A former student at the University of Southern California (USC) has decided it is time to come forward with her unresolved sexual assault complaint, 20 years after the fact, the Huffington Post reported.
The student, who wished to remain anonymous, said she noticed the school was being investigated by the U.S. Education Department's (ED) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) for not properly reporting sexual misconduct. The details of the complainants' stories, she said, were similar to hers.
In 1993, the year the alumna said she was raped, she began her reporting process by contacting USC's Office for Women's Issues. It had taken her several months to feel comfortable making the report, but in the spring semester, she did so. The school official said it would serve her better to wait until the fall semester to make the report and that she should file it with the school, not the city or campus police.
Confirmed by campus records, the alumna met with campus police in 1994 in an office on campus, with a Los Angeles police officer present.
She said the USC officer kept asking her why she did not resist the man's unwanted advances. She said she was drunk and could not properly comprehend what was happening, adding that she told him to stop.
The accused student was found to have violated several student conduct codes, but none that said he was guilty of sexual assault or rape. The USC disciplinary panel said the student "had a lack of understanding about healthy sexual behavior." The report said there was not sufficient medical or physical evidence to support sexual misconduct, but acknowledged the victim experienced "pain" and "distress" in a "traumatic event."
In the margin of the report, the alumna scribbled, "How could consensual sex be traumatic?"
"Twenty years later, I am not the person I would have been," she told the Huffington Post. "The administration and [university] president must consider the question, 'don't you want USC to be better than this?'"
The same federal laws that protect the students whose claims are being heard now were relevant to the alumna 20 years ago. USC is currently under investigation for allegedly not reporting claims of sexual assault properly, under the Clery Act and Title IX laws. It is an issue running rampant through many institutions of higher education.
"Rape is a violent crime that robs a human being of their human rights. It is not a sexual misadventure," the alumna said. "And these women deserve a school that understands that and acts accordingly."