Naomi Shatz of the Huffington Post has some tough love for the feminist crowd.

Feminists, We Are Not Winning the War on Campus Sexual Assault

It is no secret to anyone who occasionally picks up a newspaper or magazine that we are in the middle of a cultural sea change regarding sexual assault on college campuses, a movement that one prominent lawyer has even called “one of the most important civil rights movements of our time.” Debates are swirling about whether universities should handle sexual assault cases at all or refer them straight to the criminal justice system, about whether women ever make false sexual assault claims, and whether the definition of consent for these cases should or should not require affirmative consent (whether verbal or non-verbal) to sexual acts.

As a feminist and a lawyer who represents male students accused of sexual assault by their colleges and universities, I find myself in a unique position to watch the media explode with these stories. In college I would have been one of the women attending the rallies, holding the signs, and celebrating the wave of expulsions and suspensions of men accused of sexual assault. In my first job as a lawyer I worked on issues surrounding how schools handled dating violence among students, and used Title IX, the law that addresses sexual assault in schools and universities, to sue an upstate New York school district for failing to protect my client from gender-based harassment. And then I joined a firm known for handling student discipline cases, started representing students accused of sexual assault, and soon realized what an insane, Kafkaesque world these student disciplinary proceedings are…

We as feminists are failing if we make our victories dependent on eschewing the fundamental rights and principles our legal system was founded on — fairness, due process, a presumption of innocence — in order to obtain findings of guilt in sexual assault cases without regard to the facts of individual cases. A system that is as unfair to accused students as the one currently employed by U.S. colleges and universities lacks legitimacy, and the more people learn about the fundamental unfairness of these systems the more skeptical they will become of accounts of campus sexual assault and any resulting actions by the schools.