Even Date-Rape Complainant Says Men Are Treated Unfairly in Proceedings

WASHINGTON - July 22, 2014 - PRLog -- WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 22, 2014): A female student - whose complaint that Swarthmore violated Title IX by ignoring her report about rape triggered major changes in how the school handles date-rape cases - has now come out in strong support of a male student whose law suit is challenging those very procedures as unfair, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

        Banzhaf has been studying a new legal movement in which males found guilty of date rape are then successfully suing their colleges, sometimes under the same Title IX which triggered the problem.

        Moreover, even those who are sympathetic to the problem of campus date rape, and are in charge of the campus adjudication process, are now recognizing that it can be unfair if not illegal.

        For example, the director of the Association of Title IX Administrators bluntly warned that some male students may have been improperly penalized.

        "Some boards and panels still can't tell the difference between drunk sex and a policy violation," he wrote. "We are making Title IX plaintiffs out of these men."

        In the Swarthmore case, "John Doe" and "Jane Row" had two sexual encounters in 2011 which did not involve intercourse.  Subsequently, the male and female had intercourse, which the woman agrees was consensual.

        But, 19 months after the fact, she suddenly claimed that the two earlier episodes had been coerced.  The school originally thoroughly investigated and then cleared the man in January 2013 without even filing disciplinary charges.

        However, sometime thereafter, the student newspaper published articles charging that women who reported rape felt revictimized by the college's failure to take their complaints seriously, and Mia Ferguson's highly publicized Title IX complaint against Swarthmore went public.  Less than two weeks later, Swarthmore told the male, a law student, that they had reopened a complaint filed against him a year earlier.

        Then, after an emotional hearing before a panel made up of faculty, staff, and students, he was expelled.  His attorney charges that the inference is clear.  "To correct one wrong - its past unresponsiveness to female complaints - [Swarthmore] committed another wrong against John based on his gender . . . He was a male accused of sexual misconduct at the wrong time and in the wrong place."  Mia agrees.

        Swarthmore has subsequently changed its adjudication procedures, and now has such cases heard before and decided by a retired judge; a tacit admission, suggests Banzhaf, that its former procedure had serious problems.

        Male students have already used legal action successfully at Brown (2X), Central College, Denison,  Duke (2X) , George Washington, Holy Cross, Occidental, Saint Joseph, University of the South, and Xavier.

       Meanwhile, law suits filed by male students convicted by their universities of rape and/or sexual assault are pending against Bucknell, Cincinnati, Columbia, Delaware State, Depauw, Drew, Kenyon, U of Michigan, Philadelphia U, Swarthmore, Vassar, Williams, and perhaps others.

        “When even rape victims and Title IX administrators admit that men are being convicted unfairly, it’s long past time to consider changing the procedures,” argues Banzhaf.

JOHN F. BANZHAF III, B.S.E.E., J.D., Sc.D.
Professor of Public Interest Law
George Washington University Law School,
FAMRI Dr. William Cahan Distinguished Professor,
Fellow, World Technology Network,
Founder, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
2000 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052, USA
(202) 994-7229 // (703) 527-8418
http://banzhaf.net/ @profbanzhaf