UTAH
Slate
By Dahlia Lithwick
Brigham Young University made national headlines this month when it was revealed that female students who reported being raped could be suspended or expelled for violating the school’s onerous honor code. The details of the case are infuriating. Whether or not the school is technically in violation of Title IX remains to be seen, but the school is clearly violating the spirit of the law in a way that does untold damage to rape survivors and makes future rapes more likely.
BYU, a private university in Provo, Utah, is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A handful of students came forward at a rape awareness conference earlier this month to describe their experiences with the school’s honor code policy. The Salt Lake Tribune then picked up and expanded upon the story, reporting that the practice of expelling rape victims for violations of the university’s honor code dates back decades. A petition with more than 110,000 signatures is calling for the school to amend the honor code to afford amnesty to the victims of sexual assault. BYU says it is “studying” its policies around investigating the victims of sexual assault for conduct that may represent small honor code violations.
The BYU honor code is far more restrictive than most other university codes. Created by BYU students in 1949, it forbids students from drinking, using drugs, wearing tight clothing, gambling, drinking coffee, homosexual conduct, engaging in premarital sex, or being in the bedroom of anyone of the opposite sex. Code violations may lead to expulsion. The problem? This code is on a collision course with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at any schools that receive funds from the U.S. government. Title IX requires that sexual assaults be counted and investigated; it certainly does not contemplate that any young woman fighting to protect her civil rights will be tossed out of her school for violating an honor code, a threat that is clearly antithetical to the promise and goals of Title IX.
The aforementioned online petition was launched earlier this month by 20-year-old BYU student Madi Barney, who reported last September that she was raped in her off-campus apartment by a man who is not a BYU student. According to police documents, the alleged attacker, Nasiru Seidu, admitted to Barney during a phone conversation that he had raped her. He now claims the sex was consensual. After agonizing for four days over whether she could report the assault and afford to be charged with an honor code violation, Barney went to the police and not the university. Seidu was arrested in September and is awaiting trial. But the school got ahold of her police report when sheriff’s deputy Edwin Randolph turned it over to the BYU Honor Code Office. Both her alleged attacker and Randolph were charged with witness retaliation, but the charges were later dropped. (A court petition filed by a prosecutor in the case described Seidu and Randolph as “friends,” something that Randolph denied.)
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.