No crackdown on assaults at colleges

No crackdown on assaults at colleges

Officials at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this week acknowledged that they allowed a student who confessed to raping a friend on campus last fall, a felony, to remain enrolled and avoid significant discipline.

The decision to give the student a deferred suspension was an error that has led to a change in the flagship university’s disciplinary procedures, according to Jean Kim, vice chancellor for student affairs and campus life.

The case is symbolic of what victims and the advocates and lawyers who represent them in the college disciplinary process contend is a widespread failure of schools to issue tough sanctions against perpetrators.

Newly obtained Justice Department data show that reports of sexual assaults on college campuses rarely lead to serious sanctions. Ten New England universities and colleges provided the data as part of a campus grant program overseen by the Justice Department’s Office of Violence Against Women.

Of the more than 240 alleged assaults the schools reported between 2003 and 2008, four led to expulsions. The grant recipients in Massachusetts included Salem State College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern, Tufts, and UMass Amherst.

The schools were required to report assault cases in years they received money from the grant, which is designed to strengthen services for female victims of violent crime on campus, including making them more comfortable in reporting rape, developing strategies to prevent the assaults, and effectively using the campus disciplinary process to hold offenders accountable. Massachusetts schools received grants in at most two of the five years.

The Justice Department grant program encourages schools to train campus disciplinary boards to respond effectively to assault charges, including using “appropriate sanctions, such as expulsion of students’’ who have perpetrated sexual assault.

Schools are not specifically required to tell local police about sexual assaults reported on campus; that decision is left to the victims. Most states require citizens to report felonies, but most college administrators will not unless the victim wants them to, according to Brett Sokolow, a lawyer with the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management.

Schools that do not hold perpetrators accountable anger advocates. “It’s a rape; it’s a forcible contact without someone’s consent,’’ said Colby Bruno, an attorney with the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston.

“It’s punishable by up to 20 years in prison, so why is it acceptable on college campuses?’’

In the UMass case, school officials said Tuesday that a review of their records indicated that the school’s response to the October rape was not appropriate.

The victim, a 2009 graduate who had returned to campus in October to reconnect with friends, said she was stunned to learn in January that her perpetrator had not been more severely punished.

The victim, who did not want to press criminal charges, had filed a complaint with the school in November. The accused student waived his right to a hearing and reported to assistant dean Christina Willenbrock.