Title IX Sexual Assault Injustice: Guilty before Proven Innocent

A great take from Reason on the flawed reasoning of the Obama Department of Education’s Title IX sexual assault policies, which call into question the following of due process, the rule of law and the oft-held mantra in criminal justice, “innocent before proven guilty.”

In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone declared, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” In an 1785 letter, Benjamin Franklin was even more exacting: “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approv’d, never that I know of controverted.”

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education took a different position.

That was the year the department’s Office of Civil Rights sent a “dear colleague” letter reinterpreting Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. That section reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The OCR’s letter declared that sexual assault is “a form of sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX.” (Sexual violence is a great deal more than discrimination, of course, but set that aside for the moment.) Afraid of losing their federal funding, colleges then set about devising grievance procedures to address complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault on their campuses.

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