A group of 10 bipartisan senators introduced a bill titled the Campus Accountability and Safety Act Thursday, which focuses on addressing the issue of sexual assault on college campuses.
The bill was introduced by Senators Mark Warner, D-Virginia, Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, Dean Heller, R-Nevada, Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York, Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, Marco Rubio, R-Florida, Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia., and Gary Peters, D-Michigan.
Warner said sexual assault is an issue that has seen support from both Democrat and Republican parties and also has support from the chairman of the U.S Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
“I think there is a general acknowledgement that there are crimes taking place on campuses and this is an area that this is a tough place to have rules on,” Warner said.
The bill primarily focuses on improving current systems of addressing and disclosing issues of sexual misconduct on campuses by establishing new resources for survivors, demanding increased transparency of proceedings, implementing a national sexual assault survey by individual universities and stipulating a more uniform process of disciplinary action.
Warner said the bill outlines general regulations to address the growing concern of sexual assault on campuses nationwide.
“Basically it says we have to set a federal baseline for encouraging prevention, demanding transparency, more accountability and to make sure that should these events take place that there are going to be procedures in place,” Warner said.
According to Warner’s press release, the bill will institute a standardized, biannual survey at every college or university campus in the U.S. While the bill specifies few details about the survey, Warner said the anonymous survey is meant to compare college climates to allow high school students to better evaluate prospective schools.
“[The survey] won’t be prescriptive,” Warner said. “It’s more of an assessment of saying how prevalent is sexual assault on campus.”
Survey results would be published online, and the Department of Education would be required to publish a list of the universities with pending sexual assault investigations and any final or voluntary resolutions.
If passed, the bill will also require the instatement of Confidential Advisors, whose responsibilities will include coordinating supports services for survivors and providing information about options for reporting. The Confidential Advisor will not be a Title IX coordinator.
“We’ve heard from groups that you want to give the victim or survivor someone that they can trust…who doesn’t have an obligation to the university or the law enforcement system,” Warner said. “We want to make sure that this confidential advisor is 100 percent in the victim or survivor’s corner.”
The bill requires Confidential Advisors to have specialized training, the details of which have not been specified.
“We think [training] will require survivor input from around the country,” Warner said. “There is not a set of best practices – a lot of universities treat this in a different fashion. We just want to provide a baseline and resources.”
The proposed bill would also require colleges and universities to coordinate with local law enforcement in order to eliminate discrepancies over jurisdiction. While the bill establishes a mandatory coordination between university and law enforcement agencies, Warner said survivors of sexual assault will still have the option of utilizing either court or university systems.
“There is nothing in the legislation that will exclude someone from going to law enforcement,” Warner said. “We want to encourage that, but we don’t want to mandate it.”
Warner said he does not anticipate much opposition to the legislation, although a similar version of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act was introduced and subsequently rejected summer of last year.
“[That bill] didn’t get the hearing that I was hoping it was going to get,” Warner said. “We’ve got commitment now from the Chairman of the Health Committee. I think it’s too often a bill takes a while to gain momentum, but it think it’s gaining that momentum now.”
The bill will first have to pass through committee, where it may be amended, before it reaches the Senate floor.
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