This divide is most evident in state legislation. Red states like North Dakota and North Carolina have passed legislation to protect the rights of the accused, requiring that all students have lawyers in disciplinary hearings. The Blue states of California, Connecticut, Illinois, and New York, on the other hand, have all passed “yes means yes” legislation, which strongly favors victims’ rights. These latter laws mandate that, in order for sex to be consensual on college campuses, both parties need to explicitly provide consent.

As a national issue, debates over how to handle college sexual assault has always been at least mildly partisan. As Katharine Baker, a professor at the Chicago-Kent School of Law who focuses on sexual violence, pointed out, women’s advocacy groups and the Democratic Party have long had a “decent” coalition. “Women’s advocacy groups are generally concerned with protecting rape victims, so we see Democrats interested in protecting them, too,” she said in an interview.

On the right, Baker notes, many social conservatives see college sexual assault as an unfortunate repercussion of increased sexual freedom. “If a woman gets herself into that position, they think it’s her responsibility to get herself out of it.” And by extension, according to Baker, that makes them less likely to endorse policies that favor alleged victims over those who’ve been accused. Republicans are more likely to believe these college cases should be handled exclusively by the criminal-justice system—a stance victims’-rights activists adamantly oppose, as only a tiny fraction of sexual assaults reported to the police are ever taken on by a prosecutor.

When it was introduced, Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination at any education institution that receives government funding, applied primarily to gender discrimination in athletics. It wasn’t until 1994 when the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) introduced the idea that the law also applied to college sexual assault, effectively giving it the authority to investigate how universities respond to it. Soon after that, in part because of pressure from feminist activists frustrated by police inaction on the issue, it announced that Title IX required universities to adjudicate sexual-assault cases. But for years, that guidance didn’t actually change much on campuses; the Education Department only got involved in a few cases, and no political campaign, including President Obama’s in 2008, included the issue in its platform.

“This was still an era in which student crime victims were culturally conditioned to report to the police, not to a campus bureaucrat (if they reported at all),” said KC Johnson, author of The Campus Rape Frenzy, which argues that the Obama-era policies led to unwarranted panic around the issue of college sexual assault. “There were also few accusers' rights organizations pushing the issue at the time, so there was very little public or media awareness.”