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Last year, a female student at the University of Minnesota told investigators she believed "that a total of 10 to 20 men had sex with her." Although she had been drinking, an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action (EOAA) report noted, the student recalled being pinned down by the shoulders during sex and that "on multiple occasions, more than one man had sex with her at once." She also said that there was a crowd of onlookers "chanting, laughing, cheering and jostling for a position in the line to have sex with [her]," according to the report.Ultimately, the school suspended 10 football players for their role in the incident. Authorities declined to criminally charge any of the players, citing a lack of evidence."As advocates for student survivors, we are gravely concerned that rape myths like the one you articulated to the Times will motivate your office's policies," the letter states. "Stereotypes like the one you repeated have long fueled skepticism of rape victims by courts, communities, and, yes, schools. Your job as Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights is to reject such myths loudly and repeatedly, not reinforce them, as you did last week. In doing so, you undermined students' faith in your office and used your bully pulpit to broadcast a destructive and inaccurate message."An Education Department official perpetuating rape myths is terrifying to women's rights advocates, particularly when coupled with Secretary Betsy DeVos's recent meetings with men's rights groups that work on behalf of the accused. It's currently unclear whether the federal government will continue to advocate on behalf of sexual assault victims: During her senate confirmation hearing, DeVos refused to say whether she would uphold the Obama administration's guidance on how to handle campus sexual assault, called the Dear Colleague Letter (DCL).
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The horrific alleged event defies the pattern of campus sexual assault as described by Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. According to Jackson, who's charged with enforcing sexual assault survivors' rights in schools, almost all campus rape claims stem from both participants being drunk and the girl later changing her mind about what happened. In most investigations, she told the New York Times last week, there's "not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman.""Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of 'we were both drunk,' 'we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,'" she said.Since her comments came to light, Jackson—who is herself a rape survivor—has apologized for her "flippant" remarks. But what has many campus sexual assault survivor advocates concerned is that she's yet to retract her false statements. Today, the National Women's Law Center and 57 other organizations issued a public letter to Jackson, demanding she "publicly reject the invented statistic you dangerously shared" and meet with more survivors of campus sexual assault to hear their stories.Read more: The Sexual Assault Survivor Fighting to Protect Victims' Identities
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In a recent op-ed penned for Broadly, Sejal Singh of Know Your IX—one of the organizations calling for Jackson to retract her dangerous and inaccurate statement—argued that the Education Department needs to take rape survivors more seriously. "Schools investigate and discipline students for code of conduct issues that are also crimes (like, say, stealing or getting in a fistfight with another student) all the time," she wrote. "There's no push to stop schools from investigating those cases. But the Department of Education is now considering raising the barrier to justice for rape victims, and rape victims alone, at the urging of groups that spread well-documented falsehoods about gender-based violence.""I fear the Department's choice to single out survivors of sexual violence," she continued, "stems from the pervasive, unique, and patently sexist skepticism reserved only for people who speak up about gender-based violence, especially when Jackson herself appears to be advancing the insidious rape myth that most women and survivors are liars 'crying rape.'"