New Rights for Campus Victims

The rights afforded victims of sexual assault and harassment in public schools have risen a notch with the signing by Gov. Pete Wilson of legislation extending to campus disciplinary hearings the protections now guaranteed in the criminal justice system.

The law was written, and pushed, by the Santa Monica-UCLA Rape Treatment Center, an organization that normally focuses its efforts in public schools on educating 18,000 students a year about existing laws, rather than creating new ones.

But the sexual assault last year of a 12-year-old middle school student on a Los Angeles Unified School District campus prompted the center to become an advocate and, ultimately, lobbyist. The girl, who reported that she had been raped by a fellow student, was asked to face the accused attacker, his parents and his attorney alone during an expulsion hearing.

“Can you imagine what that was like for that poor girl? There are rights out there in society that you just assume you have everywhere, then you find out that they may not exist in public schools,” said Marybeth Roden, assistant director of the rape treatment center.

Under the law, which was signed by Wilson last week and will become effective Jan. 1, victims are entitled to bring their own representative to school disciplinary hearings and may insist that the hearing be closed--something that in the past could be requested only by the accused. In addition, the victim cannot be asked to disclose irrelevant sexual history during the proceedings.

Such rights have long been provided to victims in the criminal justice system. But an oversight in state education laws--which carefully spelled out the rights of accused students while saying nothing about victims--was taken literally by some public school systems.

Mention of the shift in the law was quickly included in the workshops conducted by the rape treatment center in area schools. On the day the bill was signed, instructor Kim Fill was running one at Van Nuys High School, and she reassured the students that they should not fear reporting sex crimes to teachers and administrators because “victims do have rights, you know.”

Fill’s charge, as usual, was to get a roomful of teenagers talking about sexual harassment and assault, an exercise about as natural for them as using a fork is for a 2-year-old.

Still, as the comfort level increased, a frank exchange emerged that a decade ago would have been at best relegated to anguished diary entries. Role-playing helped the students tackle such subjects as whether to have sex with a committed boyfriend, how to tell him no if you don’t want to, and how to confront a boy who has been harassing you.

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“When I pass by you, you’re making me feel weird by whistling at me,” said junior Johanna Padilla, challenging a 10th-grade boy in an impromptu skit. “Has anybody ever done that to you?”

Armed with the philosophy that prevention begins with knowledge, teams of center instructors like Fill visit campuses in five local districts stretching from Culver City to Las Virgenes, taking with them warnings that are equal parts slang and stark example.

Fill drew a few gasps when she told the class about a girl who went to a party with her older boyfriend and started playing a drinking game called “quarters.” She passed out in a bedroom and later found the boy, with whom she had not been sexually active, on top of her.

Fill asked the students whether this was rape.

“Yes, because she was intoxicated,” answered Samantha Kinchelow, 15.

“Good, good,” Fill said. “There’s a law that says that.”

Although such awareness-raising sessions seem familiar by now, decades after the women’s movement began, the process of trying to define and police harassment in schools remains a delicate one, subject to controversy.

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Because of either an increase in sex crimes on campus or more willingness to report them, the volume of complaints is growing, said rape treatment center director Gail Abarbanel. That increase, especially among younger children, was a major factor in her decision to draft the new victims rights law after the rape of the 12-year-old.

When the girl arrived at the disciplinary hearing with her mother and father in December, the parents were told to wait outside. Because the girl was too upset to testify alone, the hearing was postponed and negotiations began, with the rape treatment center later joined by the ACLU in representing the girl.

Ultimately, an ACLU attorney was allowed to accompany her to the hearing. But the lawyer had to remain silent, and the 12-year-old was seated close to the father of the accused rapist, according to the ACLU report. The cross-examination of the girl included a request that she reenact things done to her during the assault, a process rarely allowed in criminal sexual assault trials, particularly involving juveniles.

Although the boy was ultimately expelled from school and faces criminal charges, Abarbanel contacted her longtime ally, Assemblywoman Sheila J. Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) to see if they could ensure that the hearing scenario was not repeated. Kuehl said she agreed to rush through the legislation in the waning days of the session in Sacramento partly because she was surprised to discover the inequities between the criminal justice and school disciplinary systems.