In the fall of 2013, Emily started her first year at Colorado College. She soon became involved in what she regarded as a serious relationship with a male student. At first it felt very comfortable; she liked the guy she was dating, and it was clear that he liked her. But some things didn’t feel right.
“He told me he loved me three weeks into the relationship,” recalls Emily, who asked that her real name not be published. That was when she started to suspect that something was off.
They began to argue more and more frequently, and the relationship felt increasingly difficult to leave. In one argument over the phone during winter break, she remembers him saying, “If we ever break up, I’m going to make your life fucking hell.”
Emily took an extra month off after winter break to figure things out. She used the time to find the strength to break up with him. She says that when she broke up with him, “It felt like a million pounds had been lifted off my shoulders.”
She returned to campus confident with the decision she had made. The first weekend after spring break, however, her ex-boyfriend was back in her life with vengeance. She returned to her dorm room one night to find him waiting for her. They argued. He put her in a chokehold. Emily escaped without physical harm, but that encounter was only the beginning of an ongoing pattern of behavior that left Emily in a constant state of anxiety. “He would show up at my dorm, yell at me from across campus, and try to grab me at parties,” she explains. She had frequent panic attacks, lost significant weight, and struggled to concentrate in class.
Emily decided to seek a no-contact order through the CC Title IX office, which would prohibit him from interacting with her in person, online, through writing, or even through a third party. According to Emily, he immediately broke the no-contact order. She then filed a formal Title IX complaint to Gail Murphy-Geiss, the College’s Title IX coordinator. Two trained CC employees were assigned to investigate the case.
Emily was asked to write a page describing what happened to her and what she wanted to happen to her ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend, per the Title IX Policy, was asked to write a one-page rebuttal. He wrote five pages, and also gave the investigators “character references” from some of their mutual friends, arguing that he wasn’t capable of what he was accused of doing, despite the fact that Title IX policy prohibits the consideration of these references. Emily recalls that although the investigators did not formally consider these letters as evidence for the case, they purportedly read them. Tara Misra, the Sexual Assault Response Coordinator (SARC) at the time, recommended that Emily read them in the event that they became relevant in the case. Emily says that they made her out to be untrustworthy, dependent on alcohol, and incapable of handling herself. After reading the letters, Emily says, “I felt like it was in my best interest to at least say something about them. I didn’t know if [the investigators] were going to factor them in or not”—even though the investigators never should have considered the letters in the first place.
The Title IX hearings did not make things easier. Emily says that Misra “started criticizing me because I wasn’t showing enough emotion,” as if tears would have legitimized her case. Emily describes the whole investigative process as “the worst months of my life.” She felt attacked for speaking out and seeking justice—she says her ex-boyfriend’s mom started sending her texts such as, “You are ruining my son’s life.” The investigators tried to be accommodating throughout the process, but they only work during weekday hours. “Every weekend, my life was put on hold,” she says. Eventually her ex-boyfriend was found responsible and suspended from campus for a semester. Though he could have returned to CC, he never did. “I feel like he should’ve been kicked off campus or suspended for at least a year,” she says.
Emily’s case illustrates the complexities that exist throughout formal Title IX proceedings. For Emily, the anxiety caused by the Title IX investigation she went through outweighed the meager sense of closure that resulted from the investigation.
According to Murphy-Geiss, one in four female students experience some form of sexual harassment during their time at CC. According to the College’s website, CC is an institution that prides itself on responding to sexual violence “through education, outreach, dialogue, and supportive services.” But these stories illustrate that CC’s response to sexual misconduct has left many survivors and their advocates dissatisfied with the Title IX response protocol.
Part of the difficulty that survivors encounter stems from the fact that Title IX often deals with abuses and violations that are intimate and difficult to clearly define. Emotional abuse, for example, is a form of assault, as recognized by Title IX Policy. However, it is not always easily recognizable, and gathering evidence of violations in formal proceedings is difficult. The survivors of other Title IX violations, such as sexual assault, often confront similar challenges that make it difficult to tell anyone about their experience. Finding closure becomes even more evasive when the process seeks objectivity in such an emotionally distressing situation.
