An official for the Department of Education said that 90 percent of sexual assault accusations amount to drunk sex or regret after sex, according to a Wednesday report.
Candice Jackson, who heads the civil rights division of the Department of Education, made these remarks and others in an interview with The New York Times, published a day before Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ meeting with campus sexual assault activists, including both alleged victims and accused students.
“[Most investigations include] not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman,” said Jackson. “Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both ‘drunk,’ we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.'”
The Department of Education official’s comments stand in stark contrast to campus sexual assault activists, who insist that campuses are subject to “rape culture,” often citing a 2015 Association of American Universities survey alleging that at least one in four women experience sexual assault while on campus. However, the survey has received criticism for a loose definition of “sexual assault” that includes alcohol and differs vastly from the 1995-2013 figures obtained by the Justice Department, stating that 0.61 percent of students were sexually assaulted.
DeVos will meet with alleged victims of sexual assault, accused students, and college officials Thursday. Jackson recounted a meeting she had with the mother of a male accused student.
“Listening to her talk about walking in and finding him in the middle of trying to kill himself because his life and his future were gone, and he was forever branded a rapist — that’s haunting,” Jackson told The New York Times. The Department of Education official asserted that Title IX treated accused students unfairly and that investigators were “specifically told to keep looking until you find the violation,” a characterization with which her predecessor, Catherine Lhamon, disagreed, disputing the Department’s distinction between nonviolent and violent sexual assaults.
Fatima Goss Graves, president of National Women’s Law Center, said that she is “worried that the [Department of Education] will turn into apologists for the sort of violence that happens on campus.”
The Department of Education must finish four out of five of its investigations in 180 days, but the average age of the 496 cases open Monday was 703 days, with two cases having stayed open for more than half a decade. (RELATED: Critics Of Campus Sexual Assault Handlings Prepare For DeVos Meeting)
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to the Department of Education for comment, but received none in time for publication.
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