It’s not as if we all don’t know that sexual assault on college campuses has become a huge problem. One in five women will be sexually assaulted over the course of their college career, and the same goes for one in ten men. These statistics are staggering, and pretty scary.
Plenty of efforts have been made to subdue this epidemic. The It’s On Us Campaign launched by President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in 2014 is a campaign to educate students and assist colleges when a student has been assaulted. There was also the Clery Act of 1990 which helps to defend against sexual assault, and the Campus SaVE Act, an amendment in 2013, which provided colleges with Title IX funding for schools to help prevent against sexual assault.
But as of late, there’s new legislation that may change the whole game. Republicans Matt Salmon (AZ), Pete Sessions (TX) and Kay Granger (TX) have been sponsoring the Safe Campus Act, which is a new bill that would prohibit colleges from both investigating sexual assault cases and punishing those responsible unless the victim reports the assault to the police.
http://www.saveservices.org/sexual-assault/safe-campus-act/
The whole logic behind the Safe Campus Act is that a rapist being prosecuted only by their college or university isn’t enough, that they should be punished to the severest extent of the law. But that isn’t how it will work.
When someone is raped on at college, it’s a terrifying and incredibly stressful experience. Telling their friends and family of the incident is hard enough, let alone the questions and probing from the school and the police. But if a victim goes to their college administration first, usually the rapist will be severely punished, and this can mean all the difference to a victim. When a school investigates and punishes the criminal, this can give the victim the crucial confidence boost it will take to get them to go to the police, and that’s when the law can prosecute the rapist as well.
But the Safe Campus Act would make this impossible. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 80% of sexual assaults on college campuses go unreported, and that statistic could sky rocket if the Act passes. The reality of the situation is that victims would stop coming forward, and that rapists would walk free.