The United States Air Force Academy has ordered a probe of its athletics department after a report in The Colorado Springs Gazette detailed numerous violations of academy rules, including several instances of sexual assault.
At a 2011 party, according to the newspaper, players offered women a "girls-only" drink laced with a date rape drug, and allegedly committed gang rape later that night. An investigation into that party led to the disenrollment and prosecution of several cadets, Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson, the academy's superintendent said in a statement last week.
It's the second high-profile sexual assault scandal at the academy in a decade. A 2003 investigation -- prompted by an anonymous email sent to lawmakers that described the academy's alleged apathy toward a growing rape problem -- found that 20 percent of women enrolled at the academy said they had been sexually assaulted. A 2004 survey that included responses from every woman at the Air Force, Navy, and Army academies found that 302 women (about 10 percent) said they had been raped. Only 54 cases of sexual assault were officially reported the entire decade.
But the the Air Force Academy is not named on the Department of Education's quickly growing list of colleges under investigation for mishandling cases of sexual assault. And those 54 reported cases can't be found in Clery Act statistics, either. That's because the five federal service academies -- the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, the Merchant Marine Academy, the Naval Academy, and the Military Academy in West Point -- are exempt from both Title IX and the Clery Act.
As both laws are increasingly used as the federal government's weapons of choice in combating campus sexual assaults, women's groups and victim advocates are questioning why the military academies continue to be exempt.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/12/forty-years-after-first-female-cadets-service-academies-still-exempt-title-ix