UChicago rarely expels students found responsible for sexual assault, WBEZ analysis finds

Welcome back to Good Day Chicago 910 on your Tuesday morning following reports of two sexual assaults at UChicago frat houses. Students are demanding more sanctions for sexual violence but a new WBEZ analysis finds the university hardly ever expels students who actually commit sexual assault. Between 2007 and 2025 so that's a large span the school expelled seven out of 36 students who had disciplinary hearings for sexual assault. Joining us now is sexual violence researcher Thank you so much for joining us. We really do appreciate it. In an article, you were quoted as saying universities remove students for plagiarism. Why do you think sexual violence is not considered as punishable as plagiarism? The honest answer is just that universities want to protect and defend men. And I say men really intentionally, because when women are accused through these same processes, we don't see the same types of hesitations from schools. In my research, I found that it isn't a lack of evidence. It isn't a he said, she said, but that schools know that men on campus are behaving violently and they just don't want to remove them for that. I want to talk about, you know, the victims in this case because I can't imagine, you know, you've been in this circumstance, the person isn't expelled. I would imagine you would run into them on campus still. What happens to the actual victims who then report these sexual assaults? Well, we know that when survivors have to share a space with their perpetrators on campus, it causes them a great deal of harm. It exacerbates their traumatic symptoms. And in one report, according to Know Your Nine, when victims report to their schools, 39% of them experience some kind of educational disruption, whether that's having to take a leave of absence until their perpetrator graduates or leaving school altogether. We know that sexual assault during college is the best predictor of college women's grades, and it's one of the best predictors that they will drop out or be forced to change a major to get away from their perpetrator. Nicole, how do you recommend universities better support victims in these circumstances? A big part of the answer is removing those perpetrators because we can give victims all the support in the world. But if they have to keep giving up their own educational opportunities to avoid their perpetrators on campus, they're still facing discrimination. They're still facing a smaller college opportunity than their perpetrators or other people on campus are. But in addition to that, something I've seen from a lot of schools in recent years is they've done things like close victim advocacy centers or severely underfund them. So that when victims Thank you. It's harder than ever for students to be able to get the kind of support they need. A lot of Title IX offices are telling victims that they should no longer be able to do things like work out an extension or any other type of accommodation with a professor one-on-one. And instead, Title IX is trying to stand in the way of the kinds of common sense protections the other people on campus have been offering survivors for, honestly, my entire life. Nicole, I want to ask you, I want to go back to the survivors for a second because I don't know if data proves this or not, but I would imagine based on these findings saying that out of 36, seven would have been expelled, that that is what keeps a lot of victims silent. Do we have any research that proves that? Yeah, victims don't necessarily know how unlikely a good outcome is in Title IX. But one of the things that does make them silent and makes them not want to come forward is that when they do try to report, there are two things that happen. One, your average report to a university does nothing. We've been talking about cases that are investigated, but most reports are never investigated. At a lot of schools, at the school I studied for my work, it was less than 20% were even offered even the beginning of the investigation phase. So a lot of the time, survivors aren't staying silent. their schools are just silencing them. But the other thing we find is that when survivors do report, a lot of them refuse an investigation because the process that the schools have put in place is so obviously traumatic and dangerous for them that they say, I can't do this and also graduate. I heard that over and over from survivors in my research. They would say, I wanted an investigation. I wanted my perpetrator off campus, but I didn't want it badly enough to give up my own degree. And I just want to say that a lot of schools will act. As if the reason that their processes are so bad for survivors is because it's required by the federal government. But actually, the Title IX regulations that exist, even those passed by the Trump administration, still give schools a huge amount of discretion to make a better system if they want to. There's nothing in the Title IX regulation at the federal level that requires these processes to take so long, or for schools to refuse to discipline perpetrators. Those are all choices that schools themselves have made, and they are changes they could make tomorrow to fix those things. You know, we wouldn't be talking about this if prevention was more key. And I remember that, you know, when I was in school, I don't know, maybe Tia, you can share a story too, but at the University of Illinois, every freshman student had to go through an orientation on sexual assault. What does that look like? You know, what is a yes? What does a no look like? They gave all of the students. Whistles. We refer to them as rape whistles. I mean, you know, even then. So when we talk about prevention, what do you suggest needs to happen in order for us not to be talking about this in the future? Well, nothing that schools are doing now around prevention works. And we know that because the sexual assault rate on college campuses has not changed since researchers started measuring it over 50 years ago. And when it comes to things like the types of prevention measures you're talking about, researchers know that those are actually dangerous. That things like one time sexual harassment or consent trainings are associated with an increased rate of perpetration on campus. Because when you only have to do a training at first year student orientation, what that tells the perpetrators in the room, is this institution doesn't care about this. I conducted a different study really early in my career where I asked men about their experiences with these types of consent trainings. And they said, I didn't take them seriously. And I wanna be clear, it wasn't because they didn't understand what they were hearing. I found in every study with men and with perpetrators that I've ever conducted that they know when they're committing sexual assault and they know when they are not, they are not confused. And so the entire premise of a consent training is that, These boys just don't know better, and that's not true. In fact, the reason that these consent trainings aren't working is because of what I said, where they just know that the school won't do anything if they get caught. I once interviewed a man who told me, listen. My consent training was at the same time as they told us not to drink alcohol while we were in college and that that was prohibited by school policy. But everyone knows that college students are drinking and even making plans at these very trainings to meet up with each other and drink. It's the same thing with consent trainings. You often see men in the back of a consent training joking about it, sexually harassing their peers, making inappropriate comments, and in the moment nothing happens. They're not disciplined in any way. And so one of the things we're realizing is that response is a really important part of prevention. If you want a prevention training to not fall flat, if you want any kind of prevention intervention to work, people need to know that a school is going to react seriously when violence does happen. The sociological research is really clear. The places where violence doesn't happen are the places where it isn't tolerated. And so a good response is a crucial part of prevention. Real question real quickly for you, Nicole, before we let you go. Who's the oversight body for these universities? You mentioned Title IX and universities, they could follow the proper procedures, but in some cases they're not. Who's the oversight body of them to make sure that they do have an actual plan that they plan, I guess, to roll out in the event that something like this does happen? You have hit the problem right on the head. You figured out exactly what it is. So the oversight body for Title IX is the Department of Education, and Trump in both his first and his second term has very loudly proclaimed that the Department of Education will not accept complaints from survivors whose rights were violated by their schools. And so schools have known that they have carte blanche to treat students however they want. But the other thing I'll say is that that Department of Education oversight mechanism has been weak under other presidents as well, that with the exception of the Obama administration administration, every other president didn't use it either. And so if we're looking at what a good enforcement mechanism would look like, we would really want to see something more similar to the Food and Drug Administration or the FDA, where instead of waiting to see if... Somebody is poisoning our food supply, there are regular inspections, there are regulations that set clear standards, and that the government is really involved in making sure that our food is safe. We should have the same thing on our college campuses. It should be a regular issue of enforcement, not waiting for an individual whistleblower to raise a concern that their school has been flagrantly violating survivor's rights. Nicole, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.