By Penny M. Venetis

The country is having yet another #MeToo moment, as is grapples with allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape a 15-year-old girl when he was in high school. Rather than engaging in a long-overdue discussion about sexual assault among teens, the Trump administration is forging ahead with regulations that would significantly diminish the rights of female students who are victims of sexual abuse.

Sexual assault in our schools is real, from elementary school to high school to college. Multiple studies, including one released by the U.S. Justice Department in 2016, found that 1 in 4 college women will be sexually assaulted.

Indeed, this time in the calendar year is considered the "red zone" by United Educators, a company that insures colleges and universities (and by no means a feminist mouthpiece). "Red zone" is the period between freshman orientation and Thanksgiving when most college rape and sexual assault occurs -- most victims are freshman women. After analyzing claims data from hundreds of campuses nationwide, United Educators study found that 99 percent of the perpetrators are young men, with athletes and fraternity members more likely to engage in gang and serial rapes.

Yet, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is reshaping Title IX -- a 1972 statute requiring equality in education for females that has been interpreted for 40 years as requiring schools to protect female students who are victims of sexual assault and harassment -- to make it more difficult for victims of sexual abuse to seek relief.

This is tragic. I have represented dozens of young women who were sexually harassed and assaulted in schools and on campuses. My clients were ostracized by their abusers' friends and teammates. They were dissuaded by campus police and college administrators from filing disciplinary complaints and criminal charges. Schools denied their requests for deadline extensions, even thought they had been victims of violence. In short, victims of student-on-student sexual abuse have a hard time participating in academic and extracurricular activities.

Even though United Educators found that only 43 percent of students found responsible for sexual assault are expelled, underlying DeVos' regulations is the notion that male students accused of sexual assault have been mistreated and that Title IX needs to protect their rights. Indeed, the regulations contain a new provision stressing that Title IX equally protects the rights of both the victims and the accused perpetrators. Additionally, the new regulations explicitly state that schools can discipline students for bringing false abuse claims -- thus assuming that girls make up rape charges -- and that the accusers' credibility should always be questioned.

One of the major changes proposed by DeVos is that school disciplinary procedures for sex abuse complaints must be more like criminal courtrooms and offer significant due-process rights to the accused students, including the right to cross-examine the victim. This level of confrontation is not available for any other type of infraction in the school context, including cheating, stealing or violating a school's code of conduct.

The U.S. Constitution's Due Process Clause protects against government infringement on "life, liberty, or property" without appropriate due process of law. Court after court has held that students who attend private colleges, which include almost all of the nation's most elite colleges and universities, have limited due-process rights in administrative disciplinary hearings because administrators at private schools are not "government actors" under the law, and therefore cannot violate a student's due-process rights. Students attending public schools have a higher level of due process, but that process is nothing resembling the process that is due in a court of law.

And that makes sense. People afforded the highest due-process protections are individuals being tried for crimes, because the government has the ability to imprison them or seek the death penalty (depriving them of liberty or life), which are constitutionally guaranteed. However important a college degree is to lifelong success, it is not a right, and is not constitutionally mandated. No student has the right to attend a particular school. Students who are suspended or expelled for sexual assault are not thrown in jail by their schools. They are merely told to leave campus. They are at liberty to attend college elsewhere.

Another provision of the DeVos regulations is that schools may adopt a higher standard of review ("clear and convincing evidence") for sexual abuse cases than for any other disciplinary actions. This higher standard is not supported, mentioned or even recommended by a single court that has reviewed the constitutionality of campus sexual assault disciplinary proceedings.

There is no reason to toss aside the "preponderance of the evidence" analysis (in use during the Obama administration). The "preponderance of the evidence" standard is not a cockamamie standard invented by schools to coddle women or to treat male students unfairly.

Rather, it is used in all civil litigation, in state and federal courts throughout the country. In every civil case in this country, all a plaintiff needs to win is to convince a jury or judge by just over 50 percent that the party being sued legally caused harm. Indeed, on a daily basis, colleges use the preponderance of the evidence standard for a multitude of other disciplinary procedures that lead to expulsion (including cheating and plagiarism) without anyone raising a fuss or crying constitutional foul.

College disciplinary proceedings are far from perfect and most certainly need improvement. But the solution is not to make it harder for victims of sexual assault to stay in school for fear of sharing classes and campus space with those who violated them.

It makes absolutely no sense to give students who are accused of perpetrating sex offenses greater protections than their peers who crib answers from their classmates.

Penny M. Venetis is the Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise Scholar and clinical professor of law at Rutgers Law School, as well as the director of the Rutgers Human Rights Clinic. She has represented of dozens of girls and women who were sexually abused by their fellow students.

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