While CC has made efforts to teach students how to respond to sexual violence, the college hasn’t addressed the difficulty of the Title IX process. Students still overwhelmingly avoid reporting. Murphy-Geiss acknowledges that this is in part due to “the painfulness of the process.” Though formal reporting could empower survivors to seek justice through the punishment of their assailants, many survivors choose to avoid the pain of revisiting their trauma.
However, some believe school administrations don’t necessarily want more students to come forward with Title IX complaints. As of 2012, 45 percent of colleges reported zero sexual assaults—an obviously incorrect figure. According to Josh Keehne, Training and Technical Assistance Coordinator for the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, some schools may not want to know the true numbers; they want their statistics as low as possible. No school wants to be recognized as the school with rampant sexual assault and intimate partner abuse. Handling sexual violence cases internally via the Title IX process can actually keep the negative reality of assault and abuse quiet, as opposed to having law enforcement handle the situation, thus placing it in the public eye.
Nonetheless, Heather Horton, CC’s Wellness Resource Coordinator, is proud of the changes the institution has made over the years, such as the installation of practices that help the administration better stand with survivors. “I feel like we have stood [with], for instance, trauma informed practices,” she says.
While CC and other schools may be genuinely working to improve their policies on Title IX related issues, several of the administration’s programs to combat sexual assault on campus have backfired. The “Consent is Sexy” campaign, presented to students during the 2015 New Student Orientation, for example, seemed to convey the message that explicit consent could enhance sexual encounters. The message troubled many students; because consent is the most critical part of sex, these students felt it shouldn’t be sexualized by a slogan. Students responded by wearing shirts around campus that had the word “sexy” crossed out and replaced by something more emphatic: “Consent is mandatory.”
Sara Colombo, who graduated from CC in 2017, had been seeing another female CC student for roughly a year before she realized she was in an abusive relationship. Colombo experienced signs of abuse, such as isolation from her friends and from the rest of campus. It felt like she was “essentially entering into a suicide pact” with her partner, she recalls.
Colombo decided to go to the SARC, Tara Misra at the time. Colombo explained to Misra that her significant other had been emotionally abusing her. Like Emily, Colombo says that in an emotionally abusive relationship, “leaving is scarier than staying.” Colombo felt that she had been manipulated into developing an unhealthy dependence. During her explanation to Misra, the first name of her abuser slipped out. According to Colombo, “Tara got very surprised and asked for the initial of the last name [of the perpetrator], and then said ‘You have to get away from this person.’”
At this point, Colombo had stopped seeing her partner. Colombo eventually learned that her ex had been accused of a Title IX violation against another individual on campus. Along with more than 10 others, Colombo ended up participating as a witness in a Title IX investigation of her ex.
The role of a witness is to answer questions about times they have observed the respondent abusing the complainant. As a witness, Colombo was asked, “Do you have anything else to add?” The Title IX investigative team asks every witness this question at the end of their hearing, allowing the witnesses to elaborate on their own experiences with the alleged abuser. Colombo used this opportunity to provide investigators with her own account of emotional abuse.
Her ex-girlfriend was found responsible and dismissed from campus at the very end of her senior year. However, she was approved to take off-campus courses to still earn a Colorado College degree. Although the official complainant had been notified of this decision, Colombo and the other witnesses were not informed.
Colombo was frustrated because the decision did not feel like a sufficient consequence of emotional abuse and sexual assault. Moreover, the Title IX violations wouldn’t show up on her ex’s criminal record, and workplaces would not see her disciplinary record unless they specifically requested it. “She could go through her entire life without facing any consequences,” Colombo says.
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Some survivors feel that the formal Title IX process isn’t an option. Elizabeth Reece was just a few weeks into her first year at CC when she was sexually assaulted. According to Reece, a guy she had been seeing on and off, “verbally manipulated me to feel like I could not leave.” Later that night, he pressured her into sexual acts to which she had not consented. That night ended up changing Reece’s outlook on relationships, sex, and intimacy. Looking back, she now knows what happened that night was assault, but at the time she was not sure how to distinguish this experience from what she thought the hookup culture at CC was supposed to be. “I just didn’t understand,” Reece recalls.
