Campus assault cases challenging

For decades, many colleges chose to handle most sexual-crime allegations on campus rather than reporting them to local police. That often led college women to believe that university officials and campus security officers were more interested in protecting the university’s reputation than in helping police and prosecutors aggressively pursue allegations of sexual assault.

In 2011, the Obama administration issued a 19-page “Dear Colleague” letter that urged colleges to more aggressively investigate those allegations and to encourage victims to come forward. The administration warned schools they could forfeit millions in federal funding if they remained lax.

That federal scrutiny produced results: In May 2014, 55 colleges were under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for their handling of sexual-violence cases. Three years later — that is, as of July 12 — there were 344 such cases under investigation at 242 institutions.

Enter new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has been listening to advocates, rape survivors, college administrators and accused students to decide if the department’s “Dear Colleague” guidance should be rescinded or changed.

Please note: She’s just listening. She hasn’t said yet whether she’ll do anything. But that has stirred rampant speculation that the Trump administration might dilute the 2011 guidelines.

We don’t know if colleges are handling campus sex assault cases better than they did before 2011. But whatever DeVos decides, we know this much:

Sexual assault on campus — or anywhere else — is a terrible crime that ruins lives. It wrecks the lives of victims and often of perpetrators.

Sexual assault is pervasive, on campus and off. More than 20 percent of female undergrads at an array of colleges said they were victims of sexual assault and misconduct, according to a 2015 survey by the Association of American Universities.

It shouldn’t matter if the crime takes place in a house, a corporate office or a campus dorm. Investigating it and, when appropriate, prosecuting it and punishing the assailant is a job for civil authorities, not occupants of the house, bosses of the corporation — or personnel on campus.

Why not campus officials and faculty members, some of whom play the roles of judges and jurors? Because many schools lack the resources and expertise of local police to investigate such crimes, let alone to professionally process physical evidence.

Law-enforcement officials find sexual-assault cases on or off campus challenging. Often these encounters involve alcohol or other drugs and boil down to conflicting he-said she-said accounts of whether sexual contact was consensual. Sometimes victims decline to pursue charges. But those problems are common to many criminal investigations. Civil authorities, who have no agenda to protect a school or to shortchange an alleged victim or perpetrator, still are best suited to mete out justice.

All the more reason for college administrators to swiftly hand allegations of rape and other sex crimes to the people best qualified to deal with them — local cops and prosecutors.

We hope DeVos makes that a top priority. One option would be this rewrite of the 2011 letter: Dear Colleague, Someone reports a campus sexual assault? Call the cops.