White House Releases Guidelines to Combat Rape in Colleges

On Monday, the White House took one step more in its effort of combating rape on university and college campuses across the country when it released a new report.

The report consisted of 20 pages. A special task force was step up to produce the report and included Arne Duncan the Secretary of Education and Eric Holder the Attorney General.

The group spent three months compiling recommendations from talking with many people.

The task force is interested in finding out more about the scale and scope of the problem. Statistics were cited in the report from the National Institute of Justice, which said that 1 in 5 women experienced attempted rape or rape during college.

This year the group is pushing institutions of higher learning to use its 2015 tool kit to survey their own campuses. Before 2016, the task force will start making reports. It is planning to explore administrative or legislative options requiring school to carry out the survey.

In 2011, schools were first alerted by the administration about the responsibilities they had to sexual violence survivors. The administration announced that schools under Title IX must address the sexual violence issue to provide an equal access to all for education.

However, schools struggled with that. Over the last three years, many of the schools have been cited publicly for not living up to the standards.

The most recent is when the U.S. Department of Education announced that Tufts University had failed to comply in the way it handles issues related to sexual assaults.

The university wrote it was disappointed and surprised with the government’s finding and added it had a deep commitment to the well-being and safety of its students.

Now the White House has decided to get more specific. It has now emphasized the importance of using confidential advocates. This clarifies what was confusing for many that not all on college campuses have a duty to report.

Recently campus officials have said that all their employees needed to report every detail of what happened to officials. However, the report said that could mean control is quickly lost by the survivor over what takes place next.

Many advocates insist the survivors should never lose control over what takes place next.

The White House report calls for more training for those dealing with sexual violence issues on campuses across the country.

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Karen Jackson

Karen Jackson has always been passionate about technology. All the way through high-school she immersed herself in computers and web-design. Her ambitious nature helped her become a pro in Adobe Photoshop only by watching online videos and working with the program herself. This is also the program that she mostly uses in the creation of websites at her work-place. Technological innovation and gadgets that push the boundaries of what we are comfortable with have always fascinated her, so expect to see some weird gadget reviews coming from her.