FREE Six-Part Luncheon Series* Campus Sexual Assault

12:00pm Eastern Time, To register for any of the programs Register.

Please contact Section Associate Director, Caroline Walters, with any questions about the series: caroline.walters@americanbar.org

Thursday, January 7, 2016
Part 1 – Campus Sexual Assault: The Problem

This program will explore the breadth of the problem of sexual assault on college campuses, including such questions as: What does the data show? What are the holes in the data? Why are freshman women especially vulnerable? Who are the perpetrators? Is there a rape culture on campus? Why do so few women report assaults? Why have schools been slow to respond? What are the consequences for women’s education and the rest of their lives?

Speakers will include:
•Jennifer Freyd, Professor, University of Oregon
•Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, Deputy Director for Youth Power and Strategic Partnerships, Know Your IX

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Thursday, January 21, 2016
Part 2 – Campus Sexual Assault: Not Just a Crime

This program will focus on the civil rights implications of campus sexual assault. Sexual assault is not just a crime. It is also an extreme form of sex harassment. Just as employers must rid workplaces of sexual harassment, colleges must rid their campuses of it so that women receive equal access to education. What does the law say about it? Why is it so important that schools address the issue and that women have reporting options besides the police?

Speakers will include:
•Nancy Cantalupo, Professor, Barry University – Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law
•Fatima Goss Graves, Senior Vice President for Program, National Women’s Law Center
•Laura Eagan, Director of Training and Technical Assistance, Clery Center for Security on Campus

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Thursday, February 11, 2016
Part 3 – Campus Sexual Assault: The Government Response

This program will focus on how the federal government is responding to the problem of campus sexual assault. The Department of Education issued a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that reminded schools of their Title IX obligations to provide students with environments free of sexual harassment and assault. Congress responded by adding the Campus Save Act to the Violence Against Women Act. How are these laws being implemented? How is the Office for Civil Rights enforcing the new guidance? How many schools are under investigation? How is OCR resolving the complaints? How do survivors and their lawyers experience the administrative process? What could improve that process?

Speakers will include:
•Rachel Gettler, U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights
•Ashley Higgins, U.S. Department of Education, Campus Save
•Cari Simon, Bode & Fierberg

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Thursday, February 25, 2016
Part 4 – Campus Sexual Assault: What are schools doing (or not doing) about it?

This program will explore what schools are doing about campus sexual assault. How are schools responding to new public and government scrutiny? How are they implementing new laws and guidance? How do they handle survivor complaints? What kinds of “best practices” are being developed? What should schools be doing to tackle the problem?

Speakers will include:
•Catherine Carroll, Title IX Coordinator, University of Maryland
•Laura Dunn, Executive Director, SurvJustice
•Brett Sokolow, Risk Management, National Center for Higher Education

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Thursday, March 10, 2016
Part 5 – Campus Sexual Assault: Role of Courts

This program will explore the legal claims survivors of sexual assault have against their schools, how courts are applying existing law, and what kinds of remedies are available. The program also will examine how the legal standards for sexual harassment/assault under Title IX differ from those of Title VII and whether reform is necessary to hold schools accountable.

Speakers will include:
•Adele Kimmel, Senior Attorney, Public Justice
•John Clune, Of Counsel, Hutchinson Black & Cook

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Thursday, March 24, 2016
Part 6 – Campus Sexual Assault: Next Steps

This program will explore what can and should be done to address campus sexual assault. From new legislation to better education of students and educators, the program will explore how social science and the law can work together to combat this national epidemic.

Commission on Domestic & Sexual Violence Commission on Women in the Profession

*The content of this programming does not meet requirements for continuing legal education (CLE) accreditation. You will not receive CLE credit for listening.

View Hunting Ground on CNN November 22, 2015 at 8 pm ET

huntingground
The November 19th CNN broadcast of The Hunting Ground documentary was postponed until November 22nd due to coverage of Paris terrorist attacks. The viewing gave us a chance to educate millions of people about the mishandling of sexual assault on college and university campuses. The documentary is an exposé of rape crimes on U.S. college campuses, their institutional cover-ups, and the devastating toll they take on students and their families. 147 university campuses have ongoing investigations. 91% of campus report to reports of rapes or sexual assaults. Victims tell us that they are afraid to report and that the subsequent dealings with campus administrators is far worse than the rape itself.

November Program: Catherine Lhamon Video on Title IX

On October 24th, AAUW-NM held a productive Fall Workshop hosted by the Portales Student Affiliate Branch@ ENMU. One of the AAUW / AAUW-NM initiatives for the next couple years which was presented involves working with our local school districts to access their implementation of Title IX. Every branch of AAUW is encouraged to contact the schools in their respective districts to determine the person responsible for Title IX and to discuss how their schools are complying with the many facets of this law.

At the AAUW Convention in San Diego this past summer, one of the keynote speakers was Catherine Lhamon, Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights at the Department of Education. Her speech covering Title IX was dynamic and informative. For our Online Branch program this month, you are encouraged to go to the AAUW web site and view Catherine Lhamon’s speech. How to you get there?: Go to aauw.org then click on “Convention”, then click on “Resources and Materials”, then click on “Speakers”, she is the second video on that page.

