Discussion List for campus-based and allied personnel working to end gender-based violence on campus.

It's true that schools worry more about the accused student filing a civil 
suit than they worry about the victim filing a civil suit - but as my recent 
article explains -- this is backward logic because the accused student enjoys 
no constitutional rights to due process in a disciplinary hearing while the 
victim has a variety of potential constitutional claims via title ix, civil 
rights laws, etc - 

so if anyone can sue a school for not responding properly or not treating a 
student fairly, it is the victim -- not the accused -- 

the accused is only entitled to that which the school promises in writing -- 
so it's a kind of contract claim at best -- but even then, the law is so 
skeptical of allowing students to sue school for breach of contract the 
school is effectively immune as long as they come close to what they promise 
-- and because schools usually use fuzzy language -- they easily comply with 
their own rules even when they treat similarly situated students very 
differently - 

the same is not true for schools' treatment of victims because real world 
constitutional standards trump schools' policies and rules of procedure, etc.

In short -- from the perspective of avoiding liablity exposure, schools 
should be far more worried about how they treat the victim than the accused 
-- but most schools have the exact opposite philosophy because they developed 
their policies and procedures years ago -- at a time when lawyers for the 
accused had a strong presence on campus and were making analogies to the real 
world criminal justice system --which is completely improper because 
obviously, the school is not the government and there is no liberty at stake 
for the accused student - but liberty is at stake for the victim because of 
the application of real world civil rights laws to even private school 
policies -- the real issue is -- why don't more schools treat violence 
against female students as a civil rights matter?  That they don't is, in my 
opinion, its own civil rights violation - 

wendy