Yale President Says The School Is Working To Address Sexual Assault

Yale President Says School Is Working To Address Sexual Assault

Yale University President Peter Salovey spoke to HuffPost Live about addressing reports of sexual assaults on campus and said that educational and prevention programs need to blossom in order for the crimes to stop.

“We don’t tolerate sexual misconduct on the Yale campus, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to create ways of addressing it when it happens,” Salovey said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, noting that the school has involved students in some initiatives.

“I think students, when they have a complaint, need to have a way of bringing that forward. They need to be counseled properly to bring it forward,” he added. “I don’t know if the behavior [the number of sexual assaults] has grown, but certainly our awareness of it [has]. I think people, especially women’s, very, very justifiable motivation to say ‘No, this needs to stop,’ I think, is bringing it to the world’s attention.

In 2011, amid heavy criticism over the university's "sexually hostile climate," Yale underwent a federal investigation, which resulted in a voluntary resolution that required the school to alter its approach in responding to sex crimes. In September 2013, the university released a series of hypothetical scenarios to show how school officials would discipline offenders. (The university had previously received backlash for not appropriately disciplining six students convicted of "non-consensual sex.")

Salovey's statements come at the same time as President Barack Obama's remarks on the nation's swelling sexual assault epidemic on college campuses.

To tackle the growing problem of campus sexual assault, Obama announced the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, which will work with college presidents to crack down on attacks and improve law enforcement.

"My hope and intention is, is that every college president who has not personally been thinking about this is going to hear about this report and is going to go out and figure out who is in charge on their campus of responding properly, and what are the best practices, and are we doing everything that we should be doing," Obama said.

"And if you're not doing that right now, I want the students at the school to ask the president what he is doing or she is doing," he added. "And perhaps most important, we need to keep saying to anyone out there who has ever been assaulted, you are not alone. You will never be alone. We have your back. I’ve got your back."

See a video of Salovey's interview above, and see more from Davos below:

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University Of Colorado - Boulder

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