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Chapter One: Push for policy D
Survivors advocate for increased protections
rip. Drip. Drip. Her cold brew iced coffee sat on the table of the conference room, sweating. For hours, droplets of condensation pooled around the Starbucks cup as she faced her alleged rapist. The former JMU student, who’s requested anonymity and will be referred to as CW, remembers the sand. The way it infiltrated her eyes, her nose, her mouth as her assaulter pushed her further into the ground. He eventually got up and started walking away — sex on the beach “isn’t that good, anyway,” she remembers him saying. Jenna, a current JMU student using a pseudonym to protect her identity, remembers the blood after her assaulter left — five or six toilet papers’ worth “that were drenched in blood.” “People always say I’m lying about that,” she said, but “it was not my period, I can promise you. It was stinging. It was bleeding.” Vanessa Nkurunziza, a senior at JMU, was on spring break when a man came up to her and followed her back to her room. Sarah Butters, who withdrew from JMU, was also on spring break when her assault happened — the three men filmed it. And for Brooke, a current JMU student using a pseudonym to protect her identity, it happened at a fraternity party her freshman year, when a senior pressured her to go home with him. When CW and her assaulter started kissing, they fell down. He began asking about sex. “I don’t want to have sex,” she said to him, but he continued to pressure her. “The next thing I remember, it was the assault,” CW said. “I’m on the ground [and] can’t move, and I was just completely frozen and experienced, you know” — she hesitated to say it — “rape.” In the hours after her assault, CW walked through the hotel, crying. Her assaulter would later be found not responsible by JMU. The Breeze asked CW’s alleged assaulter for a comment via Facebook — he never responded. Jenna reported her assault to JMU’s Victim Advocate office but never filed a formal complaint. Brooke never went to the university with what happened.
None of these women are alone in their stories.
A waiting game
More than one in four college-aged women will experience non-consensual sexual contact during their time in college, according to data from The Chronicle of Higher Education. At JMU, that’s approximately 2,800 undergraduate women. Sexual misconduct is an endemic problem across the entire U.S. higher education system — JMU isn’t alone, or unique. Approximately 176 out of every 1,000 undergraduate women in college experienced “completed sexual assault,” according to a 2015 study from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Approximately 54 out of every 1,000 undergraduate women experienced rape, according to the same BJS study study. A study conducted by the U.S. Justice Department in 20 0 0 stated that “college administrators might be disturbed to learn that for every 1,000 women attending their institutions, there may well be 35 incidents of rape in a given academic year. For a campus with 10,000 women, this would mean the number of rapes could exceed 350.” At JMU, those instances are handled in part by the Title IX Office, which tries to make JMU “a learning, working and living environment free from gender and sex-based discrimination including sexual harassment and sexual misconduct,” according to its website. The name of the office refers to Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools that recieve federal funding; sexual CW said she was on a study abroad trip when she was assaulted. Courtesy of CW assault and harassment fall under that banner. adjudication, an alternative resolution or supportive measures, JMU is a public university, receiving about $115 million in state among other possibilities. funding to its general fund for the 2021-22 fiscal year. At JMU, case files are generated by the Title IX Office anytime When someone goes to the Title IX Office at JMU and files the office is informed of an incident of sexual harassment or a formal complaint, they’re offered several options, including sexual assault. The gap between case files and adjudicated cases is growing steadily wider — in the 2022 fiscal year, 74 case files were generated, yet only three cases were adjudicated. After filing her report with Title IX in December 2017, CW chose to adjudicate and move forward with a formal case review — a hearing — in the hopes of getting her assaulter off campus. The adjudication process is run by the Office of Student Accountability and Restorative Practices (OSARP), JMU’s judicial wing. In the following months, CW worked with an adviser, who guided her through case procedure, and a JMU victim advocate, who provided other resources and emotional support. Both the complainant and the respondent are given the opportunity to bring in an “adviser of choice,” according to Title IX policy documents. While JMU doesn’t provide advisers itself to the parties involved for most of the case investigation and review processes, the university will provide an adviser for crossexamination if a party doesn’t have one. CW waited months to receive an official hearing date for her case. It wasn’t scheduled until March, nine months after her alleged assault. The hearing, which didn’t occur until spring break had come and gone, started at 5:30 p.m. and continued until 2 a.m. the next morning, according to CW and records from her case review — nine hours of statements, witnesses and deliberation from the board deciding her case. That night, she sat in a waiting room — a separate one from her alleged assaulter — with several friends. Finally, OSARP Director Wendy Lushbaugh showed CW into a small conference room. When she walked in, her alleged assaulter was already there, sitting at one end of a long table. CW and her victim advocate sat at the opposite end. The meeting began with a basic explanation of the hearing procedure. Then came opening statements, all presented to the hearing board for the case review — a group of JMU employees assigned to adjudicate a case based on evidence from both sides. CW went first. She shared her opening statement with The Breeze. The statement, which she wrote out before the hearing, recounts the assault in vivid detail and its effects on her life ever since.
Thursday, March 31, 2022
Case files vs. adjudicated cases (2015-2022)
The Breeze retrieved this data from JMU with a FOIA.
