Two articles have popped up in the last few days about survivors suing their schools (the University of Tampa and a K-12 school system in Connecticut) for ignoring information that should have let them know that a coach or teacher was a threat to students. Both women were raped by people they trusted, despite the fact that the school knew or should have known that the people they had hired were not trustworthy. Rather than going into the details – both women appear from the brief details in the articles to have good, and sadly familiar, cases (ignored complaints, no oversight, etc.) – I want to focus for a bit on why people file lawsuits, what a necessary (although risky, exhausting, and bruising) process they seem to be in the fight to get schools to take sexual assault seriously, and what colleges and universities (and K-12 systems) should be learning instead from the medical malpractice fight.
Her attorney, Chris Knopick, says the case filed Thursday is about accountability.
“Were it not for the university placing this coach into the position he was in, this horrible event may never have occurred,” Knopick said.
The rare student who actually sues her or his school over their sexual assault usually does so, personal insults slung at these survivors aside, more to try to force her or his school to change how it handles sexual assault and to make sure that no one else has to endure what she or he endured than for any financial gain. Fighting through a lawsuit is risky – if you lose, you probably still have to pay your lawyer – and drags on for years. (The UColorado case that settled last year related to an incident in 2001 – that’s a long time to be continually fighting the same fight.) There are easier ways to make money, and most people won’t go through the pain unless they feel like they are fighting for someone else’s good. Thus, for instance, the UColorado settlement included many stipulations about how the university was going to change their sexual assault polices and procedures, including the hiring of an outside observer to establish real accountability.
The ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the National Women’s Law Center, among others, are helping students file Title IX suits against their colleges and universities for failing to take adequate steps to protect students from sexual assault because they believe (a belief I certainly share) that these kinds of suits will get attention and will force not only the school sued but other schools to start thinking about these issues. (For those of you curious about Title IX and the specific issues at stake, see here and here and here. We will be providing more comprehensive information on this issue soon, so let us know if you’re interested.) I was reading in the NYTimes a couple days ago about hospitals discovering that it is cheaper and creates better health care if they apologize for their mistakes, fix them, and talk about them openly as experiences from which they learn and create new policies and it made me wish that we could skip the next couple of decades of legal fights and just have school administrators learn from these medical malpractice discoveries.
The article is fascinating – after decades of ballooning malpractice costs, a handful of hospitals decided to try responding helpfully, responsibly, and honestly to patients who suffered a medical error. To the shock, apparently, of some, although I’m completely not surprised, their malpractice expenses have shrunk enormously. In a real blow to all those people who like to run around complaining that people only sue for money, admitting your mistake, fixing it (as much as possible) and explaining how you are going to keep that mistake from happening again, causes almost everyone to settle (for much less than they might have gotten from a suit).
The number of malpractice filings against the University of Illinois has dropped by half since it started its program just over two years ago, said Dr. Timothy B. McDonald, the hospital’s chief safety and risk officer. In the 37 cases where the hospital acknowledged a preventable error and apologized, only one patient has filed suit. Only six settlements have exceeded the hospital’s medical and related expenses.
36 of 37 just wanted the error fixed and assurances that the hospital would work to make sure it didn’t happen again (and who even knows what the factors were in the 1 remaining case – maybe they just didn’t believe the hospital had proven enough change).
Malpractice lawyers say that what often transforms a reasonable patient into an indignant plaintiff is less an error than its concealment, and the victim’s concern that it will happen again.
The same thing can certainly be said about sexual assault cases. By the nature of Title IX cases, they can’t be filed unless the university has ignored concerns that have been brought to their attention or they’ve failed to follow basic safety precautions. People file these suits to try to force their college or university (or K-12 system) to care – but how much cheaper and easier would it be for everyone if schools could learn what the medical community, it seems, is finally starting to learn? Be more careful, from the beginning. Respond with genuine concern for those you fail and make real efforts to improve your systems so the same mistake doesn’t happen again. Be open and clear about your policies and procedures and how they were followed in each case. Not every rape can be prevented, but we know how to prevent a lot of them, and universities are going to be facing a growing pile of expensive lawsuits because they are not doing everything they can. So why not step up now, rather than in a few decades, and spare your students and your universities the pain of more sexual assaults and more lawsuits?
