Title IX

International students bring their respective cultures and expectations to the USA; these expectations include their social constructs regarding relationships and the treatment of women . International Business Times reported alarming percentages of rape in several foreign countries. In South Africa, 28–37 % of adult men reportedly committed rape (Iaccino 2014). Sweden reported the highest European rape percentage with 63 rape cases per 100,000. In turn, a third of Swedish women endure sexual assault before their 20th birthday. Caribbean countries reported comparable data with approximately 48 % of adolescent girls facing sexual assault (Iaccino 2014). In regard to Asian countries, the United Nations revealed that 10 % of Asian Pacific men reported forced sex with a non-partner and 24 % reported forced sex with a partner.
In Papua New Guinea, 59 % of men reported raping sexual partners (Fossett 2013). While these statistics may startle the American reader, these incidents are an unfortunate social norm for many global citizens. Simultaneously, the USA remains a coveted place to seek an education. Given the potential cultural clash between the global mistreatment of women and American federal regulations prohibiting sexual assault, colleges and universities from all sectors have a responsibility to offer education thorough Title IX. Specifically, community colleges within the higher education arena have the responsibility to educate those with different cultural expectations that sexual violence against women is strictly prohibited. Therefore, this study’s purpose focused on international students’ experience and understanding Title IX at the community college.

Informed by decolonial feminism, this article explores a transformative justice approach to relationship violence and campus sexual assault in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University. The article considers how the emphasis on liability and Title IX compliance as the only response available for dealing with gender-based violence within university settings can function to silence survivors, particularly survivors of color and queer, gender nonbinary, and trans survivors, while also denying them precious access to resources for healing. In so doing, the author raises key questions that help illustrate the difference between current approaches that mimic a criminal justice system response, that fails to support a broad range of survivors, and a transformative justice approach that is attentive to the intergenerational impact of settler-colonial histories, ongoing state-sanctioned violence, and the coloniality and racialization of gender.

Special Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide upward mobility opportunities. Kirsten Hextrum documents how white middle-class youth become overrepresented on college teams. Her institutional ethnography of one elite athletic and academic institution includes over 100 hours of interviews with college rowers and track & field athletes. She charts the historic and contemporary relationships between colleges, athletics, and white middle-class communities that ensure white suburban youth are advantaged in special athletic admissions. Suburban youth start ahead in college admissions because athletic merit—the competencies desired by university recruiters—requires access to vast familial, communal, and economic resources, all of which are concentrated in their neighborhoods. Their advantages increase as youth, parents, and coaches strategically invest in and engineer novel opportunities to maintain their race and class status. Thus, college sports allow white, middle-class athletes to accelerate their racial and economic advantages through admission to elite universities.

The Ana Cha Collective is a coalition of feminist scholars, artists, and filmmakers formed to interrogate the cultural world through a feminist lens and engage in a creative practice that deconstructs violent power structures. This article outlines the feminist (her-)story and politics that contextualizes the formation and political praxis of the Ana Cha Collective. The Feminist Art Movement’s points of strength and limits can reveal effective feminist political practices in the contemporary cultural sphere. The Ana Cha Collective formed to utilize radical feminist practices in cultural production for the complete liberation of the marginalized by dismantling the structures that identify and
oppress these groups. By archiving the collective’s critical and creative pedagogy, this article serves as a form of feminist counter-discourse that will hopefully spark more
collective feminist art praxis.

Returning to the work begun in Amy Richlin's seminal essay on the unsettling topic of sexual violence in Ovid's work, "Reading Ovid's Rapes," this paper takes another look at the rich interpretive problems posed by the incessantly recurring theme of sexual violence in the "Metamorphoses." Though the perpetrators are almost exclusively divine, roughly a third of the myths recounted by the Roman poet features some form of sexual assault. When read in the context of conservative Augustan-era marriage legislation like the "Lex Julia de adulteriis," Ovid's insistence on the theme can be read as an indictment of Augustus himself, who after all insisted on likening himself in official imperial iconography to the cult of such gods as Apollo and Jupiter, two of the most egregious assailants throughout the long poem. However, each reiteration of the theme also reveals a series of other important concomitant concerns that arise from cases of sexual violence, including questions pertaining to illegitimate children and other unanticipated repercussions in the victim's family, that actually reveal Ovid to be more seriously engaged in thinking about the subject than he is commonly given credit for. Taking Ovid to task for the grave issues he tackles can actually provide fodder for productive discussion of topical issues effecting life on campus and in our country today. It is absolutely imperative that certain topics be addressed in productive and adult ways with our students if we expect to raise the level of our public discourse. Far from aestheticizing these topics as mere literary artifacts, Ovid's complex text demands to be read on a number of levels that are all pertinent to the world in which we live today.

This article—which is based on my work of nearly four decades representing victims of sexual violence and harassment—explores how Title IX has helped to reduce such discrimination, the continuing problem posed by sexual violence and sexual harassment at American universities, and some suggestions for improving the system.

