To address the first of these concerns, Kiss said, institutions must work toward ensuring the prevention-and-awareness education is ongoing throughout students’ time in college. The reality is that a one-time program at the beginning of the college experience—a time when students can become overwhelmed by the amount of new information being thrown at them—may prove to be ineffective or forgotten. Campus SaVE does instruct colleges to invest in ongoing prevention and awareness strategies, but the challenging part is figuring out how to do that. “The parameters of [the Act] are broad,” Peterson said, explaining that it lacks specific prescriptions on some requirements. The Department of Education has crafted guidance to complement the Act’s mandates, but adapting new regulations into campus-specific policies can be tricky for school administrators.

That’s where organizations like Know Your IX, the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence (NAESV), the Clery Center, and dozens of other national and local advocacy groups come into play: They give higher-education institutions access to various resources, such as simplified, common-language interpretations of relevant policy and on-call experts who can provide direction. Their ultimate hope is to help schools implement the most effective policies that will reduce the risk for violence on campus.

But those efforts, too, come with there own challenges. The work of many these organizations is being frustrated by some new legislative battles on the hill, according to Peterson, who oversees Know Your IX’s lobbying efforts. Two pieces of legislation, the Fair Campus Act and the Safe Campus Act (sponsored by Republican House representatives Pete Sessions and Matt Salmon, respectively) were recently introduced in congress in response to concerns among some lawyers and legislators that the current approach to collegiate sexual-assault adjudication—which is based on the DOE Office for Civil Rights’s (OCR) widely cited “Dear Colleague” letter from 2011— fails to provide defendants adequate due process.

The letter has directed schools to adopt a “preponderance of evidence” standard, which simply requires that evidence show that it’s more likely than not that the respondent committed the offense. Campus SaVE does not codify this standard into law (as a result of opposition some Republican lawmakers), but OCR policy is binding for schools that receive federal funding. Campus SaVE did increase the responsibility of schools to fairly adjudicate claims by including language that allows both parties to have counsel present and requires the arbitrator to have undergone specific training for handling dating and sexual violence claims.

But proponents of the Fair Campus and Safe Campus acts don’t think that’s enough. Because college rape cases are almost never taken to criminal court—like the Vanderbilt University trial I reported on while a student there—they want to see more stringent protections for students who face penalties from their college. Both bills seek to more closely align adjudication standards with those applied in the criminal-justice system: Each would do away with the preponderance-standard mandate—allowing schools to individually choose what threshold to apply—and allow both the defendant and complainant to have access to all evidence being used in disciplinary hearings. And the Safe Campus Act would go as far as to prevent colleges from investigating claims of sexual violence unless the complainant also reports to law enforcement. (Currently, schools must investigate every claim via a Title IX coordinator on campus based on the information they receive, whether or not law enforcement is involved.)