\u201cShe seems relatively simple and probably inexperienced sexually, so I decided missionary would be her preferred position.\u201d<\/p>\n This ranking system appears to have been a and was not isolated to a few individuals. In response Harvard University suspended<\/a> its men\u2019s soccer team for the remainder of the 2016-17 season.\n\n \n\nWhile it is easy to dismiss the scouting report as \u201clocker room talk,\u201d sex discrimination and exploitation on college campuses is not so neatly confined. Universities across the country are struggling to address sexism on and off the fields.\n\n \n\nIn 2015, more than 150,000 students at 27 universities participated in the Association of American Universities<\/a> (AAU) Campus Climate Survey<\/a> on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct. The purpose was to \u201chelp participating universities better understand the attitudes and experiences of their students with respect to sexual assault and sexual misconduct.\u201d In the aggregate, the results showed that about 1 in 4 women (23.1%) experienced nonconsensual sexual contact on campus. Among the female undergraduate respondents at Harvard, more than 72 percent<\/a> had experienced sexual harassment. Evidently, Harvard was not unique.\n\n \n\nThere is a critical need for universities to recognize the serious effects of sexual assault and sexual misconduct against women. Being a victim of sexual assault negatively impacts a student\u2019s mental and physical health<\/a>. It is related to a host of detrimental social functioning outcomes, such as academic failure, depression or anxiety, and alcohol and drug abuse. Beyond emotional consequences, there are legal ramifications as well. When students suffer sexual assault and misconduct, they are deprived of equal and free access to education<\/a>. In short, sexual violence interferes with a student\u2019s right to receive an education free from discrimination.\n\n \n\nIn an effort to combat this, universities should adopt harsher penalties for students found in violation . Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity that receives federal funding<\/a>. The law encourages colleges and universities to provide a nondiscriminatory environment and to proactively address sexual assault on their campuses. The law also instructs schools to have a Title IX Coordinator<\/a>, whose responsibility is to ensure complianceTitle IX has a clear, legally mandated role to ensure that colleges respond appropriately to sexual complaints by students.\n\n \n\nWhile Title IX may provide a good model for addressing sexual assault on campuses, the Harvard \u201cscouting report\u201d reflects the need for improvement. Universities need to make clear the procedures for reporting, investigating, and rendering decisions on incidents in which students are accused of non-physical sexual misconduct. The conduct of the Harvard men\u2019s soccer team reflects a culture that objectifies women<\/a>. Moreover, their report exposed a potential gap in the law; it is ill-equipped to deal with cases that are not \u201cclear-cut\u201d instances of physical sexual violence. The negative impacts of their behavior reaffirms the need for accountability for all types of behavior and not just the egregious ones.\n\n \n\nCollege women are told to feel empowered and proud of their athletic and intellectual abilities. Instead, they are regularly reduced to their physical appearance and fear sexual assault. This is a frustrating reality that women face on college campuses, and will likely continue to face when they graduate and enter the workforce<\/a>. Despite how common the experience of sexism is for women on campuses, these women are not remaining silent; they are demanding change. In the words of the Harvard women<\/a> who were listed in the 2012 \u201cscouting report\u201d:\n\n \n \u201cFinally, to the men of Harvard Soccer and any future men who may lay claim to our bodies and choose to objectify us as sexual objects, in the words of one of us, we say together: I can offer you my forgiveness, which is\u2014and forever will be\u2014the only part of me that you can ever claim as yours.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Christina M. Kim In 2012, Harvard University discovered an online \u201cscouting report\u201d in which male soccer players ranked female players by attractiveness and suspected sexual preferences. Freshmen women players, some as young as 17, were evaluated based on their looks and sex appeal with numerical scores and offensive descriptions. The report assigned each woman…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15,16,18,19,25],"tags":[251,756,757,758,760,1384,1385,1386,1536],"class_list":["post-2167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","category-authors","category-blog-news","category-feature","category-feature-img","category-policycontributor-blogs","tag-campus-sexual-assault","tag-harvard","tag-harvard-mens-soccer","tag-harvard-soccer-team","tag-harvard-womens-soccer","tag-sexual-assault","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-sexual-misconduct","tag-title-ix"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}