Efforts to prevent climate change. At a Senate Hearing loog into Sexual Assaults on College Campuses, Committee Members heard from officials in charge of on Campus Security and advocates for Sexual Assault victims. The hearing will please come to order, let me welcome senator schumer and senator grassley and senator mccaskell. We will be joininged shortly by senator jill brand as well to make some brief remarks and senator graham is expected to join us, hes the Ranking Member on this committee. Senators mccaskell and gill brand have worked tirelessly to and in our military. Senator mccaskell and senator helder are the lead cosponsors and worked very, very hard to develop with the senators that makes comprehensive changes in the area of campus Sexual Assault. I would like to note as well of commander leahy, through this committee and into law. As you know, it requires colleges to be more transparent about Sexual Assaults and other offices committed on campus. In my home state, attorney general peter kill martin, and Rhode Islands universities are working with me on developing best practices and advising me in these legislative efforts and i want to express my appreciation to my very robust finally i would like to thank all of our Witnesses Today for joining us. I know that you workday in and day out to help survivors who are seeking profiles and justice. Campus assault is not a new phenomenon, but the last few years has shed light on just how pervasive it has become. Oil has rightly become a pry i dont recall for University Board rooms, for Police Departments, even the white house, for its dedicated task force. Innovations in the private sector include products to prevent sir repetitious. Law enforcement done right makes sure forensic evidence is properly collected and preserved. It empowers the victim, it informs her of her continuing power through the stages of investigation and prosecution. It brings professionalism in the place of amateur university investigations. It eludes the built in conflict of interest in a university that wants the Sexual Assault problem minimized or hushed and it sends an important societal signal when after a rape, the crime scene has police tape up and evidence vans and officers taking statements, a signal that what happened was serious. At its best, Law Enforcement response is victim centered and well coordinated with both medical, Mental Health and advocacy professionals. When a rape victim is steered away from Law Enforcement, based on uninformed choices about proceeding, or because the relationship between the university and Law Enforcement is so weak that contacting Law Enforcement is a step into a dark unknown, and the victim later loses the chance for justice, she has been victimized all over again. The student has the right to know that delays in opening an investigation and collecting evidence could mean the disappearance of evidence all together and could open up devastating questioning by a future defense attorney. Until were willing to put more information and control right away in the hands of victims, they simply wont trust the victim enough to report Sexual Assaults in the first place, we know this sadly from experience. Until we find a uninformed fear and uncertainty will remain a krip mg barrier. When theres no Law Enforcement response at all, that silence is deafening, and sechbds the message that add in the new evidence that most college Sexual Assaults are committed by men who are serial offenders and thus a threat to Public Safety. That should make it an even higher priority for us as raw makers, law enforcers and School Administrators to create systems that will increase reporting, root out those who will commit such acts and see that they are brought to justice. If we dont increase and improve the role of the criminal Justice System in these cases, victims l pay the price. I say improve because equal to early Law Enforcement in this crime is the quality of the Law Enforcement response. As i said, anything can be done badly, but there are best practices out there, and i look forward to hearing from todays witnesses about some of those best practices. And about how we as federal legislators might be able to advance the goals of Public Safety and dignity and justice for survivors. As we begin this hearing, let me thank my Ranking Member for his courtesy during our time when i have been chairman and i look forward to continuing the bipartisan spirit when chairman graham takes over in the next congress. Senator grassley do you have any opening remarks . I have an interest in this issue as im a cosponsor of the bill, i dont understand the sense sixths that universities have about a crime of rape off campus or a crime of rape on campus ought to be treated the same way. I hope that theres a real effort in the next congress to work on this bill very seriously. And move it along. And i appreciate the remarks of the chairman, they would be things that i would associate myself with at this point, but i think that its high time to make sure that a crime is a crime wherever its committed and treated the same way. And when its treated universally the same way, well have les rape on campuses. I think its significant that the incoming chairman make that statement. I turn now to senator schumer. Ill be brief, u i want to thank you mr. Chairman for holding this hearing, my colleagues for being here, i want to thank two of my dear friends on the senate for making the charge here. I want to wish senator gillibrand a happy birthday. I want to thank senator graham and all the others for bringing this whole issue to light. This has been a sort of dirty little secret for a long time on College Campuses that women were abused and then afraid to come forward. And because of the efforts of the two senators that were going to hear testifying and so many others, thats not happening anymore. And all you have to do is talk to people, relatives, children of friends, women who were on College Campuses and ask them how serious is this . Most of them say its far more serious than you know. And so to get to the bottom of this and do something about it is something we can do in a bipartisan way, we can show that Government Works and works well when we put our minds together and come up with careful, rational but Strong Solutions and i look forward to hearing the testimony and working with the sponsors of legislation to make that happen. Senator franken, anything . No, im just looking forward to hearing from my colleagues and then from the witnesses. When we are united, we are i think, an objective evaluation would say that we are a force to be reconed with, and we are united on this effort, along with senator hellor r and senator grassley who have worked tirelessly to put together what truly is a bipartisan bill. Theres a lot of give and take thats already gone into the development of this election and i know all of us look forward to introducing it for its passage next year. In that vein, its porvet that we hear from your committee how we can make that even better. I want to say that this is complicated first, because were dealing with two systems, were dealing with a title 9 system and were dealing with a criminal justice m system. And the two systems have different goals. The title 9 system, while it is there for the address of victims, it is there primarily to force College Campuses to provide a safe and crime free and discrimination free campus. That is the purpose behind title 9 and when you combine those two systems it is confusing and complicated. So what we do has to strengthen title 9 and hopefully provide more victims with to the reassurance that they need, the survivors, the reassurance they need that they can in fact avail themselves of the justice that is there in the criminal Justice System. Right now, because the criminal Justice System has been