THE WEIGHT OF TITLE IX

Examining the process and emotional turmoil of reporting sexual assault at MVHS

BY TVISHA GUPTA AND JAMI LIM

Content warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.

The student source in this story is anonymous due to safety reasons and will be referred to as Student A.

It may start as an intimate moment, a reciprocation of affection between two individuals. Other times, the victim is thrust straight into it, a shock they weren’t ever prepared for. Ultimately, the outcome is the same: the feeling of perpetual helplessness, of being destroyed emotionally and physically, of personal violation beyond imagination.

“He started doing what he was doing and making sexual contact with me without asking me,” Student A said. “At first, you kind of sit there in shock, but then I realized what was happening, and I quite physically tried to move away. I tried to turn around and put my hands up, and he literally, like physically, restrained me from trying to get away.” procedures to report sexual assault include providing a written account of the event, any supporting evidence and witness perspectives in a report filed to the police. An investigation commences once law enforcement decides the evidence is sufficient to proceed with pursuing charges against the offender. FUHSD’s Title IX & Gender Equity page defines sexual harassment under Title IX as a list of conducts which, when experienced by a victim, can be reported in a formal complaint. Any person can file a formal complaint to Title IX coordinator Trudy Gross on behalf of a victim and expect prompt investigation provided by the district. According to Assistant Principal Nico Flores, MVHS offers a student safety report — an online form that promises confidentiality and a further response from administration.

Sexual harassment is defined as uninvited sexual conduct, such as sexual advances, verbal harassment and unsolicited sharing of sexual material. Sexual assault includes sexual actions performed intentionally without consent through coercion or forceful measures. Both are included under the federal civil rights law, Title IX, which protects individuals in educational settings from sexual misconduct and sex-based discrimination. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 66% of child sexual abuse victims are between 12 and 17 years old, and 57,329 children were victims of sexual abuse in 2016 alone.

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One of the first steps in the reporting process is to involve legal enforcement, and an officer will typically question a victim about the exact events. This process, known as Trauma-Informed Victim Interviewing, is a key step in the investigation, as it helps establish the facts and circumstances of the reported sexual assault. However, the invasive nature of the questions, regardless of precautions taken to reduce their impact, can cause victims to relive their trauma and experience emotional distress.

“A few of them were exact. Not just exact placement of hands or body or whatever, but like, ‘how many, how much pressure?’ That was the part that was really hard to deal with.”

Penalty for sexual assault in California is determined by the Determinate Sentencing Law, which

In the state of California, standard

“It was really a terrible process because you have to sit there with somebody you don’t know at all and they ask you all these really invasive questions about every single detail of what happened,” Student A said.

MVHS enforces penalties depending on the severity of assault cases. Most measures are put in place to create a comfortable environment for the victim post-assault, such as changing the perpetrator’s class schedules to distance them from the victim or even moving them to a different school. Flores believes the priority course of action from the district is not organizing justice but rather ensuring the victim’s safety from their offender.

“A lot of times we hear, ‘We don’t want them to get in trouble, we want them to stop,’” Flores said. “The

For Student A, the final decisions of their case made them feel as though the MVHS administration had “failed survivors of sexual assault.”

“In the end, they sent [me] an email that said he’s been removed from the class that you share,” Student A said. “And additionally, another teacher that we shared with the science class, he’s no longer allowed to be in the tutorial of that teacher to reduce the chance of [me] running into him. When you’re a survivor of something, you want to know if your perpetrator is being held accountable at all. Moving him out of my class is like someone getting an elective changed.”

One of the primary reasons that sexual offense cases may not see much action on them is a lack of evidence. According to RAINN, only 13 out of every 1,000 cases of rape are referred to a prosecutor, and only seven of those on average lead to a conviction. A lack of evidence may lead to difficulty proving the case or identifying the offender.

“When the reporting process was happening, they kept talking about the fact that there were no witnesses or no evidence, but who [is] going around sexually assaulting people while there are witnesses and evidence around?” Student A said. “Everything that falls under sexual assault, and that isn’t explicit rape, how else is someone going to get evidence of that?”

According to RAINN, those who have experienced sexual violence are at increased risk for psychological, emotional and physical effects, including depression and posttraumatic stress disorder.

“It happened within the last few weeks of junior year, and the remainder of that year was absolute hell for me,” Student A said. “After what he had done, it kind of warped my entire perception, like he’s going to come out and get me if I do something about this. I would have to leave during the classes and have panic attacks in the bathroom.”

In an attempt to increase awareness about sexual harassment and assault, Lurie has developed a lesson on recognizing and combating sexual misconduct and, more recently, a session addressing student rights under Title IX. The lesson urges students to reach out in the case of sexual misconduct and emphasizes the district’s commitment to responding to allegations. Lurie continues efforts to expand community-wide recognition and conversation around the topic of Title IX and reporting sexual assault, including the distribution of advisory newsletters to parents accessible in multiple languages.

Student A encourages victims to report their experiences regardless of the emotional difficulty and the potentiality of not getting or hearing about the desired outcome, for even the smallest of changes in a schedule or class environment can make the coping process easier.

“For those going through the same experience, one thing that my friends told me that really helped me was just reinforcing that it’s not your fault,” Student A said. “Sometimes people say that it’s because of what clothes I was wearing, because I didn’t explicitly say no, because beforehand, I had feelings for him. So maybe he thought he could just do whatever, but those are obviously not the case. It’s still not your fault.”