Federal investigators are targeting the University of Colorado-Boulder for its handling of an alleged sexual assault, in which the university punished the accused student, in part, by requiring him to write a paper about the incident.
The student was also fined $75 and suspended from school for eight months, according to the Denver Post.
The response wasn’t enough for the alleged victim, CU student Sarah Gilchriese, who gave the Post permission to identify her by name.
“He was going to be allowed back on campus when I’m still a student and that’s wrong,” she said.
The alleged assault took place off campus in February. Gilchriese reported the incident to the university and filed a police report, but she said it took university officials a month to remove the alleged assailant from campus. He has not been arrested.
Gilchriese hired a lawyer and got a protection order so that he could not return to campus, the Post reported.
Now, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights is looking into how the university handled the situation. Chancellor Philip DiStefano alerted students and faculty to the investigation in a memo, but did not go into details about the case.
DiStefano also ordered an external review of how the university complies with Title IX, which oversees handling of sexual harassment and other gender discrimination in educational settings, the Post reported.
In 2007, the university paid out $2.8 million in Title IX claims by women who were sexually assaulted by university football players and high school recruits in 2001. The incident bloomed into a widely publicized scandal, but university spokesman Bronson Hilliard told the Post CU had learned from the incident and takes Title IX compliance seriously.
But Gilchriese thinks the university still falls short.
“I want (CU) to amend their policies to protect the victims,” she’s quoted as saying in the Post. “I didn’t ask for this to happen to me.”
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