Last Friday, the Virginia House of Delegates and state Senate unanimously passed legislation regarding reporting of sexual assaults at Virginia colleges and universities. The new bill requires school personnel to report evidence of a sexual assault to that school’s Title IX committee within 72 hours and also requires that any case deemed to be a felony assault be submitted to the police or for review by a local commonwealth attorney — regardless of the survivor’s wishes.
Title IX already requires certain University employees to be mandatory reporters, so this bill effectively extends this requirement to more personnel — similar to a policy University President Teresa Sullivan announced the University would adopt anyway back in August, which required more employees to be mandatory reporters. The most controversial element of the General Assembly’s attempt to respond to sexual assault on college campuses is its new policy of mandatory reporting to the police or a local commonwealth attorney for cases deemed felony assault.
Last summer, our predecessors on The Cavalier Daily’s 125th managing board eloquently stated their position on the question of mandatory reporting, specifically in response to President Sullivan’s new policy. The managing board discussed the trauma a survivor of sexual assault can experience if the investigation is out of his or her control, the way mandatory reporting can lead to setbacks on the road to recovery for survivors and the dangers of survivors confiding in adults they trust without knowing they are mandatory reporters.
Another concern the 125th managing board mentioned but did not focus on is the possibility that such policies would lower reporting rates for sexual assault. This, if the reporting rates drop significantly enough, would automatically undermine the very purpose of mandatory reporting — to fully investigate and adjudicate cases of sexual assault.
In the case of mandatory reporting to the police, the danger of lowered reporting rates and retraumatizing or newly traumatizing survivors is especially troublesome. In an interview with The Cavalier Daily ahead of the General Assembly’s drafting of Senate Bill 712, Claire Wyatt, a 2013 University graduate and organizer for advocacy group New Virginia Majority, said that “90 percent of assault survivors who go to the police have a retraumatizing moment in their initial intake questioning by police.” The police as a whole have not yet demonstrated the ability to sensitively interact with sexual assault survivors. This does not mean police cannot be trained to respond carefully to survivors’ needs when questioning them or moving forward with investigations — but until the police are thoroughly trained, survivors should not be subjected to the consequences of mandatory reporting laws.
In a meeting with Cavalier Daily editors ahead of last month’s Board of Visitors meeting, before the final version of the bill passed the General Assembly, President Sullivan pointed out the community value of mandatory reporting — that, though a survivor’s choice is of the utmost importance, there are certain situations in which the perpetrator is a danger to the community and mandatory reporting can be necessary. “We are going to respect [a survivor’s] confidentiality right up to a point,” Sullivan said. Ultimately, she said, the General Assembly did a good job reaching out to various groups in order to inform the new policy. Sullivan commended them for “their willingness to hear what we had to say, and also their willingness to hear what students had to say.”
It is true that lawmakers appear to have listened to student input, since they originally called for requiring that all campus sexual assaults be reported to local police, and now the only sexual assaults that must be reported to police are ones that have already been reported to the school by survivors. But even this concession leaves a disconnect between what survivors experience and how to best mitigate it. If a student reports a case of sexual assault to the school, his or her expectations going forward may be very different than if he or she reports it to the police or to a prosecutor — expectations that are ignored by this legislation. Moreover, there is no reason to believe reporting rates will be salvaged by the nuance in this mandatory reporting policy, since negative experiences with officers — who, as mentioned above, need training in order to handle these cases — may still deter students from reporting their cases to their schools in the first place.
Virginia lawmakers are eager to do what they can to respond to the issue of campus sexual assault, as they should be. But eagerness should not lead to hastiness. Instead of passing policies that may do more harm than good, they should investigate ways to attack the root of sexual assault, and not just the punitive side of it. Before Gov. Terry McAuliffe decides to sign this bill into law, we hope he considers its possible ramifications. Its unanimous support from the General Assembly indicates our lawmakers want to diminish the dangers of sexual assault — but the content of the bill indicates they do not yet understand how this should be done.
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