By Haley Costen
Staff Writer
Thirty-one current and former University of California Berkeley students filed federal complaints against the college on Wednesday, claiming that campus administrators failed to properly handle sexual assault investigations.
According to the Huffington Post, the two federal complaints allege that the college failed to investigate reports of serial rapists, took months to adjudicate sexual assault cases, and dismissed rape threats as a joke.
“They are deliberately indifferent to this and they know what they’re doing and they’ve been doing this for years,” Sofie Karasek, a Berkeley junior who helped organize the complaints, said in an interview with the Sacremento Bee.
“We will do what is necessary to create and sustain a culture of prevention and reporting within our community,” UC Berkley Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “I also want to be clear that we will hold members of our community accountable for violating campus sexual assault policies.”
Title IX and Clery complaints filed by 31 women say that the chancellor and the college should have been doing that long ago.
Karasek asserts that she and three other women were sexually assaulted by the same man in a student organization they all took part in, and were told by UC Berkeley’s Gender Equity Resource Center (GenEq) “to keep him close in case he does it again,” so that he would “have a community of friends to support him in processing it,” according to feminist news blog Jezebel.
Berkeley’s ineptitude continued when after meeting with the University’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination and the Center for Student Conduct (OPHD), Karasek and the other women thought they’d reported him, but the OPHD representatives failed to tell them that a written statement was required for a report.
This one case alone is horrifying and incredibly telling of UC Berkeley’s approach to handling sexual assault. To imagine what the other students speaking out (and the unknown number of students who aren’t talking) went through due to the college’s negligence, or in some cases victim-blaming, is chilling.
Diva Kass, a former student, told the Huffington Post that after she was raped by the same man on two occasions, she was not allowed the same rights as her attacker, and was asked, “Why did you let it happen again?”
“It was viewed from this lens that, because it happened more than once, it couldn’t have been rape,” Kass said to the Huffington Post. “It was very clear people on the panel did not understand sexual assault…or the law.”
UC Berkeley isn’t the first school to be accused of violating Title IX since the Department of Education issued a clarification letter about the law. University of Southern California, Occidental College, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Yale, and many other schools have had similar complaints filed against them in recent years.
According to a terrifying report by the White House Council on Women and Girls, nearly one in five college women are sexually assaulted before they graduate college. If victim-blaming colleges like UC Berkeley corrected their policies, protected survivors of sexual assault, and educated their students, perhaps those numbers wouldn’t be so staggering.