Judges’ comments:
An issue that many thought had been dealt with decades ago. Instead, the Center for Public Integrity found that students found “responsible” for sexual assaults on campus face little or no punishment. Even more astonishing, research shows that repeat offenders account for a significant number of sexual assaults on campus, a fact contrary to what many collegiate administrators had believed. In a lengthy series, with numerous journalistic partners, this series outlines how many women suffer a lack of justice. The series has spurred reform both on Capitol Hill and college campuses nationwide. In addition, the Center includes an online toolkit so other journalists, especially reporters at college papers, can investigate on their own campuses. A stellar work of journalism leading to policy reform.
1. Provide the title of your story or series and the names of the journalists involved.
Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice
The Center for Public Integrity Reporting Team: Kristen Lombardi, Kristin Jones, staff writers David Donald, computer-assisted reporter Laura Dattaro, Claritza Jimenez, reporting fellows Editorial Team David Donald, data editor Gordon Witkin, managing editor
NPR: Joseph Shapiro
Investigative News Network Partners
- InvestigateWest: Carol Smith, Lee van der Voo
- New England Center for Investigative Reporting: Maggie Mulvihill, Joe Bergantino and BU Journalism students Sarah Favot and Jaime Lutz
- Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network
- WisconsinWatch: Kate Golden, Alex Morrell and Sara Jerving
2. List date(s) this work was published or aired.
Though the initial series was published late in 2009, the bulk of the impact and all of the additional reporting rolled out in 2010. The components work in tandem and we respectfully submit them for your review. First series on December 1, 2009; December 2, 2009; December 3, 2009; second series on February 24, 2010; February 25, 2010; February 26, 2010.
3. Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Kathryn Russell said it happened in her on-campus apartment. For Megan Wright, the venue was a residence hall. According to a report funded by the Department of Justice, roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But official data from the schools themselves doesn’t begin to reflect the scope of the problem. And student victims face a depressing litany of barriers that often either assure their silence or leave them feeling victimized a second time, according to a 12-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. Because the initial series was published late in 2009, the bulk of the impact and all of the additional reporting rolled out in 2010. In 2010, the project was a unique collaborative effort with members of the new Investigative News Network, a coalition of nonprofit news organizations dedicated to watchdog journalism. These outlets, in addition to dozens of student and other local journalists picked up on the Center series, digging into the issue in their own backyards, often echoing our findings. The probe reveals that students found “responsible” for alleged sexual assaults on campuses often face little or no punishment, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down. Many times, victims drop out of school, while students found culpable go on to graduate. Administrators believe the sanctions administered by the college judicial system are a thoughtful and effective way to hold abusive students accountable, but the Center’s investigation has discovered that “responsible” findings rarely lead to tough punishment like expulsion — even in cases involving alleged repeat offenders. Research shows that repeat offenders actually account for a significant number of sexual assaults on campus, contrary to what those who adjudicate these cases on college campuses believe. Experts say authorities are often slow to realize they have such “undetected rapists” in their midst. Critics question whether faculty, staff, and students should even adjudicate what amounts to a felony crime. But these internal campus proceedings grow from two federal laws, known as Title IX and the Clery Act, which require schools to respond to claims of sexual assault on campus and to offer key rights to victims. The Education Department enforces both laws, yet its Office for Civil Rights rarely investigates student allegations of botched school proceedings by students, largely because students don’t realize they have a right to complain. When cases do go forward, the civil rights office rarely rules against schools, the Center’s probe has found, and virtually never issues sanctions against institutions. Many student victims don’t report incidents at all, because they blame themselves, or don’t identify what happened as sexual assault. Local criminal justice authorities regularly shy away from such cases, because they are “he said, she said” disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol. That frequently leaves students to deal with campus judiciary processes so shrouded in secrecy that they can remain mysterious even to their participants. Institutional barriers compound the problem of silence, and few actually make it to a campus hearing. Those who do come forward, though, can encounter secret disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations. At times, school policies and practices can lead students to drop complaints, or submit to gag orders — a practice deemed illegal by the Education Department. Administrators believe the existing processes provide a fair and effective way to deal with ultra-sensitive allegations, but the Center’s investigation has found that these processes have little transparency or accountability. The Center interviewed 50 experts familiar with the college disciplinary process — student affairs administrators, conduct hearing officers, assault services directors, and victim advocates. The inquiry included a review of records in select cases, and examinations of 10 years’ worth of complaints filed against institutions with the Education Department under Title IX and the Clery Act. The Center also interviewed 33 women who reported being sexually assaulted by other students. And by surveying 152 crisis services programs and clinics on or near college campuses selected through scientific sampling, the Center tested the reliability of Clery numbers of campus sexual assault, showing the woeful underreporting in official statistics. Of the 152 clinics serving specific campuses around the country, 58 reported solid observations of the number of sexual assault victims they serviced. Of those 49, or 84 percent, of the campuses’ official numbers were significantly below the clinics’ observations reported in the survey.
4. Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
We used judicial records from the students’ college proceedings. We got these records two ways — some students gave us their full disciplinary case file; for others, we asked the students to sign privacy
waivers so we could file records requests under state disclosure laws to obtain their judicial case files. For students who attended a private university, we helped them file a request for their judicial proceeding records under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. We also identified 10 years worth of civil suits filed under the federal law known as Title IX against colleges for the way they responded to student rape complaints, and examined those judicial decisions and court records. We filed numerous Freedom of Information Act requests with the Education Department — first, seeking the department’s resolutions of Title IX and Clery Act complaints filed against colleges over the past 10 years; then, seeking the supporting documentation in select Title IX and Clery Act complaint investigations. We constructed two databases from these records to help us identify larger trends and patterns in how colleges respond to reports of campus sexual assault. We used documents from criminal and civil court hearings that grew out of students’ college proceedings. Finally, we filed a FOIA with the Office on Violence Against Women seeking grant applications and progress reports from schools that have received federal funding to combat campus sexual assault under a Justice Department Office on Violence Against Women grant program. Many FOIA requests resulted in lengthy delays and unresponsive or heavily redacted records; the Center even sued the Education Department because of its obstacles, which prompted the department to disclose all requested records. Over the project’s course, we’ve filed FOIA requests at the federal and state level, including in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia, New York, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Florida. To test the reliability of Clery numbers reported by U.S. campuses and published by the Education Department, the Center obtained the most recent Clery reports from the database library at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. Then through scientific sampling and a survey, we gathered our own data on campus sexual assault to compare to selected campuses’ official numbers.
5. Explain types of human sources used.
We interviewed nearly 50 experts familiar with the college disciplinary process. Among them were student affairs administrators, hearing board members, victim advocates, district attorneys, campus police officers, university counsels, lawyers, researchers, as well as accused students. We interviewed 33 students who reported being raped to their schools by fellow students, and created a reporting database from those interviews. The database helped us to get beyond isolated cases on individual campuses and to see larger commonalities in experiences, suggesting systemic problems. We also interviewed about another dozen students who said they were raped yet never reported, or who said they were raped by professors. In addition, we surveyed directors and staff at 152 crisis-services programs and clinics on or near college campuses, following up many of the survey responses with phone interviews. Many of the original survey respondents went on to become sources for our series of six stories. Finally, for help with sampling and survey construction, we contacted a number of academic researchers who provided insight into the use of these social science methods.
6. Results (if any).
Perhaps the best measure of impact from the Center’s Sexual Assault on Campus series is the current campaign for reform on Capitol Hill and campuses nationwide. Spurred by our report, national advocacy organizations, such as Security on Campus and Students Active for Ending Rape, have unveiled the so-called “Campus Sexual Assault Free Environment (SAFE) Blueprint,” a legislative proposal to amend the two federal laws requiring schools to respond to sexual assaults and to provide key rights to victims — Title IX and the Clery Act. The proposal consists of two dozen amendments meant to close current loopholes in those laws. By December 2010, much of the blueprint had been incorporated into legislation introduced by Rep. Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat. Perriello’s proposed Campus Sexual Violence
Elimination Act would amend the Clery Act and its victim’s bill of rights to strengthen campus policies and procedures regarding cases of campus sexual assault. Most importantly, the bill would establish firm, minimum, national procedures for all colleges and universities to follow in responding to allegations of sexual assault and sexual violence. The bill, known as H.R. 6461, has garnered bipartisan support from at least five co-sponsors in the House. Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, introduced a companion bill in the Senate, with the support and endorsement of the Clery Act’s original Senate sponsor, the state’s retired senior senator, Arlen Specter. Speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives, Perriello thanked the Center and one of its media partners, National Public Radio, for its investigative series, explaining, “Their year-long expose & ran earlier this year & exposing many of the gaps the Campus SaVE Act will help to fill.” In September, advocates also submitted the entire Sexual Assault on Campus series into the official record of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the failures to investigate rape cases. And the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, which is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and serves as the nation’s principle resource center on sexual violence, has electronically cataloged the series website as a permanent addition to its library. Promising to ramp up its enforcement of Title IX in the wake of the Center’s series, the Education Department has reached two settlements in late 2010 that it says will serve as a new model for how schools and the department deal with claims of campus sexual assault. Officials offered the settlement details in an exclusive December interview they called with the Center and NPR. The “voluntary resolution agreements,” involving Notre Dame College and Eastern Michigan University, include robust and unparalleled requirements compared to what the civil rights office has sought in the past. Under the terms of the agreements, the schools must draft comprehensive procedures for adjudicating sexual assault cases. They must designate Title IX coordinators who will oversee the campus adjudicatory process, and train staff on how to investigate and resolve complaints. The agreements aim to change a culture on college campuses that can breed student-on-student sexual violence, according to the department’s assistant secretary, Russlyn Ali. They require the schools to conduct informational sessions with their students on their Title IX rights, and to establish campus committees charged with devising outreach and educational strategies to prevent the recurrence of sexual assaults. The civil rights office will monitor the colleges’ progress and conduct on-site visits over the next three years. Officials are now expanding their review of Title IX policies and procedures at the country’s second largest university, Ohio State, and are preparing to initiate similar actions against three more universities next year. By early 2011, the office expects to release new guidelines detailing how schools must respond to these cases to comply with the law. Meanwhile, some college administrators have begun rethinking existing policies and practices: the project led the University of Wisconsin to post its annual sexual assault reports online for the first time, for instance, and the University of Massachusetts to create a blue-ribbon commission to review its sexual assault policy. The National Center for Risk Management in Higher Education held three summer “institutes” for college administrators designed around our series, and invited project reporters to speak about their findings at an October conference for college administrators, victim advocates, and peer educators.
7. Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
We had to run a small correction in the third story of the first three-part series. The original version erroneously reported that the Education Department fined LaSalle University for ignoring crime data, including 28 anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
sexual assaults. The university and the department later reached a settlement. The data in question actually involved a total of 28 crimes, of which only a small number were sexual offenses. The error arose out of a misreading of an Education Department document. The article posted on the Center’s website has been revised accordingly. Through a rigorous rollout featuring a website with six compelling stories, audio slide shows and videos of student victims, and a reporter’s toolkit to help student journalists investigate how their schools deal with sexual assault allegations, the Sexual Assault on Campus project garnered widespread national and state level media attention. For the February series, we partnered with National Public Radio’s investigative team and five members of the Investigative News Network — all local non-profit journalism organizations dedicated to accountability reporting, from Seattle’s InvestigateWest to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network, Texas Watchdog, and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism — to broaden the scope of our work. These stories, framed to target each outlet’s respective constituency, including a mini-documentary by the New England Center, were posted on the Sexual Assault on Campus website. Coverage ranged from major stories in USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, to national television segments on CNN and MSNBC, as well as national radio broadcasts on NPR’s Talk of the Nation and WNYC’s The Takeaway. After just one week in February, coverage included broadcasts by five national NPR programs, three write-ups in the Washington Post, four by the Huffington Post, and more than seventeen college newspapers, from large state to small private schools. The project was highlighted by well-known mainstream media outlets reaching an estimated audience of 40 million, with millions more estimated to have viewed the information through 73 online media outlets, 101 student newspapers, and 39 college-related associations. The project has earned attention at an array of universities, such as Loyola, Tufts, University of Michigan, Binghamton University, Georgetown, University of Maryland, Kent State University, and the University of Pennsylvania, among many others. Coverage has continued throughout the year — for instance, on September 6 ABC News’s Nightline ran a segment about one of the student cases featured in our series, after collaborating with our lead reporter. Project reporters have also given a how-to webinar, sponsored by the Investigative Reporters and Editors, to three dozen student reporters so they could replicate the series on their campuses, as well as similar presentations to students at the Columbia Journalism School and at Brooklyn College.
8. Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
First, journalists should understand the research out there on campus sexual assault. The National Institute of Justice has funded several studies over the past decade on the sexual victimization of college women and how schools respond, which proved to be essential background reading for us. The research helped us not only identify and develop sources — including social scientists who advised us as we conducted our own survey — but also navigate the emotional landscape of college students who’ve reported being raped, officially or not. Second, know that this kind of story takes patience, persistence, and lots of time. Information on campus sexual assault proceedings is not readily available — for instance, there is no central clearinghouse for colleges to report cases and record their dispositions. Seemingly sympathetic sources often don’t want to speak on the record about this issue, let alone hostile ones. Privacy laws, such as FERPA, make it very difficult to access school records. We had students sign privacy waivers so we could obtain their judicial case files, and request interviews from school administrators and other officials. Many schools only agreed to talk about the specifics of a student’s case because of these waivers; others still declined our interview requests. Ultimately, the best way to get at this story is to find students who have filed sexual assault complaints and gone through their schools’ processes. We did this through various avenues, described below, including a nationwide survey of providers of frontline services for sexual-assault victims, but none are easy. They required old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting skills more so than data-driven techniques. Those techniques were certainly used, but did not help us to identify students who reported being raped to their school administrations by fellow students — the sources at the heart of this investigation.