By Maggie Mulvihill, Joe Bergantino and BU Journalism students Sarah Favot and Jaime Lutz

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Officials at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this week acknowledged that they allowed a student who confessed to raping a friend on campus last fall, a felony, to remain enrolled and avoid significant discipline.

The decision to give the student a deferred suspension was an error that has led to a change in the flagship university’s disciplinary procedures, according to Jean Kim, vice chancellor for student affairs and campus life.

The case is symbolic of what victims and the advocates and lawyers who represent them in the college disciplinary process contend is a widespread failure of schools to issue tough sanctions against perpetrators.

More than 240 sexual assault reports to campus security at New England colleges resulted in few tough sanctions for perpetrators, despite millions in federal funding flowing into those schools aimed, in part, at holding students found responsible accountable for the crimes, newly obtained U.S. Justice Department data shows.

Just four expulsions were issued between 2003 and 2008, the most recent year available, for sexual assaults reported by ten campuses funded by the DOJ to combat violence against women, an investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University has found.

A DOJ study has found that one in five women will be sexually assaulted before they graduate. The FBI estimates rape is falsely reported less than eight percent of the time.

The schools provided the data as part of a campus grant program overseen by the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women.

Data from college disciplinary proceedings is rarely made public. While federal law requires colleges to report disciplinary actions and arrests for crimes on campus, it only applies to violations of drug, alcohol and weapons laws.

The grant recipients in Massachusetts included Salem State College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern, Tufts, and UMass Amherst. Other schools that received grants were the Universities of Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island.

The schools were required to report assault cases in years they received money from the grant, which is designed to strengthen services for female victims of violent crime on campus, including making them more comfortable in reporting rape, developing strategies to prevent the assaults, and effectively using the campus disciplinary process to hold offenders accountable. Massachusetts schools received grants in at most two of the five years.

The Justice Department grant program encourages schools to train campus disciplinary boards to respond effectively to assault charges, including using ‘‘appropriate sanctions, such as expulsion of students’’
who have perpetrated sexual assault.

Schools are not specifically required to tell local police about sexual assaults reported on campus; that decision is left to the victims.

Most states require citizens to report felonies, but most college administrators will not unless the victim wants them to, according to Brett Sokolow, a lawyer with the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management.

Schools that do not hold perpetrators accountable anger advocates.

‘‘It’s a rape; it’s a forcible contact without someone’s consent,’’ said Colby Bruno, an attorney with the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston.

‘‘It’s punishable by up to 20 years in prison, so why is it acceptable on college campuses?’’

In the UMass case, school officials said that a review of their records indicated that the school’s response to the October rape was not appropriate.

The victim, a 2009 graduate who had returned to campus in October to reconnect with friends, said she was stunned to learn in January that her perpetrator had not been more severely punished.

The victim, who did not want to press criminal charges, had filed a complaint with the school in November. The accused student waived his right to a hearing and reported to assistant dean Christina Willenbrock.

Willenbrock gave him the deferred suspension, which puts students on notice that they will be suspended if they violate the university’s rules of conduct again. He was allowed to continue living on campus and to attend classes.

‘‘It never even crossed my mind that he would blatantly get away with rape,’’ said the victim who requested her name be withheld to protect her anonymity. ‘‘I was told that he could lose his housing on campus, get suspended or even expelled.’’

‘‘I now get to live with what this man did to me every single day of my life while he continues on with his day, happy that he got away with a crime,’’ the victim said.

After she complained to the school about its handling of the case, UMass officials reviewed their records and determined that Willenbrock had not sent her disciplinary decision to a superior for approval. That is the standard procedure at the university, Kim said, and they could find no other case in which it had not been followed.

In response, the university has issued written rules requiring this type of upper-level review.

Kim said UMass, however, cannot go back and issue a more serious sanction against the student, who is due to graduate in May.

‘‘Reversing a decision is not an option,’’ Kim said. ‘‘I think it is really unfortunate that this took place, and we are making the adjustment that we need to make.’’

UMass Amherst has a consortium grant, meaning it collects and reports sexual assault information from its campus and from four other colleges: Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith. UMass reported 54 sexual assaults during the five-year period, but only 42 went to review boards. Of that group, 26 were from UMass, with the remainder from the other schools, a UMass spokesman said.

Data from the Justice Department reports are being entered into a national database by researchers at the University of Southern Maine and were shared with investigative reporters as part of a new journalism collaborative being led by the Center for Public Integrity.

School officials said that, despite their best intentions, the problem of campus sexual assault is extremely complex. There are generally no witnesses or physical evidence to prove a victim’s allegation, they said.

