‘I Want to Get This Right’: Scenes From a Conference on Campus Sex Assault

The case was familiar to everyone in the room: Brock Turner, a former Stanford University swimmer, was found guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman earlier this year. A projected PowerPoint slide highlighted some of a judge’s reasons for sentencing Mr. Turner to just six months in jail for committing three felonies — a decision that sparked a national uproar.

Alcohol shouldn’t be an excuse for Mr. Turner’s behavior, the judge explained in the statement, but it was a factor. That affected his sentencing decision.

“Is everyone equally disturbed by this?” asked Michael L. Milnor, a former criminal investigator who is now the chief of police in Altavista, Va. Mr. Milnor, who was leading a workshop on investigative strategies for sexual-assault cases, scanned the group sitting before him: about 50 officials in higher education and law enforcement, as well as representatives from rape-prevention groups. Heads were nodding in agreement.

Figuring out the role of alcohol, he told the audience, is a hurdle they would have to overcome when conducting campus sexual-violence investigations.

Mr. Milnor’s session was part of the National Center for Campus Public Safety’s first conference, held here all last week at George Washington University, at which the center unveiled a new curriculum for college officials and police officers focused on conducting “trauma informed” sexual-assault investigations.

The center was established in 2013 through a funding agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and Margolis Healy, a campus-safety consulting firm. In an April 2014 report, the White House’s sexual-assault task force asked the center to develop the curriculum by September of that year.

Since then, the center has solicited feedback from federal agencies — including the Office for Civil Rights, which has waged a strong campaign against campus sexual assault — and run several pilot offerings of the curriculum, tweaking its content and design based on responses from campus officials and others.

‘A More Holistic Approach’

Last week’s conference didn’t just give Title IX officers and other administrators their first chance to engage with the new curriculum and with experts on sexual-assault investigations. It also offered them an opportunity to connect with others who investigate and try to prevent sexual assault, compare notes, and ask questions.

Nearly 100 people attended, and 33 colleges — including four-year public and private ones, religious colleges, and community colleges — were represented.

The new curriculum isn’t about checking a compliance box for Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, or for the Clery Act, the federal campus-safety law, said Andrea Young, the national center’s program and training manager. It’s designed to teach best practices with the goal of helping students — and to stress the importance of bringing a range of perspectives to the table.

“We didn’t just want to have a Title IX investigator up there telling us how to do an investigation,” Ms. Young said. “We wanted to take a more holistic approach.” She said the curriculum will be offered at a number of campuses over the next year; two have been confirmed as hosts for the fall.

Given the intensity of trauma-based work, it’s easy for administrators and others who run sexual-assault investigations to get burned out, said Steven J. Healy, a managing partner and co-founder of Margolis Healy. That’s why the curriculum includes “self care” breaks each day, during which participants can stretch, relax, and jot down reflections.

Kati Lake, director of the recently founded campus-services division at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, said she had come to the conference to learn about sharing information when campus and criminal investigations are taking place at the same time.

Ms. Lake said she was also interested to hear whether college officials felt they had the training and resources to handle sexual-violence cases. “Do they feel prepared,” she asked, “for the emotional, spiritual, physical reaction of a victim coming forward?”

Tiffany Cox, the Title IX coordinator and director of equity and inclusion at Tennessee State University, said her chief question coming into the conference centered on that issue exactly: How could she make sure that she wasn’t revictimizing students who reported sexual assaults?

Interview Strategies

“What’s the most likely defense?” Carrie Hull, a detective with the police department in Ashland, Ore., posed that question to the audience near the beginning of a morning session on “interviewing the respondent” — the person accused of sexual misconduct.

She was explaining how easy it is to have preconceived notions of how such an interview will unfold. Murmurs began throughout the room. “Consent!” Ms. Hull said. “Let’s acknowledge it: You’re walking into the room thinking you have some idea of what they’re going to say.”

Ms. Hull and one of her three co-teachers, Chantelle Cleary, the Title IX coordinator at SUNY’s Albany campus, ran down a list of interview strategies: Use constructions like “Help me understand. …" Ask about the student’s background — where they’re from, what they do outside of class, and where they spend time on the campus. Ask about witnesses. Seek evidence, like text messages and social-media accounts.

“These,” Ms. Hull said, waving her smartphone, “are little miracles for corroboration.”

It’s crucial to allow students to answer questions in their own words, Ms. Hull said. Even if there’s a long pause, she said, don’t jump in with any prompts. And if a student balks at answering, try not to slip into interrogation mode, Ms. Cleary said.

If an alleged victim didn’t answer a question, she pointed out, you wouldn’t become visibly frustrated. “We shouldn’t be doing that to a respondent.” A better approach, she said, might be to emphasize that “I want to get this right” before rephrasing the question.

Consent’s ‘Gray Area’

After a lunch break, the attendees returned for the week’s 11th session: investigative strategies. The presentation, led primarily by Mr. Milnor, grappled with some of the thorniest questions in the area of campus rape.

“At what point does intoxication become incapacitation?” Mr. Milnor asked the group. And at what point does intoxication become an excuse for the accused? Can it be an excuse? One audience member pointed out how difficult it can be to determine incapacitation: Campus officials might define it one way while many students see it differently.

The discussion soon turned to the issue of consent, which might seem like a yes-or-no concept, Mr. Milnor said, strolling around the room. “Is there ever a gray area on consent?” An audience member piped up almost immediately: Yes, because consent to one thing doesn’t mean consent to everything. So, Mr. Milnor continued, how do you handle that in an investigation?

Then he introduced another question: There can’t be consent when there’s force involved, but “what does force look like?” For instance, he said, if the case involves a professor and a student, does the professor’s influence over that student — by virtue of his or her position — qualify as a type of force?

Later on, the group was shown a brief clip from NBC’s Today on a sexual-assault case. A post on the accused man’s Facebook page detailed a “sexual-activity calorie guide.” The guide listed “removing her clothes with her consent” as 12 calories, while doing so without consent was more than 2,000.

Is that enough evidence to prove that the man engaged in sex that wasn’t consensual? Mr. Milnor asked. Probably not by itself, one audience member suggested, but the fact that someone even thinks sex can happen without consent is a sign that the person might have committed rape.

“Bingo,” Mr. Milnor said.

At times, the three instructors had to work to prompt audience responses. But once the session turned to case studies, the participants intently discussed in small groups how they would investigate particular situations.

Representatives from each group then presented briefly to the room. Their plans for tackling each case were sophisticated, and reflected that many of the participants already had a lot of experience carrying out thoughtful, nuanced campus sexual-assault investigations.

But given the volume of questions at each session on Wednesday, it was clear that everyone still had a lot to learn.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.