NPR had a mostly fair report yesterday on “men’s rights groups,” and it improves today with an unusually sympathetic look at the plight of college students accused of sexual assault.
The report even got one expelled student, now suing the University of Massachusetts-Amherst for due-process violations, to talk on tape:
“Right from the start, they treated me like I was the scum of the earth,” says one young man, who was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst this past fall when he was told he was being investigated for sexual misconduct — and had just hours to move out of his dorm. …
The university, he says, withheld information he needed for his defense, and wouldn’t let him have an attorney to speak for him.
He says he was grilled by a hearing board that he says was hostile and poorly trained. The panel ruled against him and he was expelled, which he says was emotionally devastating.
“I had some dark days,” he says. “It’s hard, you know? It hurts down to your bones.”
It’s not just lawyers for the accused men saying that schools are putting on a show to prove Title IX compliance for sexual-assault victims – it’s a university official himself:
Some rush to judgment is inevitable, says Robert Dana, dean of students at the University of Maine, speaking generally about the current climate on campuses.
“I expect that that can’t help but be true,” he says. “Colleges and universities are getting very jittery about it” [federal allegations of “going soft” on sexual assault].
A victims’ lawyer, Colby Bruno, uses the absence of evidence to state that campus rape is an even bigger problem than thought:
“The cases where students are deluding themselves into thinking that what they did wasn’t rape and sexual assault? I think those are 85 percent of boys coming forward saying, ‘I was railroaded.’ ”
While numbers are hard to come by, she says there are still far more perpetrators getting away with a slap on the wrist than innocent students being wrongly expelled. She says false accusations are rare; far more often, real crimes go unreported.
Read the full report and listen to the full segment here.
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