Betsy DeVos teamed with Men's Rights Activists to write new campus sexual assault guidelines
From The Nation:
From May to September 2017, the DOE's Office of Civil Rights partnered with National Coalition for Men Carolinas (NCFMC), Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE), and Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) to develop regulations on campus sexual assault. E-mails make clear that staffers from these organizations participated in conference calls, offered legal advice, and met with high-level employees at the Department of Education. The DOE even hired the main funder of SAVE to help draft new regulations and teamed up with FACE to try to produce supportive op-eds.
The views of these groups have never been hidden. In public and in e-mails with DOE employees, members of these organizations have demeaned the credibility of young women, ridiculed sexual assault survivors, and pushed junk science on campus rape.
In September 2017, DeVos announced her plans to rescind Obama-era guidance on how colleges and university should handle sexual assault. The new DOE regulations - written, as it turns out, with heavy involvement by misogynistic Men's Rights Activists, some of who are recognized as Hate Groups by the SPLC - were proposed a year later, and went into effect this month. According to the New York Times, these regulations are expected to reduce investigations by 39 percent, saving tens of millions of dollars for educational institutions.
In other words, they're arguing that it's fiscally irresponsible to care about sexual assault.
To be clear: even those Obama-era rules for handling campus sexual assault were far, far from perfect (I would argue this is a problem inherent with any intra-tribunal campus committees that circumvent a standard legal process for the sake of CYA). But nothing good comes from recruiting junk science misogynists to offer an alternative.
How Men's Rights Groups Helped Rewrite Regulations on Campus Rape [Helene Barthelemy / The Nation]
Image: Backbone Campaign / Flickr (CC 2.0)