On the morning of September 22nd, the Trump Administration, under the recommendation and direction of Betsy DeVos, has rescinded the 2011 Title IX guidance including the Dear Colleague Letter established by the Obama Administration. This guidance outlined campuses’ obligations to support survivors and held university and college administrations accountable for the way they handled sexual assault cases. Before this document was issued, many institutions ignored their obligations under the law, both because colleges and universities failed to understand them, and because schools knew few students understood the law well enough to assert their rights.
Throughout the past few months, DeVos has been laying the groundwork for this action claiming that the current system for processing sexual assault cases is broken and unfair to both survivors and accused students. She has repeatedly discussed these falsely accused students and survivors as equally failed by Title IX policies under the Obama Administration. She has failed to recognize that only two to six percent of sexual assaults are falsely reported (according to the FBI), a rate lower than the false reporting of any other crime--and that one in five women, as well as many gender non-binary, transgender, and male students will experience sexual violence during their time on campus. Her rhetoric is not only false; it is a direct attempt to silence the voices of survivors on campuses. Carolina Advocating for Gender Equity (CAGE) stands with survivors and calls on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and all of the organizations affiliated or within this institution to publicly commit to upholding prior Department of Education guidance, including the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, despite its removal. Students deserve to attend a university that believes them and supports them. Sexual assault policies must be centered around serving survivors, not questioning the credibility of each survivor while granting perpetrators more rights. The system is indeed in need of work, but vilifying survivors and enabling perpetrators is the wrong action.
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