This essay introduces the 'she said, he said' paradox for Title IX investigations. 'She said, he said' cases are accusations of rape, followed by denials, with no further significant case-specific evidence available to the evaluator. In such cases, usually the accusation is true. Title IX investigations adjudicate sexual misconduct accusations in US educational institutions; I address whether they should be governed by the 'preponderance of the evidence' standard of proof or the higher 'clear and convincing evidence' standard. Orthodoxy holds that the 'preponderance' standard is satisfied if the evidence adduced renders the litigated claim more likely than not. On this view, I argue, 'she said, he said' cases satisfy the 'preponderance' standard. But this consequence conflicts with plausible liberal and feminist claims. In this essay I contrast the 'she said, he said' paradox with legal epistemology's proof paradox. I explain how both paradoxes arise from the distinction between individualised and non-individualised evidence, and I critically evaluate responses to the 'she said, he said' paradox. Keywords Rape accusations, Title IX investigations, proof paradox, individualised evidence, legal standards of proof, preponderance of the evidence.

This chapter contributes to important conversations about accessibility in higher education by examining legal issues that shape experiences of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).  The chapter begins by outlining the relationship between reasonable accommodations and academic success.  Then, it provides an overview of ASD in relation to postsecondary education.  A substantive portion of the chapter delineates current legal topics, including federal law, case law, and Office of Civil Rights (OCR) letters.  Functional limitations associated with ASD are social or sensory in nature.  However, legal precedent in the United States defines the major life activity of learning in a manner that does not usually include these components, thereby limiting access to sensory and social accommodations.  The chapter concludes by discussing Title IX and students with ASD that experience sexual assault, the value of neurodiversity, and future implications for accessibility as the number of students with ASD in postsecondary education increases.

This paper offers a legal perspective on sexual harassment in higher education. I discuss, first, a famous case, Alexander v. Yale, that established the legal responsibility of American universities to seriously address sexual harassment and violence. Second,
I provide a brief survey of the state of higher education today in the United States and the United Kingdom, focusing on recent cases of a predatory professors and the notion of consent. Third, I suggest practical micro-solutions that will reduce the incidence of sexual harassment in educational and research institutions, thereby furthering the wider project of creating a world in which all genders enjoy equal opportunities.

This paper deals with rape adjudication in the American and Indian contexts, and analyses anomalies while unpacking consent, and understanding credibility of the victim.

The first three chapters deal with American adjudication, and the final chapters draws parallels and lessons from the Indian setting. In the first chapter, I lay the groundwork with a case study of Emma Sulkowicz's rape at Stanford University which I will continue to revisit throughout the first three chapters. I also establish that sexual assault is ubiquitous in American college campuses, and how a whole generation of young, American women are being denied access to justice. The second chapter lays, and weighs the different options available for recourse to a sexual assault victim in the American system, and why the criminal justice system may not be the best answer. The third chapter seeks to understand the genealogy of treatment of consent. It also establishes the legal system’s inordinate reliance on forensic evidence that only reveals physiological violence, and thus, erases psychological harm from the narrative. I question whether admissibility of Rape Trauma Syndrome is the answer to this marginalisation by the biomedical system. In the final chapter, I discuss how and why corroboration of the victim’s testimony in the Indian context holds minimal importance in a rape trial. I explain how honour and chastity come to be central tenets in, and are unique to the Indian context. I touch upon the Nirbhaya rape case, and why it catapulted into popular imagination, and discuss why the demands sought by protestors were of a legal nature.

I have drawn heavily from feminist jurisprudence, sociology of law, access to justice literature, feminist criminology, health anthropology, to an extent, post-colonialism, and social theory on gender, nationalism and Hindutva. This paper came about as an investigation into why law remains so resistant to feminist critique, and how legal knowledge, especially in post-colonial societies where it is the only legitimising discourse, disqualifies and marginalises other epistemologies.

Scholars have called repeatedly for more nuanced understandings of power and organizational knowledge, but researchers have yet to integrate available critical frameworks that could link these concepts. Moreover, existing analyses of power in organizational knowledge tend to focus on role differences but do not yet consider how social differences – including gender, race and sexuality – shape knowledge. Working from a practice-based approach, I draw upon standpoint theory and intersectionality to show how whiteness, masculinity and heteronormativity are embedded in organizational knowledge. I construct this argument using a case study at a US university known for having some of the best systems for building organizational knowledge about sexual violence on campus. I argue that the university's practices – specifically those related to interpretation and definition – mask heterogeneity in knowledge across the university. I also show how practices give the university's knowledge the appearance of neutrality and, subsequently, can unintentionally defer important organizational actions.

This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. This model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged for nearly half a century. Crisis language denotes urgency, decisiveness, judgment, action, and mobilization, all leading to closure. These descriptions can be problematic when mapped onto the lived experiences of certain communities. The #MeToo Movement presents modern feminists with a powerful, productive, and...

