With the conclusion on Thursday of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and as the campus moves into spring finals, I want to take this opportunity to give you an update on issues surrounding sexual assault prevention and what has been accomplished at CU-Boulder this year.
First, let’s be clear: sexual assault and sexual harassment have not been eradicated from our campus community and remain a challenging goal for CU-Boulder. But we are making progress in three main areas: improving the investigation of claims of sexual assault and sexual harassment, providing better access to accommodations and support services during an investigation, and increasing and prioritizing our education and prevention efforts. For more information on OIEC, including how to report any form harassment or discrimination, visit our newly launched website at .
This year, the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance also:
- Consolidated all investigations whether involving a student, faculty or staff into one office;
- Hired three new investigators and a new Director of Education and Prevention;
- Increased training opportunities for the investigators (including focusing on issues of intimate partner abuse and stalking);
- Designated Deputy Title IX Coordinators;
- Presented at numerous town halls, panels, and workshops (including one at the recent CU-Boulder screening of the film The Hunting Ground);
- Played a significant role in drafting the proposed new CU Sexual Harassment Policy (to be effective in July);
- Collaborated with campus partners to design and promote the “It’s on Us” sexual assault and consent video campaign;
- Initiated a new reporting email at cureport@colorado.edu.
- Partnered with various community entities to help launch the first Sexual Assault Nurse Examination (“SANE”) in Boulder since 2002.
In addition to these efforts, our community has responded in some promising ways to the challenge of creating greater awareness about, and greater action to stop, sexual harassment and sexual assault.
All 16 fraternity chapters of the Interfraternity Council (IFC) underwent individual training in sexual assault prevention developed by Teresa Wroe of CU-Boulder’s Community Health division – and new Director of Education and Prevention/Deputy Title IX Coordinator for OIEC as of May 18 – a move that drew notice from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who tweeted about the program on April 14, that profiled Wroe’s and the IFC’s work together. The training was at the request of the IFC and OIEC and IFC created a partnership to implement it. Teresa Wroe designed a specifically tailored program that addressed IFC’s membership and trained three additional presenters to help deliver the sessions.
Our emphasis on the need for bystanders to intervene effectively when they see a situation building that could result in a sexual assault found a great role model in CU-Boulder student Max Demby. On the night of April 3 while walking near the CU Engineering Center, Max quickly responded to screams by a female victim who was about to be sexually assaulted by a campus intruder.
Max approached the man and yelled at him to stop, which caused him flee. The man was quickly apprehended by University of Colorado Police and jailed under several felony charges.
Ěýexemplified the kind of awareness and action that all of us must be willing to take to end sexual assault on campus.
While our campus continues the public education process on issues such as bystander intervention and understanding the meaning and importance of obtaining consent to have sex, we will continue our efforts to assess the scope of the problem of sexual assault at CU-Boulder.
Next October, we will conduct a campus-wide sexual misconduct survey for all students that will zero in on the specific experiences, observations and needs of our campus community regarding sexual assault, sexual harassment, intimate partner abuse (domestic and dating violence), and stalking. We will use the results of that survey to better understand the scope of the problem of sexual assault on our campus, and help us arrive at even better prevention and education solutions.
This survey will be similar to one currently being conducted by the Association of American Universities. While the University will continue to engage with the AAU group, we chose not to use that survey after reviewing its questions, which were duplicative of questions we asked in our climate surveys of 2014 (Spring and Fall semester), and which did not provide us the flexibility to customize questions to our community at the level we felt we needed. We nonetheless support the AAU survey, which will aggregate the results of participating universities, providing important national data on sexual assault on campus.Ěý Like the AAU’s survey, ours will be based on the White House’s recommended model, the and its aggregate results will be made public.
As our academic year draws to a close, we want to thank our campus community for responding this year to Chancellor DiStefano’s call – announced in his state of the campus address – for our campus community to work together to end sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus. We’re not there yet, but the journey is continuing with renewed commitment, increasing resources, and greater community response.
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Valerie Simons is CU-Boulder’s Executive Director of the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance and is the campus’s Title IX Coordinator.
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