Survivor Advocates Say No To Requiring Criminal Investigations Of Ga. Campus Sexual Assaults

Mandating criminal investigations could negatively impact number of reported sexual assaults.

Ramsey told the Senate Higher Education Committee that SB 37 was meant to help schools struggling to address campus rape. No formal prosecuting structure, he said, means Georgia’s college students are at risk.

“We post speed limits down I-20 and yet people go 90, 100 miles per hour, and there are consequences to that. And right now, there may not be any real consequences to the efforts of the colleges and universities as far as adjudicating criminal activity,” Ramsey said.

He referred to national anxieties that schools are more concerned with their reputations than with punishing sexual violence.

“That’s a really simple solution, or seemingly a solution, to a really complex problem,” Michelle Maziar, a Harvard School of Education graduate and organizer for the Harvard Students Demand Respect coalition, said.

The Georgia native agreed with Sen. Ramsey that many schools’ outdated approaches to sexual assaults are a serious problem. But she worries that a law automatically prompting a criminal investigation could shrink the already extremely low rate of reported rape cases.  

She pointed to research, conducted by the National Institute of Justice, on campus assaults estimating that up to 90 percent of survivors know their assailants.

“We call that intimate partner violence, and that’s something that’s very, very prevalent throughout society,” Maziar said.

Jennifer Bivins, president of the Georgia Network to End Sexual Assault, trains both Georgia law enforcement and college police on working with survivors of sexual violence. She says that without serious training, involving the police in rape cases is not necessarily the best approach.

“We have some officers that have handled these cases awful, or maybe they don’t end up taking the reports at all. They’ve said ‘You know what? You just had a bad night,’” Bivins said.

She says she would welcome measures focused on preventing sexual assaults, “but, those are the harder issues to sell right? Social norms changes. Attitudes, beliefs and behaviors about sexual violence.”  

The committee decided to hold off on voting until next year. They’ll wait to read a report due in May from a University System of Georgia task force on student safety.