A group of 37 women at Occidental College in California filed a complaint today with the Department of Education on grounds of Title IX violations, becoming part of a growing number of universities, including Yale, which have come under investigation for providing inadequate sexual misconduct resources.
The complaint, similar to the one filed by 16 Yale students and alumni in March 2011, alleges that the school fosters a hostile work environment by not offering effective prevention and response programs for sexual assault. Students allege that the Los Angeles-based school did not educate them about consent, discouraged them from reporting assault and did not remove perpetrators from the university environment.
In 2012, after a 15-month investigation at Yale, the Department of Education reached a voluntary resolution agreement with the University, where Yale agreed to uphold newly-implemented reporting and grievance procedures for sexual misconduct cases. Over the course of its investigation, the Office for Civil Rights found that Yale underreported incidents of sexual harassment and violence and did not effectively inform students of sexual misconduct resources.