During the five-year time period, the schools reported 24 suspensions. An additional 59 sanctions were issued when students were found responsible. The sanctions involved getting counseling, performing community service, writing a letter of ‘‘personal reflection,’’ or staying away from the victim, according to the data and interviews with advocates and attorneys representing victims, school administrators, and judicial conduct officers.

Some New England schools that have received several grants from the Justice Department have not suspended or expelled any student for sexual assault during this time period, the data show. Tufts University, one of those schools, which reported 48 sexual assaults to the Justice Department, has also never issued reprimands, sent the accused in those cases for counseling, or required them to do community service, the data show. Tufts has been given $1.3 million in campus grant funds since 1999, Justice Department records show.

In a written statement, Kim Thurler, Tufts spokeswoman, said the federal statistics do not reflect Tufts’ efforts to combat sex crimes on campus. Thurler said most Tufts students who report sexual assault do not want to pursue discipline, but she declined to provide specific numbers.

She also said sanctions Tufts has taken are not reflected in the Justice Department statistics, such as campus stay-away orders, even though other schools included them in their progress reports. Thurler declined to explain why Tufts did not report those actions to the Justice Department.

Tufts allows students to engage in mediation to settle an allegation of sexual assault, a strategy strongly discouraged by both the Justice Department and the US Department of Education.

‘‘Tufts is committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which all members of our community feel safe and respected,’’ reads a statement from the university.

MIT officials said 10 of the 19 women who reported a sexual assault chose not to pursue campus discipline. An additional four reports were dropped for lack of evidence, the data show. The remaining reports resulted in no sanctions, the Justice Department data show.

‘‘Very few cases get to the Committee on Discipline,’’ said Maryanne Kirkbride, clinical director for campus life. ‘‘We know, in general, it’s incredibly difficult to get victims to come forward, let alone encourage them to pursue charges against their perpetrators on campus or go public and relive the event.’’

Salem State College, which reported eight alleged assaults, issued one suspension and no other form of discipline, according to the federal data. Officials there declined comment.

Northeastern University, which reported 18 alleged assaults, issued one suspension, one expulsion, and one order for counseling. Officials there did not respond to calls seeking comment.

The campus grant program is competitive and schools must show a detailed plan for how they will satisfy the program requirements, such as holding training sessions for administrators on sexual assaults or improving counseling services for victims.

Some New England schools have never applied, such as Boston University, while others have been denied such as Brandeis University, DOJ data shows.

It is victims’ fear of their own schools disciplinary systems that is of deep concern to those who work in the sexual violence field and raises questions about how much impact the federal grant program is having on campus.

“Maybe (MIT) should take a long hard look in the mirror and find out if their process is right for victims,” said Jonathan Kassa, executive director of Security on Campus Inc., a Pennyslvania-based organization dedicated to preventing crime on campus.

The non-profit group was co-founded in 1987 by the parents of Jeanne Clery, who was beaten, raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm room the previous year by another student.

Kassa said the MIT numbers reflect a “culture of silence on campus that may not be supportive of victims.”
“Maybe it is well known that not much will happen and your name will get dragged through the mud,” Kassa said. The vast majority of victims reporting sexual assault at the University of Vermont are dissatisfied with the process, said Cathleen Wilson, executive director of the Women’s Rape Crisis Center.

“These are felony crimes and so, community service, to me and any rational person, does not seem like a logical punishment for a felony sexual assault,” Wilson said.

In fact, reporting her alleged rape is now something Rachel Allen, 23, regrets in some ways because of the harrowing campus disciplinary process she went through at the University of Vermont in 2005.

“It was worse for me having reported it to them than if I would have done nothing,” said Allen, who along with her parents unsuccessfully sued the University of Vermont after she claimed she was date-raped her first week of college in 2005.

That September, Allen, of Peterborough, N.H., said she was invited to a party at the Lambda Iota fraternity house, and began to feel sick after drinking one beer.

The fraternity had been the subject of numerous complaints involving alcohol and UVM had put it on social probation at the time of Allen’s alleged assault. In Allen’s case, a male student said he would walk her home but instead took her to his dorm room where she said she blacked out.

“Then I woke up and he was on top of me,” she said.

Allen said the university badly bungled her effort to get a punishment for what occurred to her by the sudden cancellation of hearings, denying her ability to call witnesses or amend her statement when the alleged perpetrator was allowed to do both, being told no lawyers were allowed when the student she accused submitted an amended statement from a lawyer and having to face the student and his friends at the hearing room.

Allen said she was told she could either sit at the table in the room alongside her alleged perpetrator or sit in a separate room and participate by speaker phone, which she did.

She was given ten minutes to read his lengthy account of the incident and told to submit written questions to the panel to ask during the hearing. But Allen said she “panicked” after seeing her alleged rapist and his friends in the hallway.

