As we say in Massachusetts, light dawns on Marblehead.

Tovia Smith reports.

Some Accused Of Sexual Assault On Campus Say System Works Against Them

After years of criticism for being too lax on campus sexual assault, some colleges and universities are coming under fire from students who say the current crackdown on perpetrators has gone too far.

Dozens of students who’ve been punished for sexual assault are suing their schools, saying that they didn’t get a fair hearing and that their rights to due process were violated. The accused students say schools simply are overcorrecting.

More than 70 campuses are under federal investigation for violating the civil rights of alleged victims, and some students say schools are running so scared that they’re violating the due process rights of defendants instead.

“Right from the start, they treated me like I was the scum of the earth,” says one young man, who was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst this past fall when he was told he was being investigated for sexual misconduct — and had just hours to move out of his dorm.

It started at a party. He says a classmate invited him to her room, asked him to bring a condom, texted her girlfriends about it, gave no signs of being drunk and repeatedly indicated that she wanted to have sex.

So, he says, they did.

“Then we kissed and fooled around for a few more hours, and then eventually she told me her roommate was coming back at some point and that I should leave, but that she had a lot of fun,” he says.

In her version of events, according to a university report, she started to “freak out” shortly after he left. She began to feel pain throughout her body, and realized that something had happened, but she didn’t know what. She told the school she had been drinking and had no memory of most of the night — until a day later when she remembered “him having sex with me and holding me down.”

She told a friend, who told a dorm adviser, and two days later the school launched an investigation that he says was rigged from the start.

“They were going through the motions,” he says. “I felt like I was just trapped in the tidal wave.”


 
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