This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. This model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged for nearly half a century. Crisis language denotes urgency, decisiveness, judgment, action, and mobilization, all leading to closure. These descriptions can be problematic when mapped onto the lived experiences of certain communities.

The #MeToo Movement presents modern feminists with a powerful, productive, and timely opportunity to critique the existing crisis model of service provision and support. This article invites feminists to begin this dialogue. It presents three critiques of the current framing. First, the crisis framing risks resurrecting troublesome legal relics relating to statutes of limitations and evidentiary hurdles. Second, it risks being perceived as exclusionary and limited, thus cabining its impact. Particularly, campus sexual assault victims and marginalized communities generally may not universally connect to an opaque crisis framing. Third, crisis framing risks distorting the scope of sexual assault. It limits the expansive range of harms that are associated with rape and sexual assault and the systemic longevity of the problem of rape and sexual assault in society. While the language of crisis seems to invoke an urgent call to action, which is to be applauded, this language risks blurring the long history of sexual assault and erasing a legacy of inaction in countless institutional and political and social settings. It also suggests a beginning and an end to a victim’s recovery journey. It suggests that closure is attainable when in reality, ongoing monitoring, responsiveness, and engagement are critically necessary.

The way in which the Office of Civil Rights currently interprets Title IX using the Dear Colleague Letter holds educational institutions to sexual assault standards that are unconstitutional, problematic, illogical and based on inconclusive scientific evidence. Those who hold power, whether at the governmental or educational level, have a duty to their constituents and fellow human beings to reevaluate their actions when interpreting Title IX and the Dear College Letter.

Under the federally mandated Title IX, NCAA athletic departments are directed to offer balanced promotional and informational coverage between men's and women's sports. This study examines how gender is represented in photographs on the Instagram accounts of prominent NCAA athletic departments. Findings indicate mixed results: female athletes, when showcased, receive similar promotional efforts to their male peers; their athleticism is highlighted; and fan engagement metrics are as high as male sports. However, female athletic achievements are overwhelmingly underrepresented, suggesting equality is still deficient.

Under President Trump, the Department of Education narrowed the definition of and protections for gender inequality in U.S. higher education (U.S. Department of Education, Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender, 2017). These changes drew criticism and concern for legal remedies for gender inequality. This study positions Trump's actions as an extension of rather than a deviation from past state actions towards gender in higher education. Drawing upon Brown's (Fem Stud 18(1):7-34, 1992; States of injury: power and freedom in late modernity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995) theory of the masculinist state, we examined how liberal feminists sought state protection through Title-IX and, in doing so, formalized state control over gender equity in schools. Using instrumental case study methodology (Creswell, Qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches, SAGE, Thousand Oaks, 2013; Stake, The art of case study research, SAGE, Thousand Oaks, 1995) we analyzed campus housing policies and found three themes-segregation, visitation, and demarcation-that entrench masculinist state power across public, private, and religious institutions. We conclude by discussing the ongoing contradictions for feminists seeking the state's protection.

This article examines activist artist Traci Molloy's use of the arts to radically affect and influence how one university understands, approaches, and educates a campus on issues around sexual assault. Molloy reached out to University (AU), and proposed that she be allowed to talk with survivors of sexual assault on campus. Unlike MSU, where then-President Engler accused Nassar victims of "enjoying the spotlight," AU and Molloy worked together to intentionally give survivors the stage, first via a public installation of portraits of sexual abuse survivors and their statements, then through a town hall meeting about experiences of sexual assault and the responsibilities of university communities in preventing sexual violence. This action serves as a model for the ways that higher education can integrate conversations about consent and healthy masculinity into university life. This article looks at the larger context of Title IX in understanding how Molloy and AU's proactive measures will become increasingly important in light of Education Secretary DeVos's changes to Title IX guidelines.

Informed by decolonial feminism, this article explores a transformative justice approach to relationship violence and campus sexual assault in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University. The article considers how the emphasis on liability and Title IX compliance as the only response available for dealing with gender-based violence within university settings can function to silence survivors, particularly survivors of color and queer, gender nonbinary, and trans survivors, while also denying them precious access to resources for healing. In so doing, the author raises key questions that help illustrate the difference between current approaches that mimic a criminal justice system response, that fails to support a broad range of survivors, and a transformative justice approach that is attentive to the intergenerational impact of settler-colonial histories, ongoing state-sanctioned violence, and the coloniality and racialization of gender.

Feminist communication scholars often adopt seemingly incommensurate stances to navigate tensions among agency, discourse, materiality, and history. I argue that valuing these “contradictions” is a hallmark of feminist communication research, a tradition I label feminist dilemmatic theorizing. Because feminists seek to describe and transform the world, they employ constitutive and representative understandings of communication. Rather than assert these approaches as paradoxical, I reread existing scholarship for nascent feminist new materialisms. Using sexual violence as an example, I argue that feminist communication theory develops a distinct approach to the force of communication, one in which discourse is not all-powerful. Accordingly, I suggest communication theorists draw upon existing feminist scholarship to meet critiques of social construction and develop a material turn.