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.

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Wow. The Minaret, the student newspaper at the University of Tampa, has a really impressive response to a major on-campus rape accusation. They did an entire section of the school’s paper, clearly requiring weeks of work, trying to move the campus conversation beyond the specific details of the incident into a broader investigation of rape on college campuses.

Start with A Challenge to Our Readers, which lays out the decisions that the student staff made in terms of how they reported on the allegations and their aftermath and in terms of how they tried to frame the larger issues at stake.

Therefore, we challenge our readers to grapple with the many issues involved with this story as we’ve grappled with them. We made a prolonged and conscious effort to engage with all aspects of the story, and not to rush to judgment. We hope that our readers will do the same.

Though we apologize that a prolonged investigation has caused further anguish to those involved, we hope we’ve put forth our best effort to present a holistic package that encourages reflection and introspection rather than stereotyping and rash judgments. But it will be all for nothing if the greater issues are lost in a wave of name-calling and choosing sides.

Try to reflect upon the broader picture, and what it might mean for UT if 162 of its students are indeed sexually assaulted this year, as national averages imply. The person on whom you are passing judgment is likely to be a friend, a loved one, a classmate or even yourself.

The Editor’s Note on the article about what sexual assault is suggests the seriousness with which these students approached understanding rape on college campuses.

In preparing for this special investigation, The Minaret obtained a copy of the police report from public records, and interviewed the victim by e-mail and once in person, though she remained anonymous throughout the process. We also interviewed Callaway in person, but he declined three follow-up attempts. Additionally, we interviewed dozens of students, a prosecutor, a former TPD officer, the athletic director, Monnie Wertz, Gina Firth, Mike Gilmer and Dean of Students Bob Ruday. We read through hundreds of pages of related student newspaper and academic articles. However, we recognize that there are still untapped and underutilized sources. Therefore, we encourage people to post thoughtful comments on our website, theminaretonline.com and also to utilize our discussion boards.

Then please go on to read the rest of the article. It makes me want to cry, it is so thoughtful, careful, nuanced, respectful, and well-done. This is what college is supposed to be, a chance to really stretch your intellectual muscles and grapple with the hard questions slowly and in-depth. After carefully laying out the relevant Florida state law and the University of Tampa’s policy on consent, Steve Knauss comes to the real conclusion

Our students, and men in particular, should be motivated to act respectfully with women not because of a fear of punishment or as a nod to an antiquated patriarchal system, but rather because of a dignified ethical standard, simply the way one good, decent human being should treat another.

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