When describing her initial response to the assault, Reece says, “I didn’t deal with it. I put it into a little box.” She also doubted her interpretation of events and reproached herself. She questioned if the perpetrator even knew he’d committed assault and asked herself, “Am I lying? Am I making this up?”
Reece, like Colombo, went to Misra to discuss what happened to her. Misra asked her how she felt when she saw her abuser on campus. Reece then realized that “this fear and discomfort I felt when seeing him on campus was not normal at all, and indicative of actual sexual assault, rather than just a gross experience I wanted to ignore.” However, Reece did not want to make a formal complaint, partly because of the emotional weight of the experience.
Two years after her assault, Reece still found herself struggling with intimacy. She realized she had to take action, but not necessarily through the Title IX reporting process. Reece says that she had heard stories from friends who had similar experiences with sexual violence. She started thinking about others who might feel vulnerable and unsure of how to deal with these situations. “I was worried about people getting assaulted and not having the language to describe what happened, or not knowing what happened to them,” she says. “[It’s] fucked up that he lives a normal life, friends love him, and he could still be ruining other peoples’ lives,” she says.
Upon her graduation last fall, Reece made her story public by posting about her experience on Facebook. “I had spent the past four years trying to recognize, validate, and accept what happened to me. Now, almost five years later, I am sadly still working on the ‘validation’ and ‘acceptance’ portions of this journey,” she wrote in the post. Making her story public and using it to spread awareness to other students has helped Reece find closure as a survivor of sexual assault.
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Spencer Spotts, a 2017 CC graduate, had a relationship with a male CC student. Throughout the relationship, Spotts (who uses the pronouns they/them/theirs) was victim to both emotional abuse and sexual assault. The sexual assault involved alcohol: “getting me blackout drunk,” Spotts says. However, Spotts was hesitant to file a Title IX complaint against the perpetrator because they previously had a negative experience with the Title IX office—Spotts, along with two other students, had filed a previous case against a CC employee for multiple violations, including having sex with a current student. But the employee was found not responsible of any violation. Essentially, the employee was only given a “slap on the wrist” by the administration.
This was when Spotts first felt that the Title IX process had some major flaws.
Before filing any complaint again, Spotts sought a no-contact agreement with their ex, who had graduated in 2015. Murphy-Geiss advised Spotts to go forward with a formal Title IX complaint, which could potentially keep their ex off campus indefinitely. Both Spotts and Murphy-Geiss felt that pursuing a formal investigation would be safer for Spotts in the event that their ex were to return to campus.
They went forward with the complaint, only to experience what Spotts calls a “very sloppy” process. The primary problem was that during this investigation, CC didn’t have a SARC—Tara Misra had left the school, and Maria Mendez, Misra’s replacement, would not start working until the following semester. This left Spotts without a formal ally in the Title IX process until they pointed out the problem and the office assigned an employee to serve as a temporary ally for Spotts. Heather Horton expresses that “students lost a lot of trust” in the administration that semester due to the absence of a SARC on campus. Furthermore, “There were multiple questions asked about our identities and how much I knew about his ‘coming out’ experience that were not relevant whatsoever,” Spotts says of the actual investigation process itself.
Throughout the investigation, Spotts had been active on social media, using the platform to talk publicly about the extensive healing process a survivor must go through. Murphy-Geiss repeatedly told Spotts that she believes this kind of activism complicates the Title IX investigation and discouraged them from continuing it.
According to Spotts, Murphy-Geiss then sent an email out to both Spotts and their ex, asking them both to stay away from social media. Spotts had two major problems with this. First, since Murphy-Geiss had known about Spotts’s activism, the email seemed to inadvertently side with their ex. Second, by sending the same email to both the complainant and the respondent, Murphy-Geiss had made it easier for the respondent to violate the no-contact agreement, by giving him Spotts’s email address.
