Sen.
Sen. Barbara Favola, (D, Arlington), is hoping to improve the way sexual assaults are handled on college campuses and eliminate the backlog of untested rape kits with the proposal of two bills in the 2016 General Assembly.
SB 158 deals with untested rape kits, or physical evidence recovery kits (PERKs), held in police departments. If passed, it would require the state and local police and college campus police to submit all PERKs that are in their custody on July 1 and kits that come into their custody after that date, to labs for analysis. Read the full text here.
“All these kits that may have been lying around, that were not submitted for analysis, have to be submitted to the Department of Forensic Science,” Favola said.
In 2014, the GA passed legislation requiring state and local police to report the number of untested PERKs they had as well as reasons they did not submit them for testing.
Favola said some of the law enforcement jurisdictions possess untested kits that are associated with a sexual assault report.
In September, Attorney General Mark R. Herring announced Virginia received $1.4 million as part of a multi-state grant to test over 2,000 sexual assault evidence kits from 65 law enforcement agencies holding five or more kits that have gone untested.
By testing the kits, and searching the profiles against DNA databases, law enforcement will be able to identify additional crimes by known perpetrators and make connections between crimes committed by unidentified perpetrators.
“I think this is a critical part of the investigative process, taking these allegations seriously,” she said.
The grant was awarded to Virginia as part of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s $38 million initiative to test 56,000 PERKs in more than 20 states.
Favola’s other proposed bill, SB 81, would require the Department of Criminal Justice Services and the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), to develop a curriculum for conducting campus sexual assault investigations.
Favola said having a set curriculum in place was a recommendation made last May by Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s task force to combat sexual assault on college campuses, which was launched in August 2014.
“I personally believe there’s a wide variation among the college campus security units in the Commonwealth,” Favola said. “I’m not sure every college campus security unit is well trained in how to do sexual assault investigation, I just think that training’s really necessary.”
As far as exactly what the curriculum would entail, Favola said that would be left up to the DCJS and SCHEV.
“They certainly know that our intent is to ensure there’s a very high level of professionalism and quality in the investigative practices related to college sexual assault allegations,” she said. “I think they get that.”
The second part of Favola’s bill would require the DCJS and SCHEV to provide training on the new curriculum for all personnel investigating those sexual assaults, which is apparently a problem among universities.
According to a recent study done by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), 30% of colleges and universities offered no training on sexual assault to students or law enforcement officers.
For some time, sexual assaults on college campuses have been the focus of intense discussion in Virginia and around the nation. The November 2014 article Rolling Stone magazine published about a supposed gang rape at U.Va. which was later widely discredited, prompted legislators and other officials to examine how colleges handle sexual assaults.
Favola said a big problem is that sexual assaults on campus are underreported.
In the previously mentioned report from NSVRC, the organization stated that more than 90% of sexual assault victims on college campuses do not report their assault.
Beyond that, it noted that 40% of colleges and universities reported not investigating a single sexual assault in the previous five years.
“I think the whole culture of campuses and universities, it needs to change,” she said. “Right now, I hate to say it, I believe there’s still a number of young men who just think if a women is under the influence or inebriated or under the influence of a date rape drug, she’s fair game,” she said. “The message should be just the opposite.”
The NSVRC found that one in five women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college.
In Virginia, 4,949 forcible sex offenses occurred in 2014, which is up slightly from the year before according to a Virginia State Police report
Favola said there is going to be variations between private and large public schools on how they handle sexual assault allegations, but SB 158 is aiming to set a standard for all of them to follow.
“There are some universities that are already doing what my bill requires, we just want to ensure everyone is doing it.”
Kate McCord, Communications Director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, said their organization is in favor of a bill that would train personnel in charge of handling a traumatic incident like a sexual assault.
“We support training that trains responders on how to provide a trauma-informed response and conduct a trauma-informed investigation,” she said. “Having said that, we also think it’s important to keep at the forefront that college-aged students experience not only sexual assault at a high rate, but intimate partner violence…we see a great deal of benefit that training requirement be expanded to include intimate partner violence.”
McCord said the “trauma-informed approach” is a way of understanding a sexual assault incident.
It takes into account the victimization results in trauma and “ensures that the survivor is at the center and informed of all aspects of the investigative process and the criminal process later on.”
McCord noted there’s also been increased scrutiny put on college campuses not only at the grassroots student level, but at the federal level with the Department of Education and the White House.
“Colleges are under a great deal of pressure to change and improve not only how they respond to those kind of incidents, but how they present them in the future,” she said. “Good work is happening, but we have a long way to go.”
As of October, 2015, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was conducting 174 investigations at 145 higher education institutions for possibly violating the Title IX law. Title IX is a federal gender equity law which prohibits discrimination or a hostile environment based on an individual’s sex.
Courts and the Department of Education have held that Title IX requires any school receiving federal funding to address sexual harassment among students.
Five Virginia colleges were under investigation for how they handled sexual assault on their campuses including Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Richmond, James Madison University, William and Mary and Washington University and Lee.
VCU came under investigation a few years back for how it handled a sexual assault on its campus.
According to a story that originally ran in The Commonwealth Times in September 2014, graduate business student Antoinette Moore and an employee of the university each filed OCR complaints against VCU in September and December 2013.
“I will say it over and over,” said the second complainant, a VCU employee and ’08 alumna who asked to remain anonymous. “What I went through with the university was worse than anything my assailant did to me because these are the people who are supposed to help and care. Encountering their indifference really compounded the trauma of being assaulted,” she stated as she concluded her description of the eleven-month-long process she endured by contributing to a university sexual misconduct and harassment investigation.
The case involved a tenured faculty member who the employee stated raped her before she left the state for graduate school. According to the story, once she returned to VCU as as a full-time employee, he “exhibited retaliatory behaviors that eventually warranted the services of VCU’s threat assessment team, a specific safety plan, and the Richmond and VCU police departments.”
Click here to read the full story.
The University of Richmond also faced a sexual misconduct complaint from the U.S. Department of Education in 2014.
Favola said sexual assault on college campuses is an issue that she’s not only passionate about, but her constituents care about as well. She said they have been very active on McAuliffe’s task force and even some Virginia university officials were on board with the bill.
She mentioned President Angel Cabera of George Mason University, Leah Cox, Special Assistant to the President for Diversity and Inclusion for the University of Mary Washington, and Allen Groves, the University of Virginia’s Dean all participated in the task force.
According to the final report for McAulffe’s task force, all 16 Virginia public colleges and universities pledged to work together to eliminate sexual violence on Virginia’s campuses.
“I really do want to make sure we have best practices in place we have to send a strong message that sexual assault allegations have to be taken seriously,” she said. “I’m expecting I’m going to have support.”
The General Assembly will convene next Wed. Jan. 13.
