Why the Campus Rape Crisis Confounds Colleges

http://www.thenation.com/article/180114/why-campus-rape-crisis-confounds-colleges

The dean of student life acted as the investigator in the case. When Logan arrived at her office to give a statement, the dean’s recorder was broken. Instead, she took notes. Later, she produced a document that was missing important information.

In May 2011, there was a hearing with a panel made up of faculty and administrators. Logan’s alleged assailant appeared via Skype. “One of the worst parts of the hearing was that each party was allowed to ask the other questions, and those questions would be reviewed or filtered through the hearing board,” Logan says. So her alleged rapist would direct questions to her, and she would wait as the board decided whether they were relevant and she had to answer them. “It was a really revictimizing experience,” she says.

At one point, after a break, she returned to the room to hear the members of the panel chatting amiably with her accused attacker about his finals and the weather in the country where he was studying. “How do you come into a room where everyone is laughing with your rapist?” she says.

There was surprisingly little disagreement between the two about the facts of the case, only about what those facts meant. The young man argued that she’d been extremely drunk during both encounters, Logan says, as if that somehow exonerated rather than indicted him. “He was using the policy violation as an excuse for his policy violation.”

In the end, he was found responsible and expelled. Then he appealed, arguing, in part, that since he’d been drinking too, technically she was an assailant as well. Logan says that Occidental’s lawyer began pressuring her to reach a private settlement with the man’s family, but she refused and the appeal went forward. Again, the young man lost. He would be kept off campus for good. It was the fullest victory a victim can expect in a case like this, and yet Logan felt more devastated than vindicated. “The adjudication board itself was one of the worst things I had to experience outside of the actual assault, and in some ways it was worse,” she says.