Paper Versus Practice: How Admin Addresses Sexual Assault

All students who shared personal stories in this article have been given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity and privacy.

In our last three articles, we heard stories from MHS students about rape jokes, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Now, we are going to explore what happens when a student reports an incident to the school administration.

Policy and Procedure: The Process of Reporting

The moment a student reports a sexual harassment encounter or assault, the information is processed by officials in Student Services.

According to school nurse Megan Westphal, “If someone does share with us that they have been sexually assaulted, because we are educators or the different professions that we have, we do have the obligation to report it to law enforcement or child protective forces.”

As soon as a sexual assault is reported, said MHS Associate Principal Omar Rodriguez, “[the] student is always informed that we, as mandated reporters, have an obligation to report any instance of compromising a students’ safety to authorities, and it’s not only a report to the police. It’s also a report to Child Protective Services to try to prevent further endangerment of that minor. Where it goes from there is really driven by the student, is driven by the family, as well.”

All staff members in public schools are mandated reporters under Title IX, a federal law that outlines civil rights regarding discrimination in schools, including both sexual harassment and assault. The law outlines what schools’ responsibilities are to prevent and address sexual harassment. According to Title IX, “even if a student or his or her family does not want to file a complaint or the student does not want the school to take any action on the student’s behalf, if the school knows or reasonably should know about possible sexual harassment or sexual violence, it must promptly investigate to determine what occurred and then take appropriate steps to resolve the situation.”

For this to occur, however, there has to be an official report.

“If the report is anonymous or we don’t get a report in the first place then there’s really nothing for [the police] legally to look into, and it also doesn’t provide us much information for us to follow up on, as well,” said Rodriguez.

Despite being required to report and investigate all sexual assaults, steps can be taken to leave control in students’ hands. As one of the primary officials in charge of handling sexual harassment cases, Red Maple social worker Kristin Wilson acknowledges how important it is to allow the student to have autonomy.

“We try to provide as much control as possible,” said Wilson. “Sometimes we use the Rape Crisis center as our advocate, or an organization called Safe Harbor, so the victim has to only tell their story once . . .  Sometimes the victim can request a female officer, or they are okay with a male officer. It’s up to them; [the interview] can happen at home, it could happen [at MHS] it could happen with or without parents . . . Most of the time we say, ‘Do you want to tell [your parents] first or how do you want to do it? Do you want me to go home with you? Do you want me to come in?’”

Under Wisconsin state law, there is a ten-year statute of limitations on sexual assault reports. This allows students to decide when they want to report and decreases the pressure to do so immediately.

If police charges are not sought after, however, the report still has to be investigated by the school, Rodriguez said, “Whether it’s sitting in on a police interview and taking our own notes or then taking that police report and then following up on the students afterwards to conduct our own thorough investigation as well.”

Nonetheless, despite the administration’s acknowledgment of students’ free will, there are cases in which the police will become involved and legal action will be pursued, regardless of the student or family’s desire to press charges.

“So technically a victim of sexual violence is an actual witness to the crime that was committed against them, and so, for the most part, if the district attorney’s office said, ‘we have so much here, we are going to go ahead and charge regardless of what the survivor said, regardless of what the parents want’ . . . we [at MHS] are going to go ahead,” said Wilson.

The Power of Legal Action

After the preliminary investigation, the school may take action against the predator if they find a connection between the event and the school.

“If the incident occurred within our school grounds – and that includes the building and our campus – or a school event, it kind of makes it easier for us to navigate and have a resolution,” said Rodriguez. “If an event occurs outside of school, we have to prove an impact to the school, and that could be larger, like if there’s an event and kids catch wind of it, and it creates a disturbance in the hallway, that’s enough, but the way I see and interpret this, at least for sexual assault, it’s also creating a hostile environment for that individual student. That’s impacting someone’s day, someone’s ability and right to learn, so we have the obligation to act on that, but again, we have to be able to make that connection between event and disruption.”

Once this tieback to school grounds has been made, the administration can take steps towards resolution. In the case of police involvement, the most concrete actions can be taken against the perpetrator.

One of the administration’s goals in these cases is to let students know the power of taking legal action.

“I think this is the importance of coming forward and encouraging victims to come forward to the police because there are certain things that legally, once they’re enacted, they can get a [restraining order] to eliminate the contact altogether,” said Rodriguez. “. . . Court orders bear that much more weight . . . The victim and the perpetrator have equal rights to be at school, but if the courts help narrow that focus, it gives us a lot more latitude.”