In addition to the speech, there are other resources with tons of information regarding the breadth of Title IX available on the AAUW web site. The easiest way to find information on the aauw.org site is to type what you are looking for into the “search” box at the top of the home page.

See Suffragette When It Comes to a Theater Near You!

AAUW is proud to collaborate with the new film Suffragette, which tells the story of the fight for the women’s vote in England while calling attention to today’s most fundamental issues and the need continue the fight for gender equality.

Gather friends and go see Suffragette. In late 19th- and early 20th-century England, the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal stake in the quest for equal rights. This film is rated PG-13 and scheduled for release on October 23.

2015 Summer Reading

dedefeldmanbookfairgamescarletsisters
Inside the New Mexico Senate: Boots, Suits and Citizens is a legislative history with a human face. Here maverick leaders, shameless special interests, and earnest advocates clash in the unique arena that is the New Mexico Roundhouse. The New Mexico Senate comes alive, with stories of grit and grace, honor and disgrace. DeDe Feldman was elected in 1996 to New Mexico’s state senate representing Albuquerque, where she served for four terms. In this account she reveals how the work of governing is actually accomplished. For students of government, advocates and lovers of politics this book is invaluable.
Book available from UNM Press, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble
Fair Game How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government by Valerie Plame Wilson has been made into a motion picture. Valerie Plame Wilson’s career in the CIA included work in counterproliferation operations to ensure that enemies of the U.S. could not threaten America with weapons of mass destruction. She now lives in Santa Fe, NM. Fair Game is her historic account of the personal and international consequences of speaking truth to power and her betrayal as an undercover CIA agent.
The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age by Myra MacPherson tells the story of Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin. For a few years in the 1870s, sisters Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin were the most notorious women in New York, treating the social strictures of their age as no more substantial than the spirits with which they claimed to communicate. Myra MacPherson’s captivating dual biography opens on Wall Street in 1870, as Tennie, “a bodacious beauty in her early twenties,” and her charismatic elder sister descend from their open carriage amid a throng of reporters and rubberneckers. Dressed in matching dark-blue outfits, with “shockingly short” skirts grazing their boots, they declared their new brokerage firm open for business. The sisters had the backing of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, which lent their business legitimacy — even if the stories they told about their rich father and their business training were lies, and even if the rumors of Tennie’s affair with the recently widowed Commodore were true. Before the decade was half-over, the sisters had started their own radical newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, with the profits from their brokerage; Victoria had addressed Congress and run for president (with Frederick Douglass); and Tennie had been named colonel of New York’s 85th, the state’s only African American regiment. The sisters tangled with suffragists, spiritualists, socialists and conservatives, including Karl Marx, antivice crusader Anthony Comstock and the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (their newspaper published a report that triggered the famous
preacher’s adultery trial, a landmark of Victorian hypocrisy). They had the backing of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but they clashed with stricter suffragists, who wanted a single-minded focus on the vote and judged Woodhull a trashy distraction. Yet it was Woodhull who stood up in front of the House Judiciary Committee to argue that the 15th Amendment and other sections of the Constitution guaranteed rights to “citizens” — forcing Rep. John Bingham of Ohio to sputter out, “Madam, you are no citizen — you are a woman!” The sisters’ doctrine of “free love” earned similar horrified denials in a world that accorded women no bodily autonomy.

One AAUW Video

Watch Video on YouTubeThe story of women’s progress toward equality is a remarkable one, and AAUW has played an important role in every chapter. Together, as One AAUW, we have worked tirelessly so that women and girls could gain more choices and opportunities, and we have made significant advances. But we’re not done yet.

Although we have come so far, many daily injustices still threaten women’s success, safety, and accomplishment. We have much more work to do. And no other organization is better positioned than AAUW to pave the way for the next level of women’s achievement.

This video was shared at AAUW state conventions across the country in 2015.

A Thousand Voices May 10 at 3 pm on PBS

Strong tribal women lead viewers through the history of the invasions of the American Southwest while also explaining how those invasions changed their roles as women. A Thousand Voices, a documentary by Silver Bullet Productions, a nonprofit educational film company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico will rerun May 10 at 3 pm on your local PBS station.

The women in the movie will talk about boarding schools, the reaffirmation of beauty, strength, and sustaining culture and languages of New Mexican tribes.

“Each woman tells a story deeply rooted to her culture… and the ‘thousand voices’ that precede her. This eye-opening film shatters stereotypes and features interviews with women from the Navajo Nation, Mescalero Apache Tribe, Jicarilla Apache Tribe, Kiowa Tribe, Pueblo de Cochiti, Ohkay Owingeh, and Pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, Jemez, Santo Domingo, Pojoaque, Santa Clara, Taos, Nambe, and San Ildefonso,” says a press release from Silver Bullet.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/02/19/thousand-voices-native-women-correct-history-reclaim-their-power-159285