sexual assault

Three young women tell similar stories of being discouraged from calling police after reporting sexual assault to Reed College authorities, and of a campus investigatory process so intensely secretive one student was unsure she could even talk to her parents about it. The students’ allegations were not vetted by trained investigators or faculty, but by a student board without expertise in sexual assault.

Former Reed administrator Lisa Moore, a licensed social worker, confirms she took one of the students to the health center when she came to her crying and saying she had been raped by a former boyfriend in January of 2009, but did not know the student was later turned away without an appointment. Moore has since left Reed and now works at Boston University, in part because of her inability to change the Reed system. None of the recommendations of a sexual assault task force she assembled has been implemented, she said.

Two outside experts in how colleges handle sexual assaults criticized the system used by 1,400-student Reed, a highly secretive process based on a student Honor Code and enforced by a student Judicial Board, in which students act as a fact-finding committee and participants are barred from discussing their cases with anyone except a designated advocate, a procedural aide and medical professionals.

But her ordeal brings change to state system

Emily Lorenzen turned to college administrators for help after she was hazed into drinking too much alcohol and woke up naked in bed next to a persistent upperclassman whose advances she had spurned. She found a lack of concern and a desire to protect the university, and says the college investigation and disciplinary process victimized her again. But the experience spurred her father, then head of the board of higher education in the state of Oregon, to begin making changes in that state that could have long-ranging impact for young victims like Emily in the future.

Discipline meted out to accused often light or nonexistent

The story of a frustrating search for justice through an unclear and conflicted college disciplinary system is compellingly told through the experiences of two women who reported being raped on campus. Both women say the schools’ handling of their cases compounded their trauma, and both point to insensitive handling that ranged from inappropriate questioning to being required to go through mediation sitting near the man they had accused. Discipline for the alleged perpetrators was light or nonexistent, and left both angered that students who suffer sexual assaults by other students are often left to bear the emotional, physical and financial consequences, while those they hold responsible for their anguish walk away.

Barriers to reporting sexual assault in same gender cases even higher

Sexual assault crosses all barriers, gender included, and same-gender assaults are not uncommon on college campuses, experts say, but the obstacles to reporting are even greater.