Are students accused of rape being denied a fair trial?

For a cautionary lesson in how swiftly moral outrage can spawn injustice, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times, look no further than the issue of campus sexual assaults. For years, US colleges were “shamefully loath to deal with rape accusations at all”. But in response to high-profile scandals and new Obama-era guidelines, colleges have swung to the opposite extreme, abandoning “anything resembling due process”. Accused students have been stripped of basic protections, including access to evidence and the right to cross-examine witnesses. Their fate lies in the hands of “secret tribunals” and administrators (Harvard has no fewer than 55 handling sex discrimination issues). The result – as shown by a recent series of articles in The Atlantic by Emily Yoffe – is a system “all-but-guaranteed to frequently expel and discipline the innocent”. Thankfully, Education Secretary Betsy Devos has now announced plans to revise the Obama-era rules.

“This is exactly what survivors, their advocates and supporters of women’s rights have feared since Inauguration Day,” said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe. Devos is worried about “the rights of the accused”, but she didn’t mention that “only between 2% and 10% of rape allegations are false”, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Centre. Before Barack Obama issued these guidelines, most victims were extremely unlikely to see their attacker punished. Devos’s rollback “should come as no surprise”, said Dana Bolger in The Washington Post. After all, she works for “a president who has bragged about sexually assaulting women” – and getting away with it.

Whatever you think of Devos, she’s right in this instance, said Lara Bazelon on Politico. The Obama rules – which threatened colleges with the loss of federal funds if they didn’t comply – were “ripe for abuse at the hands of scared, ill-trained administrators”. Since the guidelines took effect, said USA Today, about 170 students have appealed against colleges’ guilty findings – and in about 60 cases, the courts ended up siding with the accused. It would be better in future if colleges deferred to the criminal justice system in such cases, rather than trying to conduct their own proceedings. Sexual assault is too serious a crime to be entrusted to an internal procedure that delivers “second-class justice” to victims and perpetrators alike.