Al Jazeera America: To prosecute sexual assault, go off campus
Al Jazeera America reports:
But it doesn’t do much for the victims, the accused or even their classmates — not to mention a school’s reputation — when an institution that’s clearly unprepared to deal with serious felonies insists on handling rape cases in-house.
So what should universities do? Any new national guidelines coming from Washington, or from the schools themselves, should follow the example set by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., a champion of reform of sexual-assault cases in the military, who has insisted that the command chain be taken out of the adjudication process rather than becoming more deeply enmeshed in existing systems. The same conflict of interest that military officers might face when disciplining their colleagues also exists in the vested interest that modern American universities have in dealing with, or ignoring, campus rape.
