The University of Oregon announced it was aware of the sexual assault investigations involving Oregon basketball player Damyean Dotson, Dominic Artis and Brandon Austin on March 9 — almost two months before the story was broken to the public.
But UO isn’t the only school dealing with sexual assault related investigations.
According to a statistic released by the White House, one in five girls will be sexually assaulted while in college — usually by someone she knows.
Nancy Schwartzman is a sexual assault survivor and the creator of Circle of 6, a free app invented to help prevent assault.
She believes schools are not prioritizing their students’ safety, by choosing not to pursue offenders or to let them off without severe criminal charges, in order to produce favorable safety records.
“I just think over and over again schools are choosing rapists over their female students,” Schwartzman said. “The overall trend is schools don’t want to be transparent about their record because they don’t want parents to not send their kids there.”
On Thursday the Education Department released a list of 55 universities with open “sexual violence investigations” that have been filed with them under the jurisdiction of Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex. The University of Oregon was not on the list.
Erin Buzuvis is professor of law at Western New England University who researches Title IX and she says that Title IX is violated when a school fails to handle a sexual assault case appropriately.
“It’s considered an act of sex discrimination to ignore a victim of sexual assault,” Buzuvis said.
She says she sees the release of the 55 universities as a motivator of all schools to step up and do the right thing.
“What now is increasingly more apparent, is that universities that to do try to sweep sexual assault under the rug are going to be held accountable by the government and the court of public opinion,” Buzuvis said.
In January, President Obama created the “White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.” The group was tasked with figuring out ways to bring down the true frequency of sexual assault occurrence on campuses nationwide.
UO Psychology professor Jennifer Freyd researches sexual assault and was invited to advise the task force. Although she believes sexual assault has always occurred at this magnitude it has become a bigger deal recently because the public is calling for change.
“We’ve had the tipping point here, I’ve been in the field for 22 years or so of sexual violence, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like entering another galaxy,” Freyd said.
Though Freyd’s research on sexual assault isn’t limited to one school, she says hearing about the alleged rape at UO hits close to home.
“I’m very very worried about how this case came about and I’m worried about how we’re going to handle it,” Freyd said. “The sort of common thread is to not have sufficient transparency, we absolutely need to not hide things under the cover because sexual violence hides in the dark.”