Students who are raped on campus often turn to school officials for support only to be ushered into a secretive and intimidating college judiciary system, according to a new report. The Center for Public Integrity's nine-month investigation has found that young women who report an assault to their college "can encounter mysterious disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations." Worse yet, students can come to rely solely on the college administration in sexual assault cases because the local district attorney often declines to press charges due to the "he said she said" nature of most cases or the involvement of booze or drugs casting doubt on the accuser's story.
The Center interviewed 33 female students who reported being raped by a fellow student and 48 experts on school disciplinary processes, surveyed 152 crisis centers serving college campuses and performed an extensive review of relevant case records from the past decade. It found that "school policies and practices can lead students to drop complaints, or submit to gag orders -- a practice deemed illegal." Often, the process has no transparency, little oversight and punishments of the accused are rare. Sometimes colleges simply go the route of "confidential mediation" -- yup, reconciliation between the alleged victim and her accused rapist -- where everything is considered off-the-record, even a confession of guilt. Of course, schools have an invested interest in keeping rape cases on the D.L. -- it would be bad P.R.
You might ask: What business do schools have in investigating a felony in the first place? Well, colleges and local law enforcement have dual jurisdiction when it comes to on-campus rapes. The criminal justice system, of course, is charged with determining the accused rapist's guilt, while the administration determines whether he violated the student code of conduct and, if so, what the appropriate punishment is. These secretive campus proceedings arise from two federal laws that are actually meant in part to defend sexual assault victims' rights: Title IX and the Clery Act. The actual effect, though, is to "re-victimize an already vulnerable student," as The Center's Executive Director Bill Buzenberg put it in a press release. "As if being a victim of sexual assault isn't difficult enough, it becomes even more traumatic when survivors’ schools become barriers to justice."
Vice President Joe Biden may hail from one of the smallest states but the former U.S. Senator from Delaware has long been notorious for having one of the biggest mouths in the nation's capitol. Sometimes that works in Biden's favor, as when he famously declared during the 2008 presidential campaign that there are "only three things" Rudy Giuliani "mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11."
Sometimes it doesn't. President Obama knew that Biden had no problem speaking his mind when he picked him to be his running mate: Biden once famously made headlines for all the wrong reasons when he called Obama an "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" in 2007. Former President George W. Bush reportedly once said of Biden that, "If bull was currency, Joe Biden would be a billionaire."
Monday, Biden may have let slip an admission that the White House would have preferred he kept to himself. Speaking at a fundraiser for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., Biden warned that if Republicans take control of Congress in the 2010 elections, it could mean the end of the Obama administration's goals to remake Washington. "They're going to put their chips on movement in the 35 seats in the House that have been traditionally Republican districts and trying to take them back," Biden said. "If they take [those seats] back, this is the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do ... This is their one shot. If they don't break the back of our effort in this upcoming election, you're going to see the things we said we're for, happen."
While Biden hardly said something that Democrats and liberals didn't already realize, his comments come at a time when the White House is engaged in a tough fight on healthcare reform and needs to appear as strong as possible. But Biden has made a number of high-profile flubs since Obama first tapped him to be his running mate back last Here's a look at some of his most notable gaffes:
Dick Cheney: Best Zombie Ever
Surge Protection: Winning Afghan Hearts and Minds
Conan Takes Late Night
Outrage Over Arlen Specter
