WASHINGTON – The NCAA is facing calls to be tougher on college athletes involved in sexual violence.
At a July 9 Senate hearing held to examine claims that collegiate sports’ major governing body exploits its athletes and needs to reform, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., confronted NCAA President Mark Emmert with data from polls of 236 colleges and universities.
The report found that 82 percent of Division I schools provided sexual violence prevention training for college athletes. Overall, however, only 37 percent of the 236 schools provided such training for college athletes.
McCaskill also condemned the finding that more than 20 percent of the schools surveyed allow their athletic departments to have a role in overseeing allegations of sexual assault against student-athletes.
“If you’re a victim and you know your allegation is going to be handled by the athletic department, as opposed to any other student on campus who’s handled in a different system, why in the world would you think the process is going to be fair?” McCaskill asked.
Emmert said he cannot create sexual violence rules because NCAA policies are set by a body of member schools, but that he can speak out against athletic departments being involved in sexual assault cases.
But Baine Kerr, a Colorado attorney who specializes in Title IX cases, said that’s not enough – the NCAA should take a bigger role in cases of college athletes accused of sexual violence.
“The NCAA is far more serious about these essentially technical and minor [rules] – practice time violations, for example – than true out and out criminal conduct like sexual assault, which is a huge dereliction of its responsibility,” Kerr said.
Kerr has been part of a team that has won a number of big Title IX cases involving sexual assaults allegedly committed by student-athletes. Kerr helped a former Arizona State University student win a settlement of more than $800,000 in 2009 after the school was found to have mishandled her rape case, which involved a football player. Now, Kerr is preparing to serve as one of the lead lawyers for a female college student who accused Jameis Winston, the Heisman Trophy-winning Florida State University quarterback, of raping her in December 2012.
“We will never know whether [Winston] was guilty or not because nobody ever investigated because of who he was,” McCaskill said of Winston’s case at the hearing.
While there have been numerous studies examining the relationship between sexual violence and male student-athletes, “There is a significant gap in the research, with only two publications addressing student-athlete violence against women over the course of the past 15 years,” according to Ohio State University researcher Kristy McCray.
Although McCray said it’s clear male student-athletes are assaulting women, making general statements about college athletes and sexual violence is not possible because it’s “uncertain at this time whether or not they are [committing violence] at rates higher than their nonathlete peers.”
Even so, McCaskill and others feel the NCAA has a responsibility to make sure its member institutions act in a uniform way when sexual assault allegations are made against student-athletes.
NCAA spokesman Christopher Radford said via email that the organization isn’t in the process of expanding its rules to include sexual assault regulations, but that it has been engaged in campus violence prevention and that its Sports Science Institute is revising educational materials for athletic departments.
“NCAA rules typically do not regulate criminal matters, as these are best handled by local law enforcement,” Radford wrote. “I’m not aware of any pending rules proposals on this issue, but the door is always open for further conversation regarding NCAA policy on campus violence.”
Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel and director of equal opportunities in athletics for the National Women’s Law Center, thinks the NCAA should be more clear about what it expects of its schools in terms of sexual assault policies.
“I definitely think the NCAA has a leadership role to play here. They should be making sure that all their member institutions know about their legal obligations,” Chaudhry said. “Every school has to make sure that they have a fair process for both [the accused and the accuser] – that’s very important.”
Trisha Ananiades, a Los Angeles attorney, wrote in a 2012 law journal article that student-athletes found guilty of sexual assault, either by a university panel or a legal court, should have their eligibility stripped in order to prevent them from playing for other colleges.
But New York attorney Peter Ginsberg said the NCAA should steer clear of sexual assault cases and leave them to the legal system. Ginsberg represents University of Maryland senior Dez Wells, a guard on the basketball team who was accused of sexually assaulting another student in 2012 while playing for Xavier University. Wells was expelled from Xavier, but filed a lawsuit against the university for mishandling his case, stating that his accuser didn’t press charges and the local prosecutor declined the case. Wells’ suit was settled in April.
“I think the NCAA right now has enough problems of its own, and it has not proved itself to be particularly wise in handling matters of that seriousness,” Ginsberg said. “I would be reticent to see the NCAA expand its jurisdiction in most areas.”
Ginsberg and others argue Title IX-mandated college hearing panels are not the right place to try sexual assault cases, and say they frequently put accused students at a disadvantage. Steven Henricks, a New York attorney, wrote last year that recommendations from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that the government should lower the burden of proof in Title IX campus sexual assault cases demonstrated a lack of equal protections for the accused and the accuser.
Former student-athletes are split on whether the NCAA should punish college athletes found to be responsible for sexual assaults.
Robby Barbieri, a former linebacker at Vanderbilt University who graduated in 2013, said he would support the NCAA taking punitive action against athletes found responsible for sexual assaults.
“I would support that completely,” Barbieri said. “Increasing that fear factor and the punishment side of it would have an effect.”
Frisline Saintoiry, a former thrower on Eastern Illinois University’s track and field team who graduated in 2011, likes the idea of the NCAA addressing sexual assault cases against student-athletes, but isn’t sure if stripping student-athletes of their eligibility is the best way to go.
“I guess that would be a better rule than the one they have now,” Saintoiry said. “But then there’s all the gray area of a situation, where you don’t know exactly what happened. Every rule has a gray area where you don’t know what to do in a certain situation.”
Published in conjunction with 