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An Australian friend draws our attention to two stories that appeared in the Australian press last week:
The government of Western Australia is considering placing police officers in that state’s high schools, in response to a recent increase in assaults on teachers there…
…And an officer assigned to an “elite unit designed to be the public face of [the] police in high schools” in the state of New South Wales has been arrested on charges that he sexually assaulted a child.
This is just one incident, of course. But it does serve as a reminder that whatever the benefits to teachers and students of bringing police onto school grounds may be, the practice carries real costs as well.
(Thanks to lauredhel of Hoyden About Town for the tip.)
According to the Times of India, students at the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow staged a march on campus yesterday to complain about one of their professors.
The marchers carried signs and chanted slogans accusing Kamal Jaiswal, head of the department of applied animal science, of sexual harassment, soliciting bribes, and “asking students to visit his place and work as his domestic help.”
According to the article, their complaints led the university’s vice chancellor to suspend the professor and launch an internal inquiry into their charges.
Last April we passed on word that a student at the University of Portland had been threatened by administrators with disciplinary action after reporting a sexual assault. She and a male student had been drinking at a party in violation of university policy. She told the university he raped her in her dorm room. The university took no action.
A year later, after the student went to the campus newspaper with her story, she got a letter from the university’s judicial co-ordinator saying that the two students’ drinking had made “consent—or lack of consent … difficult to determine,” and that “there are possible violations for which [the complainant] could be charged.”
Today comes word that the university’s sexual assault reporting policies have been revised. The new policy reads as follows:
“To foster the safety and security of the entire community, the University of Portland encourages reporting of all instances of sexual assault. … To remove barriers to reporting, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of the survivor which occurred in the context of the sexual assault. Likewise, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of a person who comes forward to report sexual assault.”
This change brings Portland’s policies in line with Catholic colleges like Gonzaga, Santa Clara and Notre Dame. According to a university administrator, it brings the university’s written policies in line with “the University’s values and practices regarding sexual assault that have been in place for many years.”
Thanks to Inside Higher Ed for the heads-up. New visitors are welcome to follow us on Twitter.
The University of Michigan has completed its investigation of a professor who paid a student for sex and allegedly assaulted her.
As we reported at the time, a Michigan law student told police last December that Yaron Eliav, an associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, had struck her with his hand and a belt in the course of a sexual encounter they had arranged through Craigslist.
Police refused to arrest Eliav, who claimed the acts were consensual, for assault, instead charging both student and professor with misdemeanor offenses relating to the exchange of money for sex. Both were ultimately fined and charged court costs.
A university spokesperson told the Ann Arbor News last week that Eliav is currently on paid leave, and that an internal investigation of his role in the incident has been completed. She refused to comment on the outcome of the investigation, or to say what administrative actions, if any, had been taken against Eliav, who has tenure.
About a week ago, this story made the rounds.
A professor at the University of Michigan answered an ad on craigslist for sexual services placed by a woman who turned out to be a U of M law student. In the course of the encounter that followed, he hit her with a belt and slapped her face. She went to the cops, he claimed it was all consensual. The cops refused to charge him with assault, instead charging them both with misdemeanor offenses relating to the transaction itself, and one local (non-campus) cop made an extremely offensive public comment ridiculing the woman who had been beaten for going to the police.
I didn’t post about the story at the time because I didn’t have much of an angle on it, and because it’s often hard to know what to make of a crime story when it first breaks. It wasn’t clear what action the university was taking, or planning to take, for instance.
But now the law student has spoken out, and her statement is very much worth reading. Here it is.
studentactivism.net 
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