In February, writing on her blog, Tucker Reed identified a classmate at the University of Southern California as the man who raped her. Ms. Reed, then a junior, included his name, three photos of him, and a detailed account of their troubled relationship. The post went viral.
Within two weeks, Ms. Reed’s apartment became a haven for fellow students who also identified as survivors of rape. They baked cookies, killed zombies on Xbox, and began writing letters to the university, expressing their dissatisfaction with how it had treated them. Before long they had formed a group, the Student Coalition Against Rape, or SCAR.
As the Southern California students were finding one another, so were survivors across the country. Throughout the spring, they exchanged a hail of Facebook messages and tweets, swapping stories, giving advice, and, before long, mobilizing.
Bolstered by social media and a sense of injustice, hundreds of students and activists nationwide have formed a movement to force colleges to change how they handle reports of rape. The long-simmering issue has reached a boil: Organizers, who say they are angry with their colleges for turning a blind eye to sexual violence and for failing to help prevent it, are now filing federal complaints against their colleges. The government, already having pushed institutions to do more on sexual assault, is taking a heightened interest, too.
The movement has zeroed in on Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Meant to prohibit sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds, the law requires colleges to investigate and resolve reports of sexual misconduct, including assault, whether or not the police are called in. That mandate has proven to be a challenge for many colleges, whose disciplinary processes are often better suited for infractions like plagiarism or cheating than interpersonal violence.
In their complaints to federal authorities, students and alumni have faulted campus officials for missteps at nearly every juncture: Telling students who report rape to take time off until their assailants graduate. Treating judicial cases like educational exercises. Slapping perpetrators with penalties less severe than those for stealing a laptop.
With every news conference, rally, petition, and testimonial, activists’ message has grown louder. Sexual assault doesn’t have to be an inevitable part of campus life, they say. Don’t brush off our experiences as dates gone wrong, or drunken naïveté. Title IX compels you to take us seriously.
The emergence of this movement now, scholars and observers say, has several possible causes. It could come from a persistent sense among college women that their institutions are neglectful of their safety. Rape survivors may feel more comfortable than previous generations in talking openly about their experiences. And activists’ ease with technology and social media has enabled rapid collaboration.
This wave of action builds on decades of campus activism against sexual violence. Students have long held Take Back the Night marches, walking en masse in the dark. They have pressed for women’s centers, and to raise awareness they have displayed colorful T-shirts—red, pink, and orange for survivors of sexual assault—through the Clothesline Project.
Today’s campus organizers, savvy and strategic-minded, are appealing to allies on Twitter, raising funds, and presenting policy recommendations to officials at the Education Department and White House. This month they created a Web site, Know Your IX, aimed at helping students file federal complaints and put pressure on their campus leaders.
The activists have found an audience in Washington. In 2011, after vowing to step up its enforcement of antidiscrimination law, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights provided guidance on policies and processes that colleges should have in place to protect the rights of alleged victims. For starters, the agency said, colleges must provide “prompt and equitable” resolutions of complaints, and have at least one employee whose job is to carry out the college’s Title IX responsibilities. This year Congress passed the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, which requires colleges to offer programs for prevention.
For their part, colleges have been re-examining their policies, often with consultants, trying to balance campus safety and support to victims with due-process rights for accused students. Administrators must conduct thorough, fair investigations—still a challenge even for the criminal-justice system—while designing effective prevention for the broader student body.
It’s up to colleges, activists say, to ease if not eliminate this persistent and deeply rooted societal problem on their campuses. And the government must keep colleges focused on it.
The movement has drawn much of its strength from cross-campus collaborations. To help the cause at Southern California, a professor at nearby Occidental College, where students had already filed a federal complaint, showed Ms. Reed a template to help her craft her own claim. In more than 100 pages of allegations against her university, Ms. Reed included the results of a survey she had conducted to gauge students’ familiarity with campus policies. As she prepared to file her complaint, Ms. Reed stayed up till 3 a.m. with the professor, who coached her.
That day, in late May, students at Dartmouth College, Swarthmore College, and the University of California at Berkeley also filed federal complaints, as had students at the University of North Carolina and Occidental. By July, the Education Department was investigating nearly two dozen colleges’ responses to sexual misconduct.
Colleges shouldn’t be surprised by the growing unrest or the degree to which organizers are plotting their next moves, says Ms. Reed, who is facing a defamation lawsuit from the man she labeled a rapist. She faults her university for responding slowly and not seriously enough in her case.
