BRONX TIMES REPORTER, N BTR OV. 26-DEC. 2,2021 9
saults and rapes continues to be low,
and advocates state that changes to
Title IX by the U.S. Education Department
ran by then-Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos beefed up protections for
accused college students, by mandating
live hearings by adjudicators who
are neither the Title IX coordinator
nor the investigator, and real-time
cross examination of each student by
the other student’s lawyer or representative.
In defense of her rules, DeVos’s
claimed her rollback Title IX is one
in which Title IX seriously addresses
sexual violence and also requires fairness
to the accuser and the accused.
“Under the DeVos changes, we
start seeing a power imbalance that
favors the accused particularly if they
come from a wealthy background,
have a status of privilege and can afford
to acquire the best representation
to discredit survivors,” said Tracey E.
Vitchers, executive director of It’s On
Us, a nonprofi t founded in 2014 as an
initiative of the Obama-Biden administration
to combat campus sexual assault
through peer-to-peer prevention
education programs.
The Obama administration expanded
federal protections for student
survivors, issuing directives in
2011 and 2014 meant to increase young
women’s access to the reporting process,
to more robustly enforce schools’
responsibilities to survivors, and to
create supportive measures aimed at
keeping survivors in school.
The DeVos rules make it mandatory
for schools to have a more onerous
reporting process for sexual violence
than for any other kind of student
confl ict; holding sexual abuse claims
to higher standards of evidence than
other claims, and making it harder
for survivors to enforce schools’ obligations,
advocates say.
A report, from Know Your IX
based on testimonials from 107 students
who reported sexual violence
to their schools over the past decade,
described students dropping out of
college, feeling suicidal and facing
threats of defamation lawsuits from
the accused. In fact, almost 40% of students
who report their experiences of
sexual violence to campus authorities
are pushed out of school — forced to
drop out, transfer or take a leave of absence
in the wake of reporting.
For Czernyk, who was able to receive
her diploma a year later and
is still battling with post-traumatic
stress disorder and depression associated
with her assault, she hopes
that reporting her story can empower
other survivors in similar situations.
“I think that most women feel that
level of shame and disgust when this
happens to you. And that’s, I think
that’s also a key component in terms
of why women don’t report because
talking to police offi cers about (a sexual
assault) isn’t the most comfortable
thing to do, you know,” she said. “But
for me, I found the inner strength to
report it because I knew that talking
about it and bringing it to someone’s
attention would make a difference.”
Keating Hall on Fordham University’s Bronx campus. Photo courtesy Getty Images