The Baylor Sexual Assault Crisis: How to Be Your Own Best Advocate if It Happens to You
Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is back in the news — and not because of any sports accomplishments, but rather as the result of a new report from 60 Minutes Sports that revealed new depths of wrongdoing by the school and local law enforcement when it comes to the handling of complaints of campus sexual assault. The report revealed that the Waco police kept details of sexual assaults from the school’s own Title IX office (the department all schools are mandated by federal law to have in order to prevent, investigate, and respond to charges of sex discrimination on campus, including claims of sexual assault), that the school delayed on its Title IX investigations in response to sexual assault complaints brought forward by students, and that coaches who reported sexual assault and tried to help students raising claims of sexual assault faced internal retaliation. This new reporting is the latest in an increasingly long list to emerge showcasing the widespread systemic mishandling of sexual assault claims by the university.
“This story just keeps getting worse and worse,” says Neena Chaudhry, director of education and senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center and an expert in Title IX and campus sexual assault. “[The 60 Minutes Sports] report indicates that Baylor was not only not responding to sexual assault in a way it is required to under law, discouraged survivors from reporting, and [was] retaliating against those who attempted to report sexual assault, but now there’s the added element of police not reporting sexual assault to the university. Everything done here sounds like a violation of the law.”
Chaudhry explains that it’s nonetheless essential that students and survivors know they have rights afforded to them by Title IX to protect them.
“They do have rights in terms of their school, to expect their school to address their sexual assault promptly and to get them the help they need, whether in terms of medical services, counseling, or other accommodations like housing,” Chaudhry says, adding that all students should know that should they report their assault to local law enforcement in addition to their university, police should in fact be cooperating with the school in investigating.
“They have the right to expect their school to address sexual assault and investigate it and protect them while an investigation is ongoing,” she says.
Furthermore, she recommends that students make sure they know who their school’s Title IX coordinator is and, should they feel they are not getting the support they need from that person, that they seek out any supportive staff member at the school they can find.
“Helping to elevate concern is the first step” for survivors advocating for themselves in a less-than-receptive environment, says Chaudhry. She adds that if a school fails to provide students with the accommodations they need in accordance with Title IX following a complaint of sexual assault or if students believe their school is not investigating their claims in a timely and thorough manner, they should know they may file a complaint — with no fees associated with it — against their school online with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
“The hope is that the school will help you and address these very serious concerns,” says Chaudhry. “But in cases where that doesn’t happen, it’s important to know you have other options.”
And outside of the legal ramifications afforded for students who find themselves in an educational environment where their complaints are not being taken seriously or, in the most troubling cases, are being obfuscated, the latest Baylor news is also seemingly representative of the larger cultural problem surrounding the issue of campus sexual assault.
“Sadly, I’m not at all surprised to see that both Baylor and the local Waco police collaborated in burying reports of sexual violence,” Sejal Singh, a policy organizer with the student activist group Know Your IX, tells Yahoo Beauty. “As student survivors have exposed widespread sexual assault on campus — and institutions utterly fail students who come forward — some legislators have begun introducing ‘mandatory police referral’ bills that would require schools to abdicate their Title IX responsibilities and turn all cases of sexual assault over to the police.”
But Singh says the story of what has happened at Baylor is a perfect example of why such mandatory police referral is “dangerous and misguided,” citing the “systemic failures in law enforcement’s response to reports of sexual assault.”
She adds that it is essential that survivors know they have the option to report a sexual assault to the police, to their school’s Title IX office, or to both — and to have those cases run concurrently. And even if survivors choose not to file a complaint with law enforcement, they are still absolutely able to file a Title IX complaint and should know that their school is uniquely positioned to help them by providing accommodations such as moving the perpetrator out of their dorm or offering extensions on assignments — things that neither a police report nor a case turned over to a district attorney’s office can address.
“Under Title IX,” Singh says, “survivors are entitled to reasonable accommodations like these to make sure they can still access their education in the wake of violence. After all, student survivors can’t learn when their perpetrators live down the hall or sit behind them in math class. Because of Title IX, schools are tasked with removing the barriers to education that stem from gender-based harassment and violence and so are equipped — and legally required — to support survivors in ways that law enforcement cannot.”
Singh emphasizes that the Title IX movement on campuses was started by students whose schools “blatantly ignored” their obligations to survivors, students who wanted to make sure that their peers would be empowered with the knowledge of their rights. She adds that many students have gone on to file complaints against their schools with the U.S. Department of Education, just as Chaudhry describes — a process that has exposed the staggering amount of sexual violence that takes place on college campuses across the United States each year, and the ways that schools often fail to respond appropriately.
“Students have successfully put pressure on their schools to improve prevention programming, provide critical resources like emergency contraception and rape crisis counselors, and to fairly investigate reports of sexual assault. Armed with knowledge of their rights, students are powerful,” says Singh.
And it is because of this that Know Your IX has recently published its Campus Organizing Toolkit, a 145-page workbook that walks survivors and advocates through how to best leverage the law to protect their right to an education free from violence and how to plan a campaign on their campus should they meet resistance.
“When schools like Baylor fall short in their policies and procedures in response to gender-based violence on campus, it is a reminder that student activism is crucial to effecting change,” Mahroh Jahangiri, the executive director of Know Your IX, tells Yahoo Beauty. “We’re excited for this toolkit, written over this past year by students for students, to make knowledge of strategies, legal education, and [organizing] tactics accessible to all young people — so that eventually, no student has to ever face an administration like Baylor’s without support.”
Jahangiri adds that the story of Baylor publicizes “what so many student survivors on campuses across the country already know: that schools and police both routinely bury reports by victims and have little commitment to proactively address gender violence. While this is horrifying, it speaks to two crucial things: We need to support the students who are shining a spotlight on these injustices and are fighting to hold their campuses accountable, and students need to have more than one reporting option because the police routinely fail survivors.”
Chaudhry says that what disturbs her most about the most recent news from Baylor is that “the school failed to protect these students, the survivors of sexual assault who went to them and expect them to do the right thing and investigate the complaint. Covering up evidence and discouraging people from reporting is sending a very dangerous message that you can get away with sexually assaulting people and that the school is not going to help in keeping students safe and have an environment where they can learn free of this kind of discrimination.”
She continues, “Students go to school to learn and have the right to expect their school to have their back when something like this happens. There are legal obligations at the very least to investigate [claims of sexual assault] and address them quickly. But here, it sounds like the school not only didn’t do that, but put their students in the awful position where they were really left alone and made to feel bad for what happened to them.”
And Chaudhry says she hopes that survivors and other students and advocates will not be discouraged by the news out of Baylor, but rather turn their attention to those student advocates who have come before them — like those at Know Your IX — to demand that their school do better, and do right by them, when it comes to combating the epidemic of sexual violence on campus.
These young activists, she says, have modeled the way that all students “have the right to expect more from their schools and, after taking care of themselves first and foremost, can push for their schools to be better and not give up.”
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