Issue Position: Leading the Fight Against Campus Sexual Assault

Issue Position

Promote prevention, best practices and a culture of consent. Across Pennsylvania, students, school officials, law enforcement leaders and advocates are working hard to bring awareness to the critical issues surrounding campus sexual assaults. They are also working to improve and clarify policies, train faculty and staff on their roles and responsibilities and encourage bystanders to safely intervene to prevent assaults. Shapiro will direct the Attorney General's Education and Outreach to promote both prevention and best practices in combatting sexual assault on campus. He will also partner with stakeholders both in and out of government to build a culture of consent that prevents sexual assaults from happening in the first place.

Develop a model memorandum of understanding to clarify roles of responders to sexual assault on campus. Survivors of sexual assault on campus are often forced to navigate multiple complicated and overlapping bureaucracies in seeking justice or closure. As Attorney General, Shapiro will work with stakeholders to develop a model Memorandum of Understanding to help college administrators, human service agencies, student organizations and both campus and local law enforcement work together to support survivors. This approach has been demonstrated to ensure survivors of sexual crimes on our campuses interact with a system that, is coordinated, efficient, and sensitive to the trauma they have experienced.

Ensure survivors receive critical support services. As Chairman of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, Shapiro has focused on providing services to help survivors of sexual assault and other crimes get the counseling and support they need. He understands that counseling and accommodations provided by institutions are critical to helping survivors move forward, both on campus and in their communities. As Attorney General, Shapiro will lead with a trauma informed approach, and continue to advocate for funding for counseling and support services for survivors of sexual assault.

Provide education and technical assistance to comply with federal law and protect all students. The Campus SaVE Act, introduced by Senator Bob Casey and signed into law in 2013, amended the Jeanne Clery Act to further address sexual violence by requiring transparency, accountability, education and collaboration on college campuses. Under these laws and Title XI, higher education institutions must share information about crime on campus and identify and train campus mandatory reporters and campus police in their roles and obligations and trauma-informed response techniques to ensure these cases are handled fairly. The Office of Attorney General will provide education, training and technical assistance to higher education institutions working to comply with these laws and requirements and use data to combat crime on campus.

Eliminate the evidence backlog in sexual assault cases. Last year, Governor Wolf signed important legislation instituting deadlines for evidence testing and requiring police to report on backlogged evidence. According to the first-of-its-kind report from the Department of Health, more than 1,800 evidence kits were backlogged across the Commonwealth. We must do more to ensure evidence in sexual assault cases is collected properly and processed in a timely manner. Under Shapiro's leadership, the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency has directed funding to forensic labs across the state to increase their capacity. As Attorney General, Shapiro will work with law enforcement and government leaders as well as advocates to identify source funding and raise awareness to eliminate this backlog once and for all.

Encourage reporting and hold higher education institutions accountable for purposeful nondisclosure. Many Pennsylvania colleges and universities handle sexual misconduct cases efficiently. However, troubling anecdotes and vast discrepancies in reported crimes suggest that some colleges and universities are not properly disclosing statistics of sexual assaults. As Attorney General, Shapiro will intervene to assist in the elimination of institutional barriers to reporting and, if there is evidence of purposeful nondisclosure of these crimes, he will use all the powers of his office to bring institutions into compliance.

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