Photo by Daimon Eklund
The U.S. Department of Education is investigating if George Washington University officials violated federal policies for handling sexual assault complaints.
GW officials said in a statement on Thursday that they were notified by the education department’s Office for Civil Rights that someone filed a Title IX complaint against the college. No further information was provided to them, officials said.
Title IX is part of a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination, sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination, and sexual violence at education programs or activities that receive federal funding.
George Washington University will “cooperate fully” as the OCR investigates as officials take “any report of sexual misconduct very seriously,” according to the statement.
The probe, which was first reported by the GW Hatchet, comes three months after students protested the university for allowing an alleged rapist to walk across the graduation stage in May. “For GW to know and acknowledge that there is a rapist on campus and they’re going to do nothing about it—it’s infuriating,” Aniqa Raihan told DCist after her assailant was found to have violated university policy, but received a sentence that she believed was far too lenient. “I’m just so angry at GW for failing me like that.”
In July, university officials announced that they’d requested an outside review of its Title IX procedures “as part of an effort to ensure that the university continues to meet the challenge of eliminating and preventing discrimination on the basis of sex in its programs and activities.”
The last time the civil rights office opened up a Title IX investigation for GW was in 2011, when a student said the university failed to respond “in an equitable manner” to her complaint that she was sexually assaulted by another undergrad.
Following that investigation, the university created a new policy that made the rights of victims and alleged perpetrators more clear and increased training for staff to comply with federal guidelines, among other things.
George Washington is one of 250 colleges and universities across the country that are currently being investigated by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for possibly violating Title IX policies, according to U.S. Department of Education spokesperson Jim Bradshaw.
American University, Catholic University, and the University of Maryland in College Park are on that list as well.
Earlier this year, five current and former Howard University students filed a lawsuit against the college, claiming that officials didn’t act swiftly in resolving reports of sexual assault and failed to provide them with counseling and academic accommodations.