Outside of legal action, there are measures that administration can take to minimize contact on school grounds.

“We are able to do something called Schedule Constraints, which means if there is an ongoing investigation or an incident in the past, we are able to, for the most part, manipulate the master schedule so that these two people will not be in the same classes together,” said Wilson.

Outside of classrooms, said Rodriguez, “that’s where things get kind of tricky. We do take the approach of creating a safety plan, so looking for ways to try and avoid some of that unstructured contact, but doing it in a way to where the burden doesn’t fall on the victim.”

As far as disciplinary action against the predator, the MCPASD Code of Conduct procedures lists sexual assault and harassment as a major level III offense. This means mandatory suspension and police involvement at a middle school and high school level.

The length of those suspensions, Rodriguez said, “is where we have discretion as an administrative team.”

The Aftermath

Once disciplinary action has been taken against the predator and the issue has been resolved, the focus then shifts to mental health – and not just that of the victim.

“It’s hard to do, but we have to remove our own . . . biases and provide the supports to both,” said Rodriguez. “Because I would argue that statistics show that perpetrators for the most part probably experienced some sort of trauma in their lives themselves that would cause for them to act in this way, so it would be unethical to not address that as well, and provide that student the support they may need to kind of work through some of those issues, as well.”

Nevertheless, the victim remains a primary concern.

“So from there, knowing that there has been a traumatic experience, that is where our counselors, social workers, and school psychologists come into play establishing follow-up conversations, follow-up appointments with the victim, and then, in cases where the student continues – the perpetrator continues to be a student here as well, we do some check-ins as well,” Rodriguez said.

It is not the school’s place to provide counseling or therapy, he explains, but the school does have the discretion of working hand-in-hand with external support systems “to provide therapy and treatment.”

Admin’s Message of Awareness

Safety, mental health, and the right to education are all invulnerable aspects of the administration’s job, making them a focal point of the school’s attempts to prevent sexual assault and harassment at MHS. The best way to do this, in the eyes of Student Services, is through information.

Over his three-year tenure at MHS, Rodriguez has seen the administration’s efforts to raise awareness on sexual harassment and rape culture through “creating the space for students to feel comfortable, safe enough to come and engage in those difficult conversations.”

In his opinion, the administration’s efforts have paid off.

“In the past three years, just from conversations that I’ve had with colleagues who have been here for quite some time, the reports have increased exponentially,” said Rodriguez. “I would like to believe it’s because of the work that we’ve done to, like I said, create that safe environment for students to come and make those reports, but we can’t just tie it or make that correlation to that – it’s also, I think, a positive – if we can find any positivity in this, it’s a positive outcome or result of the #MeToo movement that has been multiplied.”

Student Perceptions and Protest

Regardless of the administration’s attempts to raise awareness around sexual assault, many students are unsatisfied.

Following an incident of sexual harassment, junior Skyler said, “[the administration] pulled me out of class a lot and talked to me about it, and then I’m pretty sure they talked to the guy one time . . . He later told me that all that they did was search his phone – but his parents took his phone – and that they just kind of told him that, like, ‘Hey, you can’t do that anymore’ and that he’s not supposed to contact me . . . He didn’t really get any punishments.”

Toby, who recently graduated from MHS, remembered that there was a boy in his grade who would sexually harass girls on a semi-regular basis.

“He made it seem as if it was jokingly,” said Toby, “ [and] there [were] a couple girls that brought it up to the school . . . They didn’t end up really doing anything about it because they didn’t have enough evidence, and they just kind of dropped it after a little bit.”

These students are not alone. At the protest against sexual harassment on November 19th, many students expressed the sentiment that the administration is not doing enough in response to sexual assault at MHS.

“That could not be further from the truth,” said Rodriguez. “It’s something that impacts your everyday experience here in the building, and again, our number one priority is ensuring your safety and wellbeing.”

These priorities, however, are sometimes lost in translation. Although the administration supports students who report sexual harassment to the fullest extent of their capabilities, many students are unaware of this. They perceive that the administration is not doing enough to combat sexual harassment.

Ultimately, the administration fully supports student voice and the right to protest, regardless of their message or perception of Admin.

“That’s education, it’s freedom of speech, and allowing you the right to congregate, and protest is a basic right that we have, thankfully, in this country,” said Rodriguez. “If we were to suppress that, we would be teaching you all the wrong aspects of being a productive citizen in our community. We encourage it . . .  [we support] our student body, bottom line.”

In our next article, The Cardinal Chronicle will share how students are raising their voices against the issue of sexual assault and harassment at our school.