Dear Ms. Kennedy,

I am writing to you today not as a member of Leaders in Interpersonal Violence Education (LIVE), nor as a facilitator for the Date, but as a student who has been consistently disappointed with Washington University’s response to sexual assault accusations. All the thoughts here are my own and do not reflect the stance of any groups I am involved in.

I am not a survivor of violence on this campus, but I have been working for and supporting survivors for most of my time here. I have seen the impact this has on my campus and my friends firsthand, I have sat in silence as people I love unload pain I would never wish on my worst enemy and I have heard their often equally heart-wrenching stories of interacting with the Title IX process. I have tried, as hard as I can, to hear their concerns and relay them to people who can do something about it. I was even a facilitator for your listening sessions, because I wanted to give you and your office the benefit of the doubt after all the egregious mishandling of cases became public. I thought that you were committed to listening and making change, but recent events have shown me this belief was misguided.

It is abundantly clear to anyone remotely involved in this issue that the Title IX process at this school has multiple, essential flaws that go beyond the time that it takes to complete. These flaws discourage survivors from accessing the resources they are entitled by law and ultimately allow dangerous individuals to remain on campus and hurt even more people.

So imagine my surprise when, early on April 29, I read in Student Life your statement that “I think in a lot of ways our process is ideal, except for the length of time that it takes.” Because if you had REALLY been listening to the students, you would know the process is NOT ideal.

The process is NOT ideal because survivors consistently report feeling re-traumatized by you, your office and the University Sexual Assault Investigative Board (USAIB) process. This has been well-documented in op-ed after op-ed after op-ed in Student Life and came up multiple times during the listening sessions. This is despite multiple calls for expanding the training that everyone in the process receives, which you claim is already “extensive” but really consists of two half-days and optional monthly trainings.

The process is NOT ideal because survivors consistently report feeling frustrated by your lack of empathy for their situation and your inability to protect their rights from their perpetrators’ lawyers. Why is it that you seem to be unable to prevent lawyers from speaking out during USAIB sessions and completing forms for their clients and are more concerned about a perpetrator’s winter break than the timely completion of a complaint?

The process is NOT ideal because your office continues to discourage survivors from reporting their assault or pursuing their rights, encouraging them instead to consider if the perpetrator will “enjoy his winter break,” forcing students who report close to summer break to choose between having student representation on the USAIB or having their case adjudicated in a timely manner and questioning if they even would like to report, even after they have collected evidence the event occurred.

The process is NOT ideal because, by your own office’s statistics, only 47 percent of the cases that reached you in the past four years—a tiny minority of the total number of assaults that occur on this campus—resulted in the respondent being found responsible. This is appallingly low, given that national statistics and campus studies consistently find the rate of false reports to be 5 percent or less. While we cannot judge the outcome of any individual case based on these statistics, anyone with a hint of background in statistical analysis knows that it is incredibly unlikely that those 53 percent of cases that did not result in responsibility were all unfounded! How can survivors on this campus trust your office as a resource when they would do better with a coin flip?

The process is NOT ideal because, on top of all of this, we learned this week that a serial assaulter was allowed free reign on our campus to continue his attacks with impunity as survivors were turned away from resource after resource instead of finding a safe place for the University to respond appropriately.

The process is NOT ideal, yet for some reason you still think all we need to do is shorten the time and increase education efforts.

The only way you cannot realize this after multiple listening sessions and hours of meeting students who care deeply about this issue is because you have failed to listen to and center the voices of survivors on this campus. How can a survivor of sexual assault feel comfortable disclosing their story to you when you have shown time and again you did not listen to the voices of the survivors that came before them?

You have failed to engage with the students and have lost their trust. Because of this, countless survivors feel they have no avenue for institutional response, student activists and survivors feel consistently ignored by you and your office and scores of perpetrators continue to bring violence to this campus rather than facing the consequences of their actions.

You have lost our trust, and you will never regain that trust. Survivors on this campus will never feel safe coming to your office, they will never feel as though you respect their rights and hear their voices.

Ultimately, the process is NOT ideal because of YOU; because you and your office present an essential barrier to survivors accessing the resources they are entitled to by law.

As a white man involved in violence prevention work, I have learned to recognize when my presence is not contributing to a conversation, and may even detract from work being done, and when that occurs, I step back. For the sake of all the survivors on this campus who feel shut out of this process by your office’s systemic failures, I call on you to do the same. Until the University hires someone else to lead the Title IX Office, no amount of listening sessions or meeting demands will restore the trust in the system that every survivor on this campus deserves.