September 2009 marked the 15 year anniversary of President Bill Clinton signing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) into law. As the date approached, it became clear that we needed to do more than a press release or event. This was a moment in time for the Department of Justice to send a clear signal that the issue of violence against women is a priority.

That is why we at the department launched a year-long initiative to raise public awareness, build stronger coalitions among federal, state, local and tribal communities, and redouble efforts to end sexual assault, domestic and dating violence, and stalking for men, women and children across the country.

Far too many communities in the United States and around the world are affected by this issue and it must stop. One of the messages that we have sought to carry throughout the 15th anniversary of VAWA is that sexual and domestic violence are not just issues for the victim, or his or her family. They are everyone’s problem. And anyone dealing with sexual violence on a college campus today knows that this is a reality.

Read the rest of the story here

We found this very interesting article by Jaclyn Friedman, who talks about the issue and recounts her personal experience as a sexual assault survivor:

I’d heard horror stories about victims being grilled in excruciating detail about their sexual histories, as if anything a woman may have done in her past made her fair game to be raped in the present. But I got lucky on that front: My assailant agreed to plead no contest to the charges if I agreed to hear him out. So I spent a dark hour and a half in a dean’s office, barely breathing while the guy who’d violated me wept about his family history of alcoholism. A few days later, the dean of students called me to say that the guy had been expelled for a year (the amount of time I had left at school) but that I mustn’t speak of the case — or the punishment — to anybody.

Grateful that I would no longer have to see my attacker around campus, I didn’t think to question the sentence or the muzzle at the time. But as I began to heal, I encountered survivors of on-campus sexual violence who had been taken even less seriously than I had by the system. Gag order or no, I began to speak out about my experience and advocate for change. And then, without warning, my assailant reappeared on campus, turning my last semester into a haze of fear, hiding and post-traumatic stress.

Read the complete Washington Post story.

The Center for Public Integrity has added some new articles to their report about college sexual assault.

Here’s a sampling of some of the interesting articles:

‘Undetected Rapists’ on Campus: A Troubling Plague of Repeat Offenders

An Uncommon Outcome at Holy Cross

From the report:

But official data from the schools themselves doesn’t begin to reflect the scope of the problem. And student victims face a depressing litany of barriers that often either assure their silence or leave them feeling victimized a second time, according to a nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. Many victims don’t report at all, because they blame themselves, or don’t identify what happened as sexual assault; one national study found that more than 95 percent of students who are sexually victimized do not report to police or campus officials. Local criminal justice authorities regularly shy away from such cases, because they are “he said, she said” disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol. That frequently leaves students to deal with campus judiciary processes so shrouded in secrecy that they can remain mysterious even to their participants.

Click here to read the complete report by Kristen Lombardi