California lawmakers are seeking more effective ways to handle and address a “rape culture” that has pervaded the University of California and California State University school systems and are looking for ways to exercise harsher punishments for perpetrators who commit these sexually-motivated crimes.
“What I see is a mistrust of the universities to handle the problem,” Assemblyman Adam Gray (D-Merced) said at a joint hearing on Monday by the Assembly Higher Education and Joint Legislative Audit committees, according to the Sacramento Bee.
A state audit, released last week, concluded that California’s universities are not doing enough to ensure that their employees are trained to handle incidents of rape and other forms of sexual violence, writes the Bee. In fact, the punishment facing sexual perpetrators is often minimal, not even resulting in suspension or expulsion, which a growing number of opponents have been countering in an indirect defense of the perpetrators by saying expelling the students could ruin the rest of their lives.
Assemblyman Das Williams (D-Santa Barbara) cited the federal Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities across the United States who receive federal funding to disclose information about crime on and around their campuses or risk losing that financial support. Williams said college campuses “have the duty to” go after and punish perpetrators.
California’s UC school system, the Bee notes, has more autonomy than the state’s CSU system, which has resulted in a much lower number of reports by the school’s administrators than their CSU neighbors. Berkeley was reportedly the only school with data on dismissals resulting from sexually-motivated crimes and cases involving non-consensual sex out of UC and SCU representatives who were present at the hearings.
“We’ll be focusing like a laser on what schools are doing and how they’re going to get it done,” Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) said.
In May of this year, the federal government took the unprecedented step of opening a national investigation and launching a sexual assault probe into 55 colleges and universities over their mishandling of sexual abuse complaints. The University of California, Berkeley, Occidental College, University of Southern California, and Butte-Glenn Community College District were four California institutions placed on the list released by the federal Department of Education.
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