“They must have thought that because rape victims are so ashamed of themselves,” she says, “none of us would talk to each other and compare notes about how we were treated, and would never go public.”
Days before dozens of activists gathered in Washington for a rally last month, Twitter was abuzz with anticipation.
“One week from today, we’ll be delivering this petition to call on the Ed Dept to enforce #TitleIX. Please sign and RT!” typed Alexandra Brodsky, a law student at Yale University, who had helped organize the event. As it drew near, she exhorted her fellow activists to pick up the pace. “Over 90K! Can we get to 100,000 signatures by the end of the night?”
On a blazing-hot Monday, the activists hauled boxes of the 112,000 signed petitions to the Education Department’s headquarters. In college T-shirts—Carleton, George Washington, Maryland, Penn, Tufts—the students rallied for stricter federal oversight.
They hugged and called out greetings, some recognizing one another from Facebook pictures. After so many late-night chats, many of the students were meeting in person for the first time.
Among 60 or so demonstrators was Andrea Pino, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In January she had joined two classmates and a recent alumna to file a complaint alleging that the university had failed to protect their rights as survivors of sexual assault. The same day, she got an ankle tattoo of the Roman numeral IX.
Before long, the North Carolina group had connected with Ms. Brodsky and students who had mobilized at Amherst College. By March they had formed the IX Network, which now includes about 700 members, from 50 or so colleges, all part of a private Facebook group. Ms. Pino’s days have a new rhythm: interviews with reporters and calls from the Education Department.
“To think that this has become something so large so quickly is incredibly inspiring,” she says. When she was assaulted, she says, she felt very alone. Other survivors she knew dropped out or transferred. The IX Network, she says, provides solidarity and a platform. “It really gives us the energy to continue forward and to continue demanding action.”
One tactic is the petition, which is on Change.org. “When we have reported violence to campus officials,” it says, “we have been shamed, silenced, and ignored.”
The petition demands that the federal government levy sanctions, including fines, against colleges that fall short, and publicly declare them noncompliant. (Title IX’s current penalty for noncompliant colleges is a loss of their federal funds, but it is generally not imposed.) In negotiating settlements, it says, complainants should be at the table.
After the rally, in a meeting with more than a dozen officials from the Education Department, five organizers presented detailed demands. They want the agency to conduct random compliance reviews of colleges, and to act more quickly, resolving complaint-driven investigations within a semester.
In a written statement to The Chronicle, the department says that it has initiated a “record number” of proactive investigations, and that agreements with colleges have included “robust, far-reaching remedies.”
The activists maintain that those resolutions lack teeth. “All carrot and no stick,” the petition says.
Ms. Brodsky, the law student, is a leader of the campaign. After surviving an attempted rape during her freshman year, also at Yale, she joined 15 classmates and alumni in filing a Title IX complaint, in 2011. The Education Department reached an agreement with the university last year, praising its progress, and continues to monitor the situation there.
Ms. Brodsky spoke over a megaphone at the rally. “Not enough has changed at Yale,” she told the crowd. “Until the department is willing to enforce these laws, we’re left with little more than empty promises.”
She appealed to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan by name: “We need you to have our backs.”
More students are making similar pleas. On the IX Network’s Facebook page, they request and offer help in crafting federal complaints. And through the new Know Your IX campaign, the network is trying to broaden its reach. Its goal is to educate students across the country on their rights and equip them to file complaints—and possibly lawsuits—if they believe those rights have been violated.
“Is your school mistreating survivors?” asks the Web site, which includes photos and quotations from students who have filed Title IX complaints against their colleges. “Does it not do enough to prevent assault and harassment? Do you want to improve your administration and campus? Welcome to the movement against campus sexual violence.”
The leaders of this growing movement are exhilarated and drained by its momentum. (Know Your IX’s Web site includes resources for “dealing with activist burnout.”) Organizing around this issue is particularly exhausting, they say, because it is highly personal. Testimonies of trauma are powerful, and the activists know that. The details of their assaults and campus reports have become instruments of their advocacy.
“You tell the story enough times,” Ms. Brodsky says, “and it doesn’t quite belong to you anymore.” Speaking out can be helpful, but also disorienting, she says. “There’s been this doubling of my person, where what was once my very private story has become this other, very public person.”
