CREDO Too Credulous

Today I received an email from CREDO Mobile asking me to sign a petition titled "Betsy DeVos: Stand with survivors of sexual assault." I responded by contacting CREDO with this message:

You should remove this petition because it misrepresents both proposed policy changes and the facts on which those proposals are based.

Contrary to the accompanying text, no one at DEd is considering taking any rights away from those making complaints of sexual assault on college campuses. Rather, the proposed changes would simply restore Constitutional protections traditionally enjoyed by the accused which have been drastically eroded by the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter issued by President Obama's Education Department Office of Civil Rights. There have now been no fewer than 53 cases in which colleges and universities, acting under the pressure of the DCL out of fear of losing Title IX funds, have been ruled by courts to have violated accused students' due process rights (http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/cynthia-m-allen/article162774733.html). In the process, actual victims of sexual assault have also suffered, because these mishandled cases promote cynicism about all such accusations, including the true ones.

Part of the means by which such unconstitutional policies have been promoted has been bogus statistics, such as the "1 in 5" figure cited on the petition page (http://www.saveservices.org/sexual-assault/ten-myths/). Leaving aside purely ethical questions, such fearmongering does college women a disservice by creating needless anxiety, and potentially even dissuading some from attending college.