In the same week that jurors in Polk County were hearing how a gawking Iowa Senate staffer taunted female co-workers about their sex lives and made them look at a naked woman's picture on his computer, the top civil rights official in the U.S. Department of Education was suggesting most victims alleging college sexual abuse lie.

In the first instance, the jurors served up justice, awarding plaintiff Kirsten Anderson $2.2 million in damages for the hostile workplace environment she encountered in the Iowa Statehouse before losing her job — evidently for complaining.

But in the nation's capital, the acting head of the Education Department's office for civil rights, of all places, was sending a very different message about how it now perceives sexual abuses. Candice Jackson suggested to The New York Times that 90 percent of campus sexual-assault investigations are instigated by vindictive former girlfriends after getting drunk, having consensual sex and later breaking up with the alleged culprits.

Jackson has apologized and her boss, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, forgave her. But surely someone in her job would know better than to buy into vengeful ex-girlfriend stereotypes put out by accused men. She also would know from the Obama doctrine she's charged with enforcing that sexual consent cannot be considered granted by someone who's drunk. Statistics show false rape allegations account for only 2 percent to 10 percent of the total, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

Jackson has even called women accusing President Donald Trump of assault and harassment "fake victims" — hardly the language you'd expect of someone in charge of compliance against sexual assault and harassment.

In her Times interview, Jackson was complaining about the more rigorous campus sexual-assault investigations required since 2011 by former President Barack Obama under Title IX. That's the federal law against sex discrimination in educational institutions. She said, "the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.' "

Was it ignorance, or did it come out of a political agenda? Jackson, who has spoken of being a rape survivor herself, apologized for being flippant. Public officials may be forgiven an occasional tasteless joke or intemperate observation. But her broader comments suggest a deliberate effort to minimize campus sexual assaults and scale back the requirements by hyping the narrative of men being falsely accused.

If so, should she be in charge of enforcing civil rights laws in education? Then again, Jackson's boss DeVos neither attended nor sent her children to public schools and has pushed for public money to follow kids to private schools through vouchers.

Obama's 2011 directive under Title IX was in response to concerns that colleges and schools weren’t doing enough to prevent and respond to sexual assault allegations, which are already chronically under-reported. One in five women and about 6 percent of men will be the victim of an attempted or completed sexual assault while in college, according to a report commissioned by the National Institute of Justice. Obama threatened to cut federal funds to institutions that didn't comply.

The directive said the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal convictions and previously used by colleges and universities should be replaced by a preponderance-of-evidence one.

No one wants to see someone wrongfully accused and punished. That's why the more thorough investigations Obama implemented are necessary. But schools and universities are not courts of law with the power to convict and imprison offenders. Their sanctions are limited to the institution, and their responsibility is to keep students safe.

Jackson has already taken steps to undercut the regulations and has signaled her intent to scale back the requirement that investigators identify systemic issues and classes of victims and accused people. She claims hundreds of investigations remain open only because investigators were instructed to keep looking after finding no violations. That is vigorously denied by her predecessor, Catherine Lhamon, who said her office had discovered “jaw-dropping degrees of noncompliance” with sexual assault law.

Also, before the Obama directive, little attention had been paid to the sexual abuses in K-12 schools, where it can be pervasive, as a Register series documented last year. One in four girls is sexually abused before age 18. In the western Iowa community of Treynor, multiple complaints had been made but were ignored over the years against a teacher and girls' softball coach. The superintendent's own son was allowed to be alone with females at school after police ordered he not be in response to multiple allegations. Neither man is still there.

Even with tougher standards, compliance can be spotty. A survey of 25 Iowa school districts reported on by my colleague Lee Rood last October showed employees in charge of enforcing Title IX often had little to no training. In smaller districts, superintendents were often in charge of enforcement despite potential conflicts of interest when the alleged offenders were staff or students. About a third of the districts surveyed said they kept none of the required records on reported sexual assaults or how they had been handled.

The jurors in Anderson's lawsuit didn't play politics with sexual assault. They compensated her and sent a clear message that workplace sexual harassment will not go unpunished. Regrettably, federal education officials are sending a very different message to schools and colleges, where students are especially vulnerable.

You don't want to think this reflects a shift in mindset intended to minimize sexual assaults, but you have to wonder. DeVos reports to a president who has bragged of groping women he didn't know.

Rekha Basu is an opinion columnist for The Des Moines Register. Contact: rbasu@dmreg.com Follow her on Twitter @RekhaBasu and at Facebook.com/ColumnistRekha. Her 2013 book, "Finding Her Voice: A collection of Des Moines Register columns about women's struggles and triumphs in the Midwest," is available at ShopDMRegister.com/FindingHerVoice