Universities Under Investigation Re: Handling Sexual Assault

[ASTalumna06]

Originally Posted by LillyPhi

This is a very interesting article.....Columbia University student carries mattress until her rapist is finally expelled....

http://nypost.com/2014/09/02/ivy-stu...isnt-expelled/

I just came here to post about this. I only had to get a few paragraphs in before I simply couldn't believe what I was reading. Three different women have filed complaints, and this guy is still allowed to stay in school. At what point does it become too much?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...-yes-means-yes

While most students at Columbia University will spend the first day of classes carrying backpacks and books, Emma Sulkowicz will start her semester on Tuesday with a far heavier burden. The senior plans on carrying an extra-long, twin-size mattress across the quad and through each New York City building – to every class, every day – until the man she says raped her moves off campus.

“I was raped in my own bed,” Sulkowicz told me the other day, as she was gearing up to head back to school in this, the year American colleges are finally, supposedly, ready to do something about sexual assault. “I could have taken my pillow, but I want people to see how it weighs down a person to be ignored by the school administration and harassed by police.”

Sulkowicz is one of three women who made complaints to Columbia against the same fellow senior, who was found “not responsible” in all three cases. She also filed a police report, but Sulkowicz was treated abysmally – by the cops, and by a Columbia disciplinary panel so uneducated about the scourge of campus violence that one panelist asked how it was possible to be anally raped without lubrication.

Apparently even an Ivy League school still doesn’t understand the old adage of “no means no”.

So Sulkowicz joined a federal complaint in April over Columbia’s mishandling of sexual misconduct cases, and she will will hoist that mattress on her shoulders as part savvy activism, part performance art. “The administration can end the piece, by expelling him,” she says, “or he can, by leaving campus.”