"A dispute between students."
Those words, said Olivia A. Ortiz, were used by campus administrators in 2012 to describe her allegations of abusive behavior, including several sexual assaults, by her then-boyfriend.
It was the University of Chicago senior's first relationship, and she said she didn’t know at first that the behavior constituted dating violence.
Ms. Ortiz, who filed a Title IX complaint against the university in 2013 for what she said was the mishandling of her sexual-assault case, said colleges aren’t talking enough about the nuances of dating violence. Students, she said, "don’t want to believe that someone so close to us can do that," while administrators "don’t want to believe that these students at prestigious universities would do that."
She called that phenomenon a "double disbelief."
The issue is becoming more significant for colleges thanks to federal regulations that took full effect this month. The new rules require institutions to include incidents of dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking in the crime reports that are mandated by the campus-safety law known as the Clery Act. The regulations interpreted the Violence Against Women Act, which was renewed by Congress in 2013, and also imposed new requirements for training and prevention, among other changes.
The Education Department made the rules final last October, and July 1marked the deadline for colleges to meet the standards or risk penalty, though officials told colleges a year ago they needed to make a "good-faith effort" to comply right away.
Campus dating violence has received much less public attention than the tremendous scrutiny colleges have faced over their handling of sexual-assault cases. There is also less concrete data about how prevalent dating violence is. While some of the educational needs and resources are similar for both issues, administrators can’t take sexual-assault policies and "blanket" them over dating violence, said Alison G. Kiss, executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus.
Intimate-partner abuse poses its own questions for colleges. For instance, how should campuses enforce no-contact orders? How can investigators collect evidence when the abusive partner’s behavior is a long-term problem but can be sudden or sporadic?
Before the Clery changes, colleges were already required under Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, to conduct investigations into reports of dating violence and to provide accommodations for students in abusive relationships. The Clery provisions should help expand colleges’ focus from sexual violence to dating violence and, more broadly, gender-based violence, said Tara N. Richards, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Baltimore who researches intimate-partner abuse.
Ms. Kiss said some institutions have had programs in place for years to support victims of dating violence and are now making their practices more consistent. For other campuses, it’s new territory.
"A lot of schools simply aren’t educating students that dating violence is a violation of school policy," said Dana Bolger, co-director of Know Your IX, a national student group that fights for stricter enforcement of Title IX.
Jeremy Manier, a spokesman for the University of Chicago, wrote in an email that the university had made "substantial" changes this year in its sexual-misconduct policy. Last year, he said, the university improved its disciplinary process and appointed a new associate dean of students to investigate cases that involve allegations of sexual assault, dating violence, and other conduct violations. But Ms. Ortiz said she remained skeptical about Chicago administrators’ commitment to seeking justice for victims and to dealing with dating violence as a specialized issue.
A Population at Risk
One of the most commonly cited statistics on sexual assault indicates that about one in five women is sexually assaulted in college, although that study was not designed to yield a national figure. On dating violence, the picture is even less clear, and the incidents also tend to be underreported.
One national survey, from 2007, found that women in the 16-to-24 age group were the population most at risk for intimate-partner violence.
In a 2011 poll on relationship abuse, which surveyed 508 men and women in college, 43 percent of the women reported having experienced physical, sexual, or controlling abuse from a partner, or having been harassed through technology.
The Clery requirements could help paint a more detailed picture of campus dating violence within a few years, said Lisa Maatz, a policy adviser for the American Association of University Women. Still, there are other limitations to the data.
Boise State University, in Idaho, has more than 22,000 students, and the institution included dating-violence crimes on its 2014 security report. But it listed just one incident of dating violence for 2011 and no incidents for 2012 or 2013.
Part of the reason: Most of Boise State’s students live off campus, said Annie N. Kerrick, the university’s Title IX coordinator.
Ms. Kerrick said she expects to see an uptick in the number of dating-violence and stalking reports made to campus administrators this year, once the institution ramps up its relationship-violence education.
She has noticed wide discrepancies among colleges on how quickly and thoroughly they adopted the Clery standards on dating violence, depending on the backgrounds of those institutions' Title IX coordinators or Clery compliance officials and how much support their respective colleges gave them. Those variations could also skew the data.
"Some people are struggling," she said, "while some people from other institutions have been doing it for years."
Similar Problems, Separate Solutions
Dating violence and sexual assault intersect in many ways, and some of the resources colleges need to provide are similar, experts say.
For instance, a student victim of either crime is probably going to tell a fellow student. That student might not know how to respond. So campuses need to emphasize bystander education, said Ruth M. Glenn, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
But sexual assault and dating violence call for separate campus solutions, other experts note. One key difference is that dating violence doesn’t always correlate with sexual violence. The behavior might involve emotional or physical harm.
Students might be afraid to come forward because they don’t want their significant other to be punished or expelled. It might be emotionally difficult for students to isolate themselves from an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend, even if law enforcement has imposed a no-contact order.
Victims of dating violence also might need specific accommodations from their colleges, such as the ability to move quickly to a new dormitory or permission to miss class to obtain a no-contact order and free transportation to the courthouse, Ms. Bolger, of Know Your IX, said.
Dating violence also tends to involve a continuing series of events, and the behavior might come in cycles, whereas sexual assault is more often an isolated incident.
For those reasons, the investigative process that campuses use when a sexual assault is reported might not work for a relationship-violence allegation, Ms. Kiss, of the Clery Center, said. And the sanctions for students who are found responsible for sexual assault, which might involve writing a letter to the victim as an apology, are often not appropriate for abusive intimate partners, she said.
Laila Leigh, legal-services manager for Break the Cycle, a nonprofit group that advocates for healthy relationships, said she had noticed that smaller colleges and universities with fewer resources can have trouble applying their procedures to dating-violence cases. "They’re not sure how it’s different," she said.
Collaborating with local domestic-violence centers, Ms. Maatz said, is one step colleges can take to better support victims. Those agencies, she said, have long been eager for colleges to come to them.
Institutions need to make sure students know the signs of dating abuse, said Katie H. Hood, chief executive officer of the One Love Foundation, created in memory of the University of Virginia student Yeardley Love after she was beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend in 2010. Ms. Hood said the foundation is offering a workshop on relationship abuse that she hopes will reach at least 250 campuses in the coming months.
The bottom line, Ms. Bolger said, is that colleges need to take dating violence just as seriously as they take sexual assault.
"No one teaches you," she said, "that the most dangerous situation might be being in your dorm room with your partner, with someone you love and trust."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Dating-Violence-Poses-Unique/231735