Betsy DeVos to Bring Sanity Back to Sexual Assault Investigations

According to Candice Jackson, the chief of the Department of Education’s civil rights division, the vast majority of sexual assault accusations on today’s college campuses are not what they appear to be. In an interview with The New York Times, Jackson said her department – now under the leadership of Secretary Betsy DeVos – was looking to roll back the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of campus sex assaults due to what she claimed was a witch-hunt that had ensnared hundreds of innocent young men in a web of false charges.

In most cases brought before the DoE, she said, there was “not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman. Rather, the accusations – 90 percent of them – fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk, we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”

Unlike her predecessors in the Obama administration, DeVos is not trying to prove to the academic world that she’s “doing something” about so-called rape culture. Instead, she’s listening to both sides and trying to bring some sanity back to a department that many have criticized as being a vehicle for the left’s social justice agenda.

On Thursday, DeVos met with activists on both sides of the issue. Some say that Jackson is wrong about campus sexual assault – that one in four women experience some form of assault while in college. Others say the studies from which these activists derive their figures are absurdly flawed and that less than 1% of students experience such assault.

In her interview with the Times, Jackson mentioned meeting with a woman whose son had attempted suicide as a result of false rape charges.

“Listening to her talk about walking in and finding him in the middle of trying to kill himself because his life and his future were gone, and he was forever branded a rapist — that’s haunting,” Jackson said, bringing up an issue that no Obama-era official would have EVER spoken publicly about, seeing as how diametrically opposed it is to the left’s feminist agenda.

But the Department of Education, in a just world, should not be concerned with a political agenda – especially when it comes to the serious and important business of protecting our young men and women from sexual assault AND the equally-important business of protecting students from false accusations. These accusations can be just as life-ruining as the sexually aggressive acts themselves, and it’s heartening to know we have officials in the Trump administration who recognize that simple, basic fact.