very bad, in fact much worse than the military, and much worse than College Campuses, in terms of addressing victims and supporting victims and pursuing prosecutions, theres almost a false position that victims have taken through advocacy groups that they might be better off doing the title 9 process. So what we really have to do in in this k06 indicate ed indicat get support and good information about the options that are available to them. We have taken reporting in the military from one in 12 to one in h so its in that frame work that we have tried the to work out a bill that will strength the support services for victims, provide them more information and as i said to College Campuses all over my state when i did my tour, it does the College Campuses no good to have a great system in place if the students dont know about it. I must comment before i leave it to this committees work to finding even better ways we can do this, that i am saddened and angry about the bad journali ii in the rolling stoeng about an alleged gang rape at the university of virginia. I am saddened and angry because it is a set back for survivors in this country. This is not a crime where you have ram parent false reporting or embellishment, this is a crime that is the most underreported crime in america and will remain so. And our problem is not victims coming forward and embellishing, our problem is victims are too frightened to come forward. So this bad piece of journalism, i think, has set us back and i want to make sure that we overcome it and dont allow it to slow us in our determination to make sure that victims have the support they need at the moment they need it. And thank you mr. Chairman for giving me a chance to say a few words this emergenmorning and ik with you and the other members of the committee and with our cosponsors on the bill to make it better and stronger and get it passed next year so that we can beginning to have a list of reforms on College Campuses that we have been able to accomplish in the military. Thank you, senator mccaskell, i dont think you and senator gillibrand have to be working together to be forces to be reconed with. Let me turn to senator gillibrand. Thank you senator mccaskell. I really appreciate this committee for holding this hearing. The fact that according to one study nearly one in five women in college will be victims of Sexual Assault or attempted assault during their under graduate careers should shake the conscience of all of us too many young womens lives are being changed forever for us to accept the status quo. Earlier this congress along with a Bipartisan Coalition of ten senators introduced the campus accountability and safety act. A bill that will finally hold colleges and universities accountable for facing this head on aggressively with the goal of making cam empty promise that it is today. The bill was the result of exhaustive efforts listening to survivors and the short i want to thanning both chairman white house and Ranking Member graham for their leadership and their support of that bill. Clearly we in Congress Must look at how Law Enforcement must improve to be part of the solution, first in our comprehensive bill, we require every college and university in the country to have a memorandum of understanding with local Law Enforcement. Its shocking that this requirement doesnt yet exist. In these types of crimes, where physical evidence is crucial, time is precious and we cant tolerate the hours or days or weeks of delays while just dictional arguments are being made. Its where serve to flip the current incentive for colleges and universities that would rather sweep these cases under the rug. 100 of survivors of campus assault feel comfortable and confident reporting to Law Enforcement so alleged assailants are legally held accountable through due process. But time and again i have heard from far too many survivors of campus Sexual Assault that they have felt revictimed because of the crime the police should be the First Responders when a crime this serious occurs, but in the vast majority of Police Departments, have responded to reports with victim blaming and belittlement and as a result survivors have lost trust in Law Enforcement. Today i would like to provide some survivor experiencings when they tried to report the i want to address the university of virginia story in Rolling Stone that some may hold up as a reason not to believe survivors when they come forward. Clearly, we dont know the facts of what happened or what didnt happen in this case. But these facts have not changed. Uva has admitted that they have allowed students who have confessed to Sexual Assaulting another student to remaining on campus. That is and remains shocking. More importantly, it has never been about this one school and it is painfully clear that colleges across the country have a real problem in how theyre handling or not handling cases of Sexual Assault on their campuses. I hope this story will not ultimately outshine the story of thousands of young women and men telling their stories and Holding Colleges and universities across the country accountable. And i hope it will not discourage other countries from who are demafbding reform and their voices are vital to the debate. I refuse to let this one story become an excuse for congress not to fix a broken system. Because i have met with these students and seen them bravely tell their personal stories so that other young men and women on campus will not have their own story to tell tomorrow. Young women who was raped by a fellow student in Columbia University reported her rape to the police. She described to a Police Detective how her assailant had pitched her arms down her choked her and hit her across the face despite her shouting and telling him no. The detective responded by telling emma that the encounter was consensual because she had previous consensual sex with the individual. The officer repeatedly stated that the perpetrator just got a little weird that night, right. Anna was raped, at age 18, just two weeks into her freshman year at Hobart WilliamsSmith College when she filed formal criminal charges, the police sent the prosecutor a report filled with errors which included in particular failing to identify major discrepancies given my three alleged perpetrators. Anna had experienced blunt force trauma. But the police never acquired dna samples from the alleged perpetrators, the direct attorney never interviewed anna and he declined to bring charges just one day after drawn out court proski four out of every five rapes that are reported to the police are never prosecuted. Simply unacceptable. We must provide survivors of campus Sexual Assault with options that are beneficial to both Law Enforcement and survivors. Better information to send to to the ash land Police Department, ash land oregon has developed a model for investigating reports of Sexual Assault that sfrooifrs to achieve these goals, called the you have Options Program reporting. The Department Found that by using trauma informed investigative techniques in allowing victims to provide as much or Little Information about the assault as they choose in a time frame that they feel comfortable, the department can actually increase reporting and collect better evidence. In fact when i sat down with a woman who developed the program, she said she was able to convince her Police Department to do this because there were the tools that were necessary to catch multiple rapes by the same perpetrator. So if they could convict these types of serial rapists, they were willing to try a different system. They found this system worked and that it was extremely effective. By using the you have options reporting program, the ash lapd Police Department saw an increase in reporting by 106 . Theres a Critical Role for Law Enforcement to play in comb combatting