Story highlights The groups say the department's guidance under DeVos had produced a "chilling effect" on survivors coming forward

In September 2017, DeVos reversed an Obama-era policy on how campus violence allegations are handled

Washington (CNN) A group of civil rights advocacy groups filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Education Department and its secretary, Betsy Devos, challenging the department's move last year to roll back Obama-era guidelines on how colleges and universities should handle sexual assault and sexual violence.

In 2011, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights said that colleges should use the "preponderance of the evidence," the lowest standard of proof, when judging sexual violence cases under Title IX, the federal law that protects people from sexual discrimination in education or other programs receiving federal aid. In September 2017, the Education Department said that colleges and universities could abandon that guidance and use a higher standard, "clear and convincing evidence."

At that time, the Education Department said that the Obama-era rules "created a system that lacked basic elements of due process and failed to ensure fundamental fairness."

In a press conference outside the Department of Education on Thursday, leaders of the groups challenged the change, saying that the Obama-era policy included critical protections for survivors of sexual assault, and that the Department's guidance under DeVos had produced a "chilling effect" on survivors coming forward.

Stacy Malone, the executive director of the Victim Rights Law Center, said that before Obama issued the 2011 guidance, sexual assault survivors "did not feel like they had a voice on the own campus." Since the Education Department rescinded that guidance, she said, survivors are back at square one.

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