The organizers were taken aback this spring when Law & Order: Special Victims Unit aired an episode titled “Girl Dishonored,” with a plot line that seemed to be a mash-up of several real cases. It concluded with students’ holding up signs displaying dismissive comments made to them after assaults—"Are you sure it was rape?” “Why would he rape you?"—an echo of a demonstration that had actually been held at Amherst.
For Dana Bolger, a self-identified rape survivor at Amherst who organized the sign-holding event there, the learning curve has been steep and profound. After she was assaulted, as a sophomore, she left the campus for a semester at a dean’s urging. She didn’t know much about Title IX, she says now, just “that it had something to do with women’s athletics.”
She learned about the law from a friend who knew a lawyer at the Victim Rights Law Center, in Boston. When she returned to the campus, in the spring of 2012, she joined a group for rape survivors. That fall, after a former student published a harrowing account of being assaulted by a classmate and disregarded by campus officials, the organizing picked up speed.
Learning about students’ experiences years ago has driven home the depth of the problem, Ms. Bolger says. An account from the 1990s was particularly jarring: A student had gone to her dean to say that her assailant, a classmate, continued to harass her. He would bang on her door every night; she would hide in the corner and hope he didn’t pick the lock.
“The dean told her he probably loved her,” Ms. Bolger says. “And that was my experience 20 years later.”
To help drive a national conversation about campus rape—and to push for progress—has been transformative, she says. “I have taken back control of my life.”
Whether or not it is realistic, students expect intense commitment from their colleges. “When I was a freshman, I didn’t attend the ‘mandatory’ meeting on drinking and rape,” says Doe Complainant No. 13 in the Title IX complaint against Southern California. “I wasn’t held accountable for not attending, my registration was not withheld, nor did I receive any kind of discipline for not complying with this school requirement.”
“To me,” the student says, “that shows how little USC cares about educating its men and women about sexual violence.” Administrators know how “out of control” fraternities are, yet they look the other way, she says. “It is the school’s responsibility,” she concludes, “to address the out-of-control drinking, the blatant objectification and disrespect for USC women.”
Administrators at Southern California have acknowledged that federal authorities are investigating allegations by three students, including Tucker Reed. But the officials maintain that they are committed to promoting a “respectful” campus culture. Starting this fall, the university will offer additional programs for students who live in residential colleges and those in Greek organizations, and will expand its training for employees. “Issues of sexual misconduct deserve the attention of every member of our community,” the provost, Elizabeth Garrett, wrote last month in a letter to students, faculty, and staff.
On such serious social and cultural issues, activists’ anger at colleges may be misdirected, says Jonathan Veitch, president of Occidental. “Colleges and universities are one safety net,” he says, “but I don’t know if they’re the panacea.”
Decades ago, in loco parentis meant that institutions assumed a moral if not legal responsibility for the well-being of their students. That concept fell out of favor in the 1960s, but some observers think it is creeping back. The new wave of student activism, as Mr. Veitch sees it, is asking colleges to be “less resigned to a sexual culture that is damaging.”
To protect students and comply with federal law, colleges try to guide students in understanding consent and respect. Emory University frames sexual misconduct as an issue of social justice and focuses on cultivating student leaders who can help raise awareness. At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, orientation sessions help students create “relationship résumés” to articulate their needs, expectations, and values.
Sometimes a scandal prompts a college to step up its efforts. The University of Montana at Missoula—which reached a settlement with the Departments of Education and Justice this spring over its mishandling of several reports of sexual assault—developed a comprehensive online training program for students that many institutions are now asking to borrow. At Amherst, trained investigators now meet with students who report or are accused of sexual misconduct.
This fall at Occidental, freshmen will spend twice as much time as before during orientation talking about sexual misconduct. Mandatory workshops will train students to intervene if they see classmates in trouble. And administrators are looking for other ways to let students have candid conversations on the subject.
That’s just a start, says Mr. Veitch. “A pilot of a plane can get it 85 percent right, but if he doesn’t get the other 15 percent, the plane goes down,” he says. “In most of administrative life, getting it 85 percent right is a pretty good record. But that’s not a good record in this situation. We have to work harder.”
For colleges, a philosophical shift may be in order, says David Lisak, a clinical psychologist and former professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who studies campus rape cases. A longtime assumption is that students accused of rape are decent guys who, in a fog of drunken miscommunication, end up forcing their partners to have sex. What Mr. Lisak has found is more discomfiting, he says: A small number of students are serial sex offenders. Not acknowledging that reality, he says, is hampering colleges’ efforts to keep students safe.
