Paulina* is a survivor of sexual assault. She’s also an employee at the University of Oregon. If a fellow student reached out to Paulina for support relating to a sex crime, Paulina would be expected to report it to her supervisors.
It’s an obligation that comes with working for the UO.
As of last Friday, the university had 10,781 employees. Faculty. Graduate Teaching Fellows. Student Recreation Center receptionists. They all have to report any instance of university-related sexual assault that comes to their attention, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Regardless of whether or not the victim wants to come forward.
“It takes away a personal aspect of friendship or confidentiality with a survivor, and puts the university first,” Paulina said of required reporting. “It’s not my place to decide whether or not a survivor wants to take action.”
Though employee requirements are uniform, notification and training for the reporting process are anything but.
Under Title IX requirements from the Department of Education, universities are expected to have a category of employees responsible for reporting inappropriate discrimination, including sexual assault. Legally, which employees fall into the role of required reporter is a decision left up to individual universities or university systems.
In a policy unusual within the Oregon University System, all UO employees are expected to report, all the time.
According to university administration, the all-inclusive policy is an attempt to eliminate confusion regarding who has to report sexual assault, or when they have to do it.
“(The required reporting policy) is very straightforward, it minimizes confusion … It is to meet our obligations under federal law that provides guidelines for when an institution knows, or should have known about discrimination, it has a duty to act,” UO’s title IX Coordinator Penelope Daugherty explains. “At the end of the day, if we want to provide an environment that is free from discrimination, then the way we do that is by knowing when discrimination is occurring so we can address it.”
Despite administrative desire for uniformity, inconsistencies with the implementation of the policies — including confusion regarding who is designated as a required reporter and what kind of training reporters receive — lead survivors and advocates to question the policy’s true purpose.
Annie Clark, a national advocate for sexual assault reform and survivor of an assault at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, worked in UO housing last year. Although she believes that the information generated by required reporting can be beneficial, from her time at the UO, she’s not sure that the university’s systems are capable to collect accurate information — let alone make use of it.
“If you have an infrastructure in place and people are properly trained it can be beneficial … I don’t see systems in place that are adequate to support the survivors if they come forward,” Clark said. “Telling people just to report, report, report, but not giving them adequate training to respond as a person — it just comes off as if they want to make sure they’re in compliance with federal laws, and not like they want to support the victim.”
To reduce confusion, the university will roll out a new mandatory training program by November. Online, and approximately 90 minutes long, the training will be broken into two parts: one to address institutional reporting responsibilities under federal law, and the second to address responding to a victim of sexual assault and specific practices for the UO.
Training will be mandatory for faculty, GTFs, professional staff and classified employees. It will be voluntary for all others. Although they remain required reporters, student and temporary workers will not be institutionally mandated to receive the training.
This inconsistency makes Clark question the institution’s reporting capacity.
“Training GTFs and faculty is a step in the right direction, and I know there are limited resources, but if reporting is something that you’re required to do, but not told how to do and given no training in — that doesn’t set you up for success,“ Clark said.
Though she doesn’t support the policy herself, UO student Katie* considers proper response training a necessity for effective and survivor-centered reporting practices. As both a survivor and a mandatory reporter in the healthcare industry who has received hours of extensive training, Katie understands the delicacy required to support a survivor during the reporting process. It’s not something that she thinks an online program can accomplish.
“(Reporting) can be either incredibly traumatic or therapeutic,” Katie says. “The outcome is ultimately dependent on how much training the reporter has been given and how much they can actually do with that training.”
Even if a student employee participates in the online training, Katie remains skeptical that an online course is comprehensive enough to teach survivor empowerment tactics to the average student employee.
“Unless someone signs up specifically for a job that designates you as a required reporter, you cannot expect them to have the level of humanity,” Katie said. “Empathy is not something you can teach in a classroom.”
Though the administrative policy that imposes the rule is decades old, both Daugherty and Sheryl Eyster, assistant dean of students, stress that the required reporting implementation and practices are a work in progress.
“We’re learning every day. We don’t have all of the answers, but we’re going to go look for the answers and clarify what we’re going to be expecting of students in those situations,” Eyster said. “I think it’s pretty clear that we need to start strengthening these processes … this is a situation where we’re dedicated to trying to figure out how to make this better.”
The next step, Eyster says, is to improve visibility surrounding the policies. Both she and Daugherty frequently meet with campus groups to educate them about the employee requirements, options for survivor reporting and resources available for survivors who report to the university.
In addition, the administration is considering requiring the new training course for all employees in the future and is working to clarify the exact reporting duties of interns and stipend-earning students.
Although there’s only so much they can do to balance federal compliance with student comfort, both women invite community input — critical and constructive. After all, Daugherty says, it’s a constantly evolving process.
“These are the protocols as they are currently operational,” she said. “I even loathe to call them final because they will constantly be evolving as we see areas for improvement.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of sexual assault survivors.