On the heels of a student filing a federal complaint about the school's alleged mishandling of her sexual assault case, Emerson College will launch its own internal review.

Sarah Tedesco, Emerson sophomore, a group of students filed the complaint with the U.S. Education Department's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) last week and went public with their claims Tuesday. Thursday, the Huffington Post reported Emerson president M. Lee Pelton had announced the school would review its own sexual assault policies and reporting practices.

"Sexual assault occurs too often on college campuses, and it is critically important that we redouble our efforts to combat incidents that harm our students and undermine what we stand for as a commonwealth of learning," Pelton wrote in a campus-wide email addressing the issue. "We can and we will do better."

The federal complaint, filed in the midst of a government shutdown, alleged the school's administrators did not adequately investigate her claims. Tedesco said the campus police waited three months to start the investigation, then took three months to find her attacker "not responsible."

In that timeframe, she also alleged the accused man remained living near her in an off-campus residence hall and even attacked her a second time.

In the community email, Pelton said he had appointed both Sylvia Spears, vice president of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and Lori Beth Way, senior adviser to the Office of Academic Affairs for undergraduate education, to lead the school's review.

Recommendations for changes should be made by no later than March 2014. However, Emerson has already begun looking for someone to work as a sexual assault advocate for the school's victims of sexual violence.

Over the past year, schools like Occidental College, Amherst College, Swarthmore College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have conducted their own reviews of sexual assault policies and response practices. All such reviews only seem to occur when the school has been named in a federal complaint.

"This is a call to stand together," Pelton wrote, "a call to say together with a single, clear, crystalline voice that we have had enough of the acts that hurt and destroy the fabric of our College."