Are Colleges Slower to Address Sexual Assault Cases About Athletes?
LatestThis week, Al Jazeera America is running Sex Crimes in Sports, a multi-part series that’s just as uplifting as you might expect. Last night, the series looked at a number of recent high-profile sexual assault allegations featuring student athletes. The punishments for big-deal student athletes found responsible for rape range from nothing to a friendly transfer to another school.
The past couple years have been replete with hideous examples of college sexual assault allegations involving student athletes, and the ways in which campus disciplinary processes seem to get stuck in a pound of quicksand when they’re the ones being accused: Jameis Winston, where FSU campus police actively hindered the investigation, University of Oregon, where a woman who says she was gang-raped by three basketball players claims in a lawsuit that the school took no action against them for more than two months, and Virginia Wesleyan, where a student found “responsible” for rape in a campus disciplinary process was not just allowed to transfer, but allowed to change his expulsion to a “voluntarily withdrawn” to help him along. (An October piece by the Huffington Post found numerous cases where students found responsible for rape were simply allowed to transfer without further consequences.)
The Al Jazeera segment focuses on a case at University of Alabama at Huntsville where in January of 2013 a female student, then a freshman, says she was spending the night in a friend’s dorm after drinking at a party. In the middle of the night, a man woke her, telling her it “wasn’t safe there” and hustling her outside. Dazed and groggy, she let the man lead her outside and to his own dorm, where he overpowered and raped her.
The woman was able to identify her attacker as Lasse Uusivirta, an ice hockey player. What’s more, a campus police sergeant told her that Uusivirta almost immediately admitted to the rape, leading her to believe he’d quickly be expelled.