Report uncovers rampant sexual abuse
Nearly 200 allegations span harassment, violence, other misconduct involving faculty, staff, and students
“This is one instance in a very, very large picture and I think there’s still a long ways to go.” —Shanta Katipamula, Stanford junior
In a first-of-its-kind report, Stanford University this week revealed nearly 200 reports of sexual harassment, sexual violence and other unwanted sexual contact involving faculty, staff and students during the 2016-17 academic year, including 29 allegations of sexual assault.
“The report we are issuing today shows that prohibited sexual conduct happens throughout our community at Stanford,” Provost Persis Drell acknowledged in a letter accompanying the release of the report. “I believe the actual numbers of incidents of wrongful sexual conduct are probably larger than are being reported to us.”
Nearly 60 of the incidents involved allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace or academic setting, mostly involving academic staff.
“We are encouraged to see Stanford releasing a report this like,” Jennifer Reisch, legal director at Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization that focuses on sexual harassment, said in an email. “However, the numbers of reported incidents, especially of sexual harassment and sexual assault, are alarmingly high for one school year.”
Of the 30 formal investigations of sexual harassment in the academic setting, 20 were found to involve a policy violation, with five male staff members, one female staff member, and one male faculty member being removed from the university.
There were 33 reports of sexual harassment involving students, led to two formal investigations, with
one male undergraduate being told to stay away from the person who made the complaint and one male graduate student banned from campus for three years after graduation.
The 29 reports of sexual assault, mostly involving students, led to 11 formal investigations, with one male undergraduate student being suspended for three academic quarters, which amounts to one school year. He was also ordered to stay away from the victim and to undergo counseling on alcohol use and respecting personal boundaries. Another male undergraduate received a similar punishment, and one visiting researcher was permanently banned from campus. The school did not immediately respond to a question about whether any of the cases were also prosecuted in court.
“The report is a great signal from the administration that they are taking our demands for transparency seriously,” said Shanta Katipamula, a Stanford junior running to be president of the student body. But, she added, “This is one instance in a very, very large picture and I think there’s still a long ways to go.”
Katipamula said she is troubled by what she considered light sanctions for some of the reports of misconduct and by incidents that go unreported altogether.
The report does not include the names of anyone involved in a case or punished for misconduct. While public universities are required under the state’s public records law to share sexual harassment findings against employees, private universities like Stanford are not and often name student privacy laws and California employment law as reasons for refusing to release such information.
The report also does not include the sexual orientation of those involved or the location of the incidents.
“We know that women of color, and particularly transgender women of color, experience sexual violence at higher rates than other groups, and yet are much less likely to report these incidents to police or campus authorities,” Reisch said. “This data would be instrumental in assessing to what extent the campus policies and procedures for reporting misconduct are really reaching and serving all members of the campus community.”
In releasing the report, the school acknowledged as much and said it did not have such data currently but would work to collect it for future reports.
“In recent months, there has been a moment of reckoning across our country and around the world — bringing to light new stories every day and reminding us of the deep impacts of sexual harassment and violence on the lives of countless people in our world,” Drell wrote, referring to the #MeToo movement that has garnered national attention in recent months. “This movement further underscores that at Stanford, we must confront these issues as community issues, not simply as student issues; we must confront them as our issues, not someone else’s issues.”
The school has come under fire for several highprofile sexual assault cases, most notably the sexual assault of a young woman by then-student Brock Turner in 2015.
In November, this newspaper reported on how the university continued to promote the legacy of a well-known professor even after it quietly suspended him for sexual misconduct with a young graduate student.
The school is not alone. On Wednesday, UC Berkeley announced it had entered into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which had been investigating the school’s handling of sexual violence. Under the agreement, the school will change a process that allows its Title IX office to resolve some cases without a formal investigation to include an understanding that both the complainant and respondent agree to the process.
Drell said she hopes the new report will help the school “whether our policies are doing what we want them to do.”
The school has an advisory committee of faculty and students monitoring cases going through a Title IX process the school is piloting, which was designed based on the recommendation of a task force put together by the previous provost several years ago. Drell has also asked a committee of students, faculty and staff to get campus feedback and make recommendations on the school’s upcoming campus climate survey of students.
In the spring, Stanford will offer a program to sophomores focusing on healthy relationships and another group of students will take part in a program to help students resist sexual assault by acquaintances.
“Ultimately,” Drell said, “I hope the report helps encourage members of our community to come forward with their concerns and to have conversations about conduct and the expectations we have for one another.”
Reisch praised the school for releasing the report publicly.
“This type of public reporting is certainly not the norm for universities,” she said. “We hope that Stanford continues to release this information — and that other schools follow their lead.”