To change campus culture, colleges are looking to education and prevention. Activists, meanwhile, are angling for enforcement. As long as institutions violate Title IX, students and alumni promise to file more and more federal complaints. Legal analysts say it’s hard to predict what impact those complaints will have on federal policy—but they don’t doubt their potential for changing the climate on many campuses.
For now, organizers are tracking open investigations and hoping for tough penalties. Their goals are lofty: an executive order from President Obama, for one, and legislation that would expand the Justice Department’s jurisdiction over Title IX, allowing it to enforce the law with greater heft than the Education Department now can.
The national agenda is crucial, organizers say. Though earnest about raising awareness on campuses, what they really want is for colleges to feel that there are costs—ideally, federal penalties—for failing to apply a comprehensive, reliable set of policies to prevent and respond to sexual violence. If Title IX was enforced more strictly, the activists say, a significant shift might follow.
“Education only goes so far. We need enforcement,” says Laura L. Dunn, a rape survivor and law student at the University of Maryland who filed a Title IX complaint in 2006 while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Culture changes when there’s a cost to wrongdoing.”
On that hot afternoon in Washington last month, organizers were heartened when Mr. Duncan showed up toward the end of their meeting. Hours later, in another meeting, they said, White House officials seemed sympathetic to their stories and policy proposals. Less than three weeks later, organizers had a follow-up conference call with federal officials.
Ms. Brodsky, for one, thinks they’re listening. Her fear, though, is that the officials are engaging with students merely to get them “to shut up and back out,” she says. She and other organizers are hopeful, but cautious.
“This is a group of people who have put our faith in institutions and been let down,” the law student says. “We’ve all learned to keep our expectations in check.”
Despite that wariness, they continue to enlist the support of donors, national advocacy groups, and alumni whose interest in the issue has endured beyond their college years. Outrage propels them forward.
One organizer recalls a moment in last month’s meeting at the Education Department when Mr. Duncan asked his visitors a blunt question. Of the many changes they were pushing for, which was the most important? For a moment the activists, armed with petitions, proposals, and talking points, were speechless. Then they spoke up. All of them, they said.
Sara Lipka contributed to this article.
Activism and Federal Action on Campus Sexual Violence
Hundreds of students and activists have formed a national movement to transform how colleges handle cases of rape—and have found an audience in Washington. Federal officials, already stepping up enforcement of antidiscrimination law, are taking a heightened interest.
Timeline
April 4, 2011
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announce a set of guidelines from the Department of Education for how colleges must respond to reports of sexual assault under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
June 15, 2012
The Education Department announces an agreement with Yale University to resolve a complaint alleging “a sexually hostile atmosphere” there.
October 17, 2012
Angie Epifano, a former student at Amherst College, publishes a harrowing account of being assaulted by a classmate and then having her report disregarded by campus officials. Students rally for change at Amherst and beyond.
January 16, 2013
Three students, an alumna, and a former administrator file a federal complaint against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, claiming that it had failed to protect the rights of survivors of sexual assault.
March 7, 2013
President Obama signs the Violence Against Women Act, including the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, which requires colleges to report incidents of domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking, and to train students and employees in preventing sexual violence.
April 18, 2013
Three dozen students and alumni at Occidental College file a federal complaint alleging violations of their civil rights following reports of sexual assault.
April 24, 2013
The Education Department issues guidance warning colleges of penalties if they retaliate against people who file complaints with its Office for Civil Rights.
May 9, 2013
The Education and Justice Departments announce a settlement with the University of Montana at Missoula—a “blueprint” for other colleges—after having found inadequate policies on and responses to sexual misconduct.
May 22, 2013
At a news conference in New York, students from Dartmouth and Swarthmore Colleges, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California discuss new complaints against their institutions under federal law.
July 15, 2013
Activists rally at the Education Department and meet with officials from there and the White House to share their stories and push for more federal oversight of how colleges respond to reports of rape.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights says that it is pursuing investigations of 23 colleges for their responses to sexual misconduct, including assault.
August 6, 2013
Organizers of the IX Network, an activist project, roll out Know Your IX, an online educational campaign aimed at educating college students about their rights under Title IX and equipping them to file complaints..
