On June 23, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight held a roundtable, “Campus Sexual Assault: The Administrative Process and the Criminal Justice System.” The roundtable was the last in a series of three roundtables on campus sexual assault. The roundtable, led by Chair Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), focused on the role played by the criminal justice system in cases of sexual assault on university and college campuses.
In her opening remarks, Sen. McCaskill said, “I want to do everything possible to make sure that these crimes are prosecuted and that the perpetrators of these crimes are held responsible to the fullest extent of the law. But as a former prosecutor and a former lawmaker at the state level, I know that our criminal justice system and the laws that support it are not always perfect and it has not been willing or able to handle many sexual assault cases, particularly cases involving consent as a defense…Educational institutions have a role to play here, too. They have a commitment to their students and their community, and when incidents of sexual violence happen, they have an obligation to investigate what happened, support the survivor, ensure a safe campus for all students, and if the facts bear it out, punish the offender for violating the school’s code of conduct.”
Responding to Sen. McCaskill’s concern for the role of victims in the criminal justice process, Carrie Hull, detective, Ashland, Oregon Police Department, said: “Anything…that is coming from someone assuming what a survivor wants is grossly mistaken. You cannot do that, because what is right for one survivor is not right for another…What we had to do as law enforcement is we had to get out of our own way. We had to say, ‘Tell us how to do this better,’ because obviously we are not doing it well.”
Jessica Ladd-Webert, director, Office of Victim Assistance, University of Colorado at Boulder, added, “What I can promise is that I will give them all of their options and let them choose, because I do come from a victim empowerment model, and then support them, whatever option they want. But I think there has to be that trust that we are not turning them away from one of those options but fairly telling them what they are.”
The following witnesses also testified:
