After 43 years of Title IX, women find their voice

More young women have found their voices to complain about sexual assault and harassment on campus, and institutions finally are being forced to listen.

The issue is not new. It’s reached a fever pitch at this point in history for specific reasons. The 1972 law known as Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in education, aiming initially at biases that kept women off of faculties or in low-paying, untenured positions. Sexual assault became a Title IX issue first in 1977, when women at Yale University filed the groundbreaking case Alexander vs. Yale. One plaintiff, Pamela Price, described how a professor reduced her grade from A to C after she refused his sexual advances. She’s now a noted civil rights attorney in Oakland. The main complaints were that the college didn’t take sexual assault and harassment seriously and lacked an adequate system for dealing with it — the same complaints voiced by student victims today.

So, what has changed? Generations have grown up under Title IX and learned to demand their civil rights. They’ve become more confident through better access to education and athletics. They’re more likely than their foremothers to overcome the stigma of sexual assault and say out loud, “I was raped!”

Multiple court cases strengthened Title IX in dealing with these issues, though the road has been rocky. The Supreme Court in the 1980s decimated Title IX and similar laws. Years of lobbying by activists for women, racial minorities and people with disabilities got Congress to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act and to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto in 1988.

Student Christine Franklin had the guts to sue her Georgia high school for allowing a teacher-coach to sexually harass her for two years, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 for the first time that victims could win financial awards under Title IX. Lawsuits skyrocketed. Fifthgrader LaShonda Davis sued because she was sexually harassed repeatedly by a male classmate, and her Georgia school let it go on. The Supreme Court in her case expanded Title IX’s coverage in 1999 to prohibit sexual harassment by peers.

Usually, though, schools avoided students’ complaints by delaying until they graduated or left. Then came the Internet.

Survivors of sexual assault have formed advocacy groups like Know Your IX that outlast their individual terms at school. In 2011 the U.S. Office for Civil Rights gave colleges and universities explicit instructions on how to comply with Title IX. Complaints by students have generated federal investigations of more than 140 post-secondary schools and 40 school districts. Lawsuits have followed.

Still, studies such as one by the Association of American Universities report that 1 in 4 or 5 female undergraduates experience unwanted sex or touching. A third of 96 Bay Area school districts did not identify their federally mandated Title IX coordinator in a 2015 survey by the nonprofit advocacy group Equal Rights Advocates.

Today’s students are saying 40-some years is too long to right this wrong. They — and we — need to keep voices raised, fighting legislative attempts to weaken Title IX and demanding students’ civil rights. The journey is long and hard, but by knowing history we can pave the road ahead.