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Liberty University, a private Evangelical university in Virginia, is under fire for discouraging and dismissing reports of sexual assault from students.
When Elizabeth Axley reported she had been raped by another student at an off-campus party, she was discouraged by university staff from officially reporting.
Liberty staff claimed she could potentially face consequences for violating the university’s code of conduct which prohibits drinking and being alone with the opposite sex. Axley decided to report to the school’s Title IX office — the committee reviewing her case found the man not guilty.
This is not an isolated incident. An article published by ProPublica shares the stories of several young women who had been discouraged from reporting their cases of sexual assault and even punished for breaking the university’s student honor code.
Former Liberty student Adrianna Rice said, “I felt like a gag order had been placed on me after I had already experienced a trauma.”
A total of 12 women who were previous students or employees of Liberty University filed a lawsuit against the school for “intentionally creat[ing] a campus environment where sexual assaults and rapes are foreseeably more likely to occur than they would in the absence of Liberty’s policies.”
In addition, Scott Lamb, Liberty’s previous senior vice president for communications was fired and has filed a lawsuit claiming that the university fired him for challenging the school’s “mishandling of sexual assault and harassment complaints in violation of Title IX.”