War on Justice
Time for colleges to scrap O’s kangaroo courts
EDUCATION Secretary Betsy DeVos last week floated completely sensible reforms to Obama-era Title IX policies on how colleges should handle sexual-assault charges. The left’s response? Immediate and predictable: “Stop Betsy” went the outcry on Twitter. Outraged protesters accused her of moving to protect rapists.
“What could DeVos and Trump possibly have to gain by taking away Title IX protections for college women?” tweeted Amy Siskind, of the liberal group The New Agenda — as if DeVos was trying to win over the rapist vote, rather than stop the careless and cruel destruction of the lives of so many young men.
Gov. Cuomo couldn’t resist either: “Betsy DeVos’ proposal is about to make campuses less safe. New York stands with survivors.” Why he thinks false accusations, which DeVos wants to protect against, make campuses safer is a mystery.
Alanna Vagianos, Women’s Editor at Huffpost, retweeted several times the thoroughly debunked statistic that only between 2 percent and 10 percent of rape accusations are actually false. But shouldn’t even a small number of falsely accused men be protected?
The Obama-era system pushes colleges to set up extra-judicial star chambers, which punish accused students via utterly unfair procedures. There’s an assumed guilt, rather than innocence. “Defendants” don’t get lawyers. Due process, of the sort we’re used to in real courts, is tossed by the wayside. And the consequences for the accused — shattered lives and reputations — are often horrific.
“One rape is one too many, one assault is one too many, one aggressive act of harassment is one too many,” says DeVos. But also, “one person denied due process is one too many.”
She’s right. Yet on campuses across the country, more and more young men are losing their due-process rights and suffering tragic consequences — oft-times even when the accuser herself refuses to back the charges.
The young men are then forced to turn to real courts, which, as Inside Higher Ed reports, often side with them.
In 2016, for example, the California Court of Appeals ruled against the University of Southern California, which actually suspended a student for someone else’s sexual misconduct.
The student was involved in consensual group sex, and the victim didn’t like what one of the other participants did to her. The accused was punished anyway, even though the victim didn’t blame him for the assault.
The court found the accused was not “provided any information about the factual basis of the charges against him,” not able to examine the evidence and not allowed to appear before the panel deciding his case.
In Commentary, KC Johnson notes courts have tossed school’s guilty findings on due-process grounds in at least 59 cases since 2013, 21 one of them this year alone. How is this a win for the accusers? They’re only forced to go through a second round of hearings and retell their story when cases go before real judges.
And consider: In a few cases, the accused may actually be guilty — but gets off because his rights were violated by his school. Why even have schools get involved in criminal matters in the first place?
In the last few years, we’ve seen several high-profile rape cases turn out to be false: the Rolling Stone story about the alleged rape of a University of Virginia student, for example. Or the central case in “The Hunting Ground,” the documentary about rape. What happens to the young men whose lives were destroyed?
Meanwhile, Emily Yoffe, writing in The Atlantic, highlights the bind schools say they’ve been in when dealing with this issue, thanks to Team Obama. Yoffe says bogus investigations and ridiculous restrictions on accused students “were mandated or strongly encouraged by federal rules.”
And Washington backed its rules with threats of sanctions.
Yet the notion that all boys should be treated as guilty until proven otherwise — and denied due process — simply because
some have abused women is repugnant.
As is the tendency for some to dismiss the injustice by claiming it’s just a few young men who have their lives destroyed.
How do those boys go back to a normal life after their names have been smeared for something they didn’t do? In many cases they simply don’t. Some have even taken their own lives.
This needs to change. We wouldn’t allow women to be treated this way. “The future is female,” feminists’ T-shirts proclaim. But male lives matter, too. Good for DeVos for looking to end this war on boys.