I have convinced my partner that our ambulance is haunted. She has now left the ambulance because she is scared.
We are currently running a call and she is low key freaking out because she has to stay in the ambulance and can’t escape the ‘ghost’ in the ambulance.
The Misleading Claim: Betsy DeVos is rolling back protections for survivors of sexual assault!
The Reality: DeVos rolled back regulations that infringed on due process and increased chances of students being unjustly convicted before campus tribunals.
Before going further, it should be emphasized unequivocally – rape is an abhorrent and unspeakable crime and deserves swift and appropriate justice. One rape is one too many.
Let’s start from the beginning. In 2011, the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter applying Title IX, which among other things instructed colleges to abide by the following: [a]
1) Colleges must abide by the lowest standard of evidence – the “preponderance of evidence.” The standard of “clear and convincing” evidence had been the norm for colleges, but the 2011 letter overrode that. The differences between the two are: 1) preponderance of evidence states that “it is more likely than not” that the incident happened. Clear and convincing states “it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the incident happened.”
2) Universities were required to allow accusers to appeal not-guilty findings, a form of double jeopardy.
3) Schools were required to accelerate their adjudications, with a 60-day limit recommended. And, perhaps most important, OCR strongly discouraged cross-examination of accusers, given the procedures that most universities employed.
The letter proved to be highly controversial, not because its critics were interested in trying to protect a criminal, but because of the infringements of due process. In 2016, a group of 21 professors from Harvard, Stanford, New York, and several other institutions, wrote that the government’s Title IX directive unlawfully expanded how colleges must define and respond to sexual harassment. Some highlights from this letter:
1) “In 2011 OCR issued a Dear Colleague Letter on campus sexual assault, which the OCR considers to be a form of sexual harassment. This 2011 DCL curtailed a number of due process protections for students accused of sexual assault. Among other changes, the 2011 DCL mandated that college tribunals lower their standard of proof to preponderance, even though the Supreme Court has recognized that a low standard of proof is inappropriate in situations involving damage to one’s reputation.”
2) Twenty-eight Harvard Law professors protested that OCR’s directives “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.”
3) Members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted OCR’s “disturbing pattern of disregard for the rule of law” in addressing campus sexual violence and observed that “nowhere in the text of Title IX, which has been used to justify the school’s need to adjudicate outside the justice system, or in earlier Office for Civil Rights regulations does it state such a low burden be used.”
4) Cornell University professor Cynthia Bowman reported “general agreement among faculty at the Law School that the procedures being proposed are Orwellian.”
5) Even two academic associations, the American Association of University Professors and the National Association of Scholars warned that the Title IX directive was overreach. [c]
From this, the evidence is clear that the 2011 Title IX letter is a horrible miscarriage of justice. Some however, may try to push these findings aside by claiming that “1 in 5 women are victims of rape.”
The problem is that these statistics are misleading, and statistics from more reliable and comprehensive sources show the rate of rape is much lower. (Again, not to downplay the abhorrent nature of such.) However, EVEN IF we accepted that 1 in 5 women are raped, it is still no excuse for denying the suspect due process. Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi colonel largely responsible for the Holocaust, was taken back to Israel, and given a fair trial. He was found guilty, and rightfully executed for his crimes against humanity, but the point is, Israeli authorities did not use the heinous nature of his crimes as an excuse to deny him a fair trial.
But back to the statistics. The “1 in 5 women will be raped” statistic comes from a 2007 survey commissioned by the Department of Justice. This survey found that 20% of women reported experiencing sexual assault since entering college. However, response rates at both universities were low, encountering problems such as self-selection bias, a non-representative sample of students, and loose operational definitions of what constituted sexual assault. Furthermore, two of the study’s authors even admitted that the “1 in 5” statistic could not be used as representative of colleges nationwide, stating:
“As two of the researchers who conducted the Campus Sexual Assault Study from which this number was derived, we feel we need to set the record straight. Although we used the best methodology available to us at the time, there are caveats that make it inappropriate to use the 1-in-5 number in the way it’s being used today, as a baseline or the only statistic when discussing our country’s problem with rape and sexual assault on campus.
First and foremost, the 1-in-5 statistic is not a nationally representative estimate of the prevalence of sexual assault, and we have never presented it as being representative of anything other than the population of senior undergraduate women at the two universities where data were collected—two large public universities, one in the South and one in the Midwest.
Second, the 1-in-5 statistic includes victims of both rape and other forms of sexual assault, such as forced kissing or unwanted groping of sexual body parts—acts that can legally constitute sexual battery and are crimes. To limit the statistic to include rape only, meaning unwanted sexual penetration, the prevalence for senior undergraduate women drops to 14.3%, or 1 in 7 (again, limited to the two universities we studied).”[c]
To be fair, they also argue that assault rates are higher than what official statistics show, but they did not offer any evidence to support that assertion. The Bureau of Justice estimates the actual rate of sexual assaults on college campuses to be much lower – 6.1 per 100,000. [d]
At this point, some may try to argue “But students who get accused of rape falsely isn’t a big deal. False rape reports are only about 2-8% of reported sexual assaults.” While these statistics are questionable (more on that in a minute), let’s assume for a minute they’re right. The vast majority of death penalty convictions are accurate as well, per one study showing only 1.6% of death sentences being officially overturned due to exoneration between 1973 and 2004. However, the stat could be expanded to as high as 4.1%, the study argues. [e] If a 4.1% false positive rate is enough cause for legal concern (I’d argue even 1.6% is too high), then shouldn’t a theoretical 8% be treated just as seriously when a student’s reputation is on the line and a false conviction could scar them for life?
Furthermore, these stats are not the be-all-end-all of false rape reports. The 2% figure comes from a feminist author, who quoted something a judge stated at a public meeting. There are also outliers – one such study found a 40% rate of false rape reports. To be fair, while this latter study is somewhat better, it also has its flaws; such as only reviewing one city, and does not seem to account for the possibility that a rape victim could have withdrawn the complaint due to not wanting to recount the trauma of the incident, not because the complaint was false. [g] Reason Magazine further notes “Indeed, this is a serious problem with all of the studies—a reported rape is only considered false if the police can actually prove it false, usually because the victim recanted her statement or a witness other than the perpetrator contradicted the account. There could be more false rape reports than we think, because the police are not able to definitively prove the victim lied; or there could be even fewer, because the police erroneously classified some unproven rapes as false.” [f]
Writing for Bloomberg, Megan McArdle puts it this way:
“Here’s the real answer: We don’t know. Anyone who insists that we do know should be corrected or ignored.
The number of false accusations is what statisticians call a “dark number” – that is, there is a true number, but it is unknown, and perhaps unknowable.“ [g]
In summary, the case against DeVos rescinding the 2011 letter is factually flawed. Due process must be protected, even for college students accused of rape, a theme most legal experts agree with.
So many fathers seem to think that raising a child just means earning money to pay for their upkeep, when it’s actually meant to be so much more than that. They are emotionally absent in their children’s lives and upbringing, leave the mother to do all the actual parenting, and then wonder why their grown children are so distant and disconnected from them as adults. Even though he is physically present, it’s almost like having no dad at all because he is so uninvolved with his kids.
Obscure Fandoms 