A STAGGERING 95 PERCENT OF sexual assault cases on college campuses go unreported, according to findings of a nine-month investigation by The Center for Public Integrity. Confidential mediation, which is the usual course of action taken by university officials in lieu of judicial action, often leaves victims feeling further victimized as it results in a lack of accountability and punishment for offenders, notes report author Kristin Lombardi. University officials who spoke with Lombardi maintained that a public judicial process is more painful for victims, but her research shows only two of the 33 students interviewed felt that way. “Ultimately, a confidential process ends up protecting the school and the offender, not the victim,” Lombardi says.
This report highlights the need for preventative measures to be taken on campuses. Lombardi shows the best interest of the victim is actually “opening up the judicial process so it becomes transparent, assigning advocates to help victims through the process, and enforcing harsher penalties for those found guilty.” The need for judicial process reform is also a key point of the report, as it states the majority of victims interviewed who went through their institution’s judicial or confidential mediation processes, rather than through outside judicial processes, ultimately transferred out of their universities.
The U.S. Department of Justice is a key resource for institutions in need of funding to make these often expensive processes possible. Nine universities in Connecticut have joined to form the Connecticut Campus Coalition to End Violence Against Women (CCCEV) receiving $500,000 for new prevention programs. Other grants included $643,000 for a Yale/Connecticut College partnership and $400,000 for Drexel University (Pa.), University of Pennsylvania, and the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Last year, 21 grants amounting to $6.4 million were distributed through the Campus Grant Program under the Violence Against Women Prevention Act to both private and public universities.
Joe Musante, assistant director of public affairs at Southern Connecticut State University, the lead institution in the Connecticut partnership, explains that administrators, faculty, and students from the nine schools have come together to “brainstorm, share ideas, and discuss how different methods could work to form an overall best practice program.”
The Coalition aims to increase awareness about violence, hold seminars on prevention practices, and provide counseling for victims. Musante says funding “is allocated for the general good. There might be a particularly strong program at one school that all the others will participate in.”
For more information on the sexual assault on campus investigation—which included survey responses from 152 campus crisis services programs and clinics, as well as interviews with 50 current and former college students who say they were raped or sexually assaulted, interviews with students accused of sexual assault, and dozens of student affairs administrators, judicial hearing officers, victim advocates, sexual assault scholars, and lawyers—see www.publicintegrity.org/investigations?/campus_assault. —KeriLee Horan
Between the Lines
The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
By Curtis J. Bonk; 2009,
Jossey-Bass; 468 pp.; $29.95
WE HAVE ALL HEARD THAT technology “will change education as we know it.” But many “next big things” introduced in recent years have failed to live up to that potential. Curtis Bonk argues that what has been missing is convergence. He lists 10 technology trends in a model called WE-ALL-LEARN:
• Web searching in the world of e-books
• E-learning and blended learning
• Availability of open source and free software
• Leveraged resources and OpenCourseWare
• Learning object repositories and portals
• Learner participation in open information communities
