New federal rules issued on Monday aim to make campuses safer by requiring colleges to train students and employees on preventing sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking. The rules also include new categories for identifying hate crimes (gender identity and national origin) and specify that students can choose advisers, including lawyers, to accompany them in campus disciplinary proceedings.
"These regulatory changes provide new tools to improve campus safety," Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, told reporters on Friday.
One advocate called the new rules momentous. They represent "the most significant change in campus-sexual-assault policy in 20 years," said S. Daniel Carter, director of the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative of the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, a group representing survivors and victims of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.
The U.S. Department of Education published the rules in Monday's Federal Register. They interpret the Violence Against Women Act signed last year by President Obama and amending the campus-crime law known as the Clery Act. After the Education Department issued proposed rules, in June, that it drew from the consensus of an expert panel of negotiators, it considered public comments and made some minor changes, such as requiring colleges to disclose "unfounded" reports of sexual assault.
The final regulations come as colleges, under pressure from activists and government officials, are grappling with their legal responsibility to investigate and respond to students' reports of sexual violence. The Education Department is now investigating more than 80 colleges for possible violations of gender-equity law involving alleged sexual misconduct, and federal and state lawmakers have introduced legislation to improve colleges' response to the issue.
The rules will take effect in July 2015. Until then, colleges are expected to make a "good-faith effort" to comply, the department said.
The Chronicle spoke with advocates, experts, and higher-education officials about the impact of the new rules on colleges regarding sexual assault.
What are the main requirements of colleges?
Colleges are required to provide training to faculty and staff members as well as students. The training must clearly define terms such as "consent" and outline campus policies on sexual misconduct.
The goal is to improve transparency on how institutions handle students' reports, said Lisa Maatz, vice president for government relations at the American Association of University Women. The regulations, she said, "make it really clear that each school has to talk about each step of the disciplinary proceedings." That's important for students who report assaults as well as the accused, she said.
In addition to collecting a wider range of campus-crime statistics, colleges must publicly report the number of sexual assaults that the campus police and other law-enforcement officials have determined to be "unfounded." Previously, such incidents were excluded from campus-crime statistics.
The term comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which holds that crimes found to be "false and baseless" by law-enforcement officials should be excluded from official tallies of reported crimes, said Mr. Carter. But under the new regulations, those reports will be counted in a separate category. That does not mean, Mr. Carter cautioned, that cases in which an accused student is found not responsible belong in that category.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/In-Rules-on-Campus-Sexual/149521