“This isn’t just that I have to go into a room and appear before a panel of people. I was raped on this campus,” she said. The hearing panel didn’t ask most of the questions she submitted, she said.
“Their reasoning for why they didn’t ask any other questions was because my questions didn’t make sense,” Allen said. “It was a complete farce.”

The following February, Allen was notified the student was found not responsible for rape, but a no-contact order remained in place.

Allen said she was so scared of encountering her accused rapist she wore scarves and large sunglasses so he wouldn’t recognize her in the dining hall or elsewhere on campus. She suffered from vivid nightmares and panic attacks.

“It was really hard for me to be in school and get up and go to class if I didn’t sleep, or to feel safe at all on the campus,” Allen said. Following Easter break, just a few weeks from final exams, she dropped out of UVM, the only school she applied to. She is now attending college in New York.

“I understand that it’s a difficult thing for a school to address because it’s my word against their word,” Allen said. “But there’s no excuse for the way that it was done. And I know that the way they treated me was the reason I had to withdraw,” she said.

“I was 19,” Allen said. “That was college for me.”

Allen’s family sued UVM without success. The Vermont Supreme Court last year affirmed a lower court decision stating that their daughter had not exhausted her administrative remedies with the school under state law and was not entitled to bring court action.

Allen sued under the state’s Public Accommodations Act, which bans discrimination and harassment at public institutions. The court said because Allen did not complain of harassment to UVM officials, only rape, she had not exhausted all her remedies with the school first before filing a lawsuit.

The decision infuriated her parents, who continue to get a tuition bill of $15,000 for Rachel’s second semester. UVM has refused to release her grades until that bill is paid, they said.

“I think every parent that sends their child off to college assumes, wrongfully, that a college will do the right thing by a student,” said Mary Jo Allen.

“We did a lot of crying. To think that someone hurts your daughter, violates her in that manner and gets away with it and is allowed to stay at the school and graduate as life continues on,” she said.

Her alleged perpetrator, who has since graduated, declined comment when reached at his Vermont office.
Of the ten New England schools that had grants between 2003 and 2008, UVM expelled two students for sexual assault and suspended 11 – more than any other university in the group, the DOJ data shows.

UVM officials said the numbers reflect an aggressive effort to hold perpetrators responsible. As for the Allen case, they said they have improved the disciplinary process since 2005.

“Five years later I think we’ve improved all of those processes,” said UVM Dean of Students David Nestor. “And sometimes unfortunately we do learn from difficult cases.”

Nestor said of the 19 cases of sexual assaults reported during 2003 and 2008, UVM found in favor of the victim 65 percent of time.

“That statistic alone suggests that we are trying to have good systems of justice here,” Nestor said.
Nestor also said he will request the university stop the Allen’s tuition bills.

But even when students are found responsible for sexual assault, the most severe punishment, expulsion, is rarely used, school officials acknowledge.

“Forever is a long time when someone has made a mistake,” said Leslie Williams, director of Judicial and Commuter Affairs at the University of Rhode Island. When asked about the fact that sexual assault is a crime, Williams said: “It is a crime but you could make a mistake by committing a crime.”

URI had 20 reports of sexual assaults between 2003 and 2005 and suspended three students, Williams said. Suspensions range from one to three years on average.

“We make a really strong attempt to hold offenders accountable,” Williams said.

Some university officials said while serious about preventing sexual assaults, they have no authority to penalize an alleged perpetrator if the victim doesn’t want to go through the disciplinary process, which many victims refuse to do.

For instance, at the University of Maine, though there were 22 reports of sexual offenses between 2003 and 2006, only 11 went to the school’s Office of Community Standards, Rights and Responsibilities, said Robert Dana, Vice-President for Student Affairs. Of those 11, four students were found responsible with two getting a “deferred suspension” and counseling. Two others were ordered to go to counseling, perform community service and given a suspension of one to two years, Dana said. Dana is proud of his school’s record of sanctions.

“I am responsible for 12,000 students and the father of three daughters and I can tell you unequivocally there is zero tolerance for sexual assault at the University of Maine.”

Brett Sokolow said a victim’s wishes not to move through the campus conduct system doesn’t absolve schools of the requirement under the law to investigate complaints of sexual assault and take remedial steps, which could include sanctions for violations of the code of conduct.

“Title IX requires all schools to remedy gender-based discrimination when they have notice of it,” Sokolow said. “If a victim says ‘I don’t want a hearing,’ the college still has to do something.”

Sexual assault is considered gender-based discrimination under the law, said Sokolow, an attorney who has been hired by hundreds of schools to help them with their sexual assault policies and procedures.

