One of the most well-known and highly regarded universities in Northeast Ohio has been mishandling serious allegations of misconduct, according to students who are banding together to push for change.
The group of students all attend Case Western Reserve University. They say their attacks have not been properly investigated, and they feel dismissed by university officials. They’ve started a group for victims. The group hopes to provide support where they say their university is failing.
One student, who asked for her name to be withheld, was a freshman at Case when she was assaulted. She was hanging out with a group of students and ended up alone with one of the guys in her dorm room.
“I told him directly ‘I don’t want to have sex.’ But we made out a little bit, and we still had sex,” she said.
Her tone belies the pain and anguish she’s experienced since that happened in October 2018. Now, she is one of three survivors who has started a group with the goal of helping other sexual assault victims through the Title IX process. Title IX is the federal law that addresses gender equity and governs reporting of sexual assaults on college campuses.
At Case, she says going through Title IX was like pulling teeth.
“The school just really doesn’t support you, so we want to be that support system. And we don’t wanna have to need the school to feel supported. We have each other,” she said.
She and other survivors aren’t alone in feeling like this. Stories like theirs blew up over the summer with the creation of an Instagram account called CWRU Survivors. They began posting anonymous stories of sexual assault on Case’s campus in July. In less than two weeks, they received more than 600 submissions.
“I genuinely didn’t think that there were going to be this many stories,” she said.
She says her experience with the Title IX process was overwhelming. She originally did not want to file a report, but an adviser filed one for her per Title IX regulation. From there, her case was muddied. Her perpetrator hired a private investigator and even attempted to sue Case over the investigation.
“I did get a lawyer though, because obviously I was in way over my head when it came to him suing the school like first reaction,” she said.
Survivors of sexual assault on college campuses having to hire lawyers to get through the Title IX process is not uncommon these days. Teresa Stafford is the chief advocacy officer at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center. She is seeing more and more survivors engage with attorneys, in part due to an increase in offenders hiring attorneys.
“The power dynamics at play for that survivor put that survivor in a situation where nobody is speaking up for them and that survivor might not be able to put forth the best case in that situation, unless she has legal representation,” Stafford said.
Another survivor of sexual assault at Case, who also did not want us to use her name, agrees.
“I do believe that the other party had the upper hand throughout the process because I did not have a lawyer,” she said.
She was sexually assaulted in April 2019. She filed a Title IX report in October 2019, and her investigation, which per Title IX was supposed to last 60 days, went on for eight months.
Title IX requires reporting to police, but both she and other student in this story were urged by Case police not to press charges.
At the Case disciplinary hearing in May — even after she hired a lawyer — her alleged perpetrator was found not responsible. She says it was absolutely heartbreaking. Both of the survivors we spoke with have been working together on the group for survivors.
“People don’t even really talk about sexual assault, because it’s such a taboo topic already, that people don’t know other people that have gone through the same thing. And it can be very therapeutic to, I guess, connect with other survivors,” according to the first student we spoke with for this story.
The attacker of that first student whose adviser filed a report per Title IX was ultimately found responsible and suspended from Case for two semesters, but she was still angry with how Case handled the investigation. She says her lawyer was the only person who truly advocated for her.
"It sucks that the person who advocated for me the most cost me $10,000,” she said.
Her perpetrator can return to campus this semester. Case is supposed to provide her assurance that nothing will happen again, but when she brought this up with Darnell Parker, senior associate vice president of the Title IX Office, he just made a joke. She says it’s painful to talk to him.
“He was just so invalidating,” she said.
No one from Case would agree to an interview. In a statement, the university expressed sympathy for students who experienced sexual assault and announced the creation of a university task force to advance a “broad culture of respect on campus.”
The students don’t feel that’s enough.
Not all of what the survivors experienced through their investigations are unique to Case. As difficult as things are, they may get worse. Changes to Title IX by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are making sexual assault cases harder to pursue by narrowing the scope of complaints colleges are required to investigate. These changes also give more rights to perpetrators accused of sexual assault and fewer rights to survivors.
Survivors hope creating a support system for other survivors, something they never had, will make a difference.
