victims’ safety and support and turn their campuses into hostile environments for victims of sexual assault. The Center for Public Integrity’s study demonstrates how these trends affect real women: nearly fifty percent of the students we interviewed claimed that they unsuccessfully sought criminal charges, and instead had to seek justice in closed, school-run proceedings that led to either light penalties or no punishment at all for their alleged assailants. Nearly a third said that administrators discouraged them from pursuing rape complaints. Eleven students reported experiencing extreme confidentiality edicts, sometimes followed by threats of punishment if they were to disclose any information about their case. ...
The probe reveals that students found “responsible” for alleged sexual assaults on campuses often face little or no punishment, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down. Many times, victims drop out of school, while students found culpable go on to graduate.