Sokolow said colleges need to apply a different framework for sexual assaults when adjudicating complaints and can’t treat them like other violations of student conduct codes such as cheating.

“The standards that colleges and universities use in these cases are usually the same as for any other type of campus conduct violation. They haven’t applied a federal civil rights lens to a report of sexual misconduct,” Sokolow said. “This has been a weakness in some college conduct systems for many, many years.”

In fact, colleges outside New England appear to have a more aggressive record of expelling students found responsible for sexual assaults.

Sara Peters, director of the Women’s Center at the University of Tennessee and an advocate for victims of sexual assault, attributed her school’s relatively high rate of campus discipline to the school administration’s emphasis on holding perpetrators accountable. During the five years when the school participated in the DOJ grant program there were 16 reported cases of sexual assault on campus, resulting in six expulsions, three suspensions and 2 reprimands of students. The six expulsions, in 2005, were related to the same sexual assault incident, Peters said. “We’re very lucky in that we’ve had the full support of the administration in pursuing sexual assault cases,” Peters said. “They’ve never said, ‘Let’s sweep this under the carpet’ — just the opposite. There’s also support for victims to come forward: I serve as a victim’s advocate, so I’m with them every step of the way.”

Peters said the university has also conducted extensive training of its judicial board and judicial hearing officers, who hear sexual assault cases and dole out campus discipline. Cases are decided on a “preponderance of the evidence,” instead of the often harder-to-prove standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said. “Sexual assault cases often come down to a he-said, she-said scenario, so we believe a preponderance of the evidence is a fair and appropriate standard,” she said.Peters added that once a victim files a complaint with either the police or the dean of students, the complaint is fully investigated, even if the victim decides to drop the matter. “We continue to investigate, and if we find other evidence, we will pursue the case,” she said.

Stephanie Abend, a 2009 Tufts graduate who worked to revise the sexual assault policies as part of a student group before she graduated, said Tufts is concerned about its image rather than the safety of students.

“Tufts has a reputation that they want to protect. Granted, sexual assault happens on all campuses. It doesn’t make Tufts a bad school if it happens at Tufts,” Abend said. “The only way that you can fight sexual violence is by talking about it, by holding perpetrators responsible. Because Tufts, I think, is afraid to do that, they are now earning a reputation, in my opinion, as a school that doesn’t care about its students as much as some other schools might.”

Nearly half of UMass’s 26 reports resulted in sanctions, spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said. UMass-Amherst suspended five students, ordered two to attend counseling and punished four others by issuing sanctions such as being put on probation, paying a fine or being removed from campus housing, Blaguszewski said. Blaguszewski also cited statistics showing sexual assaults at U-Mass Amherst are declining. The average time for a suspension was a year, he said.

“UMass Amherst has a variety of programs in place to reduce violent crimes against women, offering specialized training, support groups, workshops, events counseling and online services,” the UMass-Amherst statement reads.

In last October’s campus rape, the victim said she was not kept informed about the process after she struggled with her decision to report the assault.

Emails and calls to various school officials were not returned and in January, she received an email update from Willenbrock.

“(male student) did come in and took responsibility for the incident. He was then placed on university sanction, deferred suspension, for the rest of his time at UMass. At this point, the case has been completed with the university,” the email states.

Of equal concern, besides holding perpetrators accountable, is that reports of campus sexual assaults remain exceedingly low, said researchers, lawyers and victims’ advocates.

The more than 240 reports of sexual assaults at 10 large colleges over a five-year period doesn’t reflect the reality of campus rape they said.

“The numbers are so unrepresentative. It tells you that the process is not good,” said Bernice Sandler, a Senior Scholar at the Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington, DC.

Sandler helped draft and push through the federal legislation in the 1970’s which bans discrimination on college campuses known as “Title IX.”

According to the most recent statistics on the 10 New England college’s websites, there are more than 81,000 females on campus. If the DOJ study is correct, then over 16,000 will have been sexually assaulted before graduation.

While the number of sexual assaults the schools disclosed are not confirmed cases, advocates and victims said it is unlikely a student would make a false report of rape, citing the low FBI statistic for false reporting.
“It puts you in a pretty vulnerable position to have to talk to anybody about, to any stranger, about your sex life,” said Allen, who struggled for weeks with her decision to report her alleged rape. “It was a huge undertaking to even try to communicate with people about being raped.”

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University is a collaborative codirected by Joe Bergantino and Maggie Mulvihill. Other contributors to this report were Andrea LePain, Lisa Chedekel, Sarah Favot, and Jaime Lutz. Other partners are WBUR, New England Cable News, El Planeta, and New England Ethnic News.