The New School recently revamped its sexual assault policies and reporting process in collaboration with a Sexual Assault Task Force set up by DVZ last year. Most of these changes were implemented at the beginning of November, but went unannounced by the university.
“We don’t have any plans to make an announcement,” said Jennifer Francone, New School Title IX coordinator.
Francone did not say why there would not be an announcement about the anonymous reporting; rather, she explained that there will be posters hung up around campus with a graphic illustrating the different ways a student can report any assault, past, recent, on campus or off.
The school may have chosen not to make an announcement about the new sexual assault reporting process to avoid sending an email that could make victims of sexual assault uncomfortable, explained Judith Lesser, an intern at Student Health Services who is currently working on a masters degree in social work at Columbia University. “It’s been a concern at [Columbia] as well, emails that can be triggering to survivors of sexual assault, which is an important consideration. But, if people don’t know about it then they can’t access [the resource].”
Anonymous reporting for sexual assaults has been a trend amongst many colleges in the last year due to the success of several third-party anonymous reporting websites, like Lighthouse and Callisto. These websites are companies independent from universities that outsource sexual assault reports, rather than having college students report assaults at their own school.
“We want to give students as many avenues as possible to make reports,” Francone said. “It’s therapeutic, being able to state what happened, without having to [say] it face to face.”
“I think getting the anonymity added to the sexual assault policy is a really good development, anonymous online reporting [is] huge,” said Aaron Neber, a member of the Sex-E collective, and student representative on the Sexual Assault task force that developed the new anonymous reporting feature.
“[The anonymous reporting] hasn’t really been publicized… It remains to be seen how much this feature will actually get used, and what will be done with the information that is gathered,” said Lesser. “But, I think it is important and I’m glad that it has been implemented.”
Online anonymous reporting is now available here for anyone to report sexual misconduct or assault.
Photo by Don Eim