In Colleges" Handling of Rape Cases, Echoes of the Catholic Church's Sex Abuse Scandal

By Rich Barlow
WBUR
July 18, 2014

http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2014/07/18/campus-sex-abuse-rich-barlow

Rich Barlow: "Universities would do well to remember how badly tarnished the Catholic Church was by its secretive handling of sex abuse allegations." (sea-turtle/Flickr)

Anyone who paid any attention in the last decade to the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal knows that one of the bishops’ biggest bungles was secrecy in dealing with predator priests. As recently as May, the United Nations condemned surreptitious transfers of molesters to new parishes. The moral? Cover-ups harm the cover-uppers, too? .

One might think that universities, those repositories of PhDs, might grasp this lesson of recent history. Yet recent headlines about colleges grappling with sexual assaults on campus suggest that the culture of secrecy that permitted abuse in the rectory may have its counterpart in the Ivory Tower.

Circumstances differ, of course. Pedophile priests used positions of moral authority and their followers’ inherent trust in them to turn powerless children into prey, while the alleged perpetrators on college campuses have been fellow students of the alleged victims. In spite of these differences, what unites the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and the current campus rape crisis is the flimsy claim of confidentiality upon which both institutions have based their feeble responses. (I work for Boston University, and the opinions in this column are solely mine.)

Catholic bishops’ claims of confidentiality ranged from due process for the accused, which is a reasonable claim, to the need to shield the reputation of God’s minions on earth, which is not one. Universities’ confidentiality claims are rooted in a Nixon-era law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which was enacted to keep student grades confidential, not to provide a smokescreen to obscure the facts in cases of on-campus rape.

In 2008, Congress revised FERPA in the wake of the deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech that claimed 32 lives. The gunman, a student, was known to his counselors at the school to have mental health issues. Government investigators acknowledged that a fear of violating FERPA (and consequently losing federal funding) may have dissuaded the school from revealing concerns about the student’s state of mind. The FERPA amendment gave any school or person “safe harbor” from penalty for a good faith disclosure made in the name of protecting the health or safety of a student or member of the public.