Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner has some words of advice for college students.

What to do if you’re falsely accused of campus sexual assault

Across the country, young men (and a few women) in college are being accused of sexual assault for sexual encounters that may not have actually been assaults. These accused students are thrust into a system in which the accused have a target on their back from a college or university under pressure from the federal government to look tough on sexual assault.

These accused students, naively believing that the truth will set them free, are expelled based on no evidence other than an accusation. They are not allowed meaningful due process or any ability to properly defend themselves. Time and time again, schools have bent over backwards to ignore evidence that the accused was innocent. The reason for this is pressure from the federal government to find more accused students responsible, rather than the truth of the allegations.

Knowing that, there are a couple things to do immediately once an accused student receives notice of the accusation.

1. Understand that the school investigator is NOT your friend

Too often an accused student receives a notice to come in and talk to the school’s Title IX investigator or another administrator responsible for investigating sexual assault allegations, and believes that if he (or rarely, she) will just explain what happened everything will be fine. This is wrong. Due to the attention this issue is receiving in the media and among politicians, schools are gunning for accused students to hold them up as an example that they take sexual assault accusations seriously.

These investigators are often trained that false accusations are rare, which not-so-subtly suggests to administrators that they should believe every accusation. This means that the accused student is already deemed responsible from the start, and they have to clear a massive hurdle to prove their innocence.