Fixing Sexual Assault Response

“We must do better,” Harvard University President Drew G. Faust wrote last Thursday in an email to the Harvard community announcing the creation of a task force on sexual assault. The announcement came just three days after The Crimson’s publication of an anonymous op-ed detailing one student’s experience and the inadequate response of the administration.

“I convinced myself that if I pushed hard enough, if I made enough noise, someone somewhere would hear me, stand up, do something. But no one really did,” the author wrote.

Faust is right. Harvard simply must do better.

And while it’s significant that President Faust acknowledged the scale of the problem of sexual assault at Harvard, the task force must make serious recommendations that the University is willing to implement if Harvard is to improve. An endless number of panels and working groups have been formed to study this issue, with frustratingly little to show for it. This time must be different.

This task force can first right some of the ills of the current system by incorporating affirmative consent into Harvard’s sexual assault policy. This language would require a “demonstrated intent to have sex” from both parties, as DePaul University professor Deborah Tuerkheimer phrases it, in order to define the encounter as consensual. Affirmative consent simplifies what the Administrative Board ought to first be looking for when facing claims of sexual assault—the affirmation. The “Our Harvard Can Do Better” campus group lists the switch to a policy of affirmative consent as number one on their list of demands.

Further, Harvard should adopt a “preponderance of the evidence” standard for cases of sexual assault in place of its current burden of proof standard, which requires that the Administrative Board be “sufficiently persuaded” of guilt. The “preponderance of the evidence” standard, which requires just over 50 percent certainty that a crime has been committed to discipline a student, is currently the standard of evidence adopted by six of the eight Ivy League schools, and was endorsed in the Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague” letter in April 2011.

The “preponderance of the evidence” standard does not presume guilt. What it does is abandon the unnecessarily high standard currently in place, which, instead of protecting against false accusations, has time and time again likely obstructed the path to justice for survivors of sexual assault. Adopting this standard is an obvious way the University can help remedy its dysfunctional sexual assault prevention and response structure.

Combating sexual assault is a community concern. All members of the Harvard community must do their part to be responsible and vigilant, especially at the campus’s social settings. Officials should ensure that that the problem doesn’t lie with poor administrative handling of these cases, especially in informal interactions with students.

By implementing these long-needed policies, the University can finally begin to improve the way it responds to sexual assault. We can—and we must—do better.