Spotts’s ex was found not responsible. The Title IX Coordinators told Spotts that they could not reach 51 percent certainty about the guilt of the perpetrator because of the contradiction between Spotts’ and their ex’s accounts. According to the coordinators, the case was a classic “he said, she said,” situation. Spotts remembers that “his retelling of certain details were the exact opposite of mine.” To Spotts, the decision indicated a “lack of training” on how to properly consider the evidence they had brought to the table, including “records of dates and witnesses who spoke to what I was like after the assault.” An appeal of the case went nowhere, despite what Spotts believed to be strong evidence of guilt; President Jill Tiefenthaler emailed Spotts personally to affirm that the decision had been upheld.
Spotts believed that the outcome of the case was a major injustice that needed to be made public. Spotts decided to carry a sign reading “CC is protecting my rapist,” including the number of days since the rapist was found “not responsible.” Spotts used their sign to raise awareness of the flawed system of Title IX investigations at CC beyond their specific case.
Murphy-Geiss believes that cases often go in two directions: “the ones that are not close, and the ones that are.” That is, decisions about responsibility and sanctions are easier to make when there is either overwhelming evidence or not nearly enough. According to Murphy-Geiss, there are, however, cases where it is truly a 50/50, “he said, she said” situation. Those are the cases that tend to leave the complainant feeling that justice has not been served.
Murphy-Geiss notes that the Title IX process is not necessarily built to provide justice. It is built to, one, stop the harm immediately, and two, address the harm over the long term. These goals are defined to ensure that students have fair, uninterrupted access to education. This is partly why, Murphy-Geiss explains, the role of Title IX coordinator is so difficult: the policy is not always concerned with “justice” in the same sense that survivors of sexual assault may conceptualize it.
She has, however, come under scrutiny for other reasons, in part due to her tendency to be explicit in discussing sexual assault, often without trigger warnings. John Henry Williams was a Residential Advisor (RA) his sophomore year. During RA training, Williams recalls Murphy-Geiss explaining inappropriate and triggering material to the RAs. He says that Murphy-Geiss essentially explained “what a sexual assault abuser can get away with,” although Murphy-Geiss disputes that she used that language. According to Williams, she told the RAs, “rape is only considered rape if its penetrative,” referencing the legal definition of rape. However, some RAs who had experienced sexual assault themselves were so alarmed by the unexpected statement that they had to leave the room, prompting emails from their bosses, the Residential Life Coordinators, who offered support.
Two years ago, CC held a screening of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary emphasizing the controversies of sexual assault on college campuses. Murphy-Geiss was on a panel of speakers. When asked about ways in which students can combat the culture of rape on college campuses, Murphy-Geiss responded by essentially saying that if women only dated women and avoided men, there would be less sexual assault on campus. Although it was a joke, many students felt that this statement implied that sexual violence did not exist within queer relationships. (Murphy-Geiss explained that the College did not have a big enough sample size of queer students to accurately include information about sexual violence in queer relationships.)
Murphy-Geiss says she openly uses humor as the Title IX coordinator and fully embraces her tendency to speak explicitly about sexual assault, acknowledging that it may offend some.
Emily felt her abuser should have been suspended for longer, if not expelled. Still, it was a relief to end the Title IX process, which Emily found to be both tedious and humiliating. Two years later, when Emily was a senior, she went out one weekend night and woke up in the middle of the night without remembering anything, lying next to a male CC student. She believes she was raped. But Emily decided it was not worth going through the emotional exhaustion of the Title IX process again. Instead, she confronted him herself, and it was not easy. “It was super hard to look him in the eyes and say, ‘You violated every part of me,’” she says.
Emily’s story is just one example of a survivor feeling let down by an administrative process that is supposed to ensure safety and the ability to live and learn comfortably. Instead, too many survivors experience emotional turmoil in going through Title IX, leaving them to feel like a victim to the process in addition to being a victim of sexual violence. These stories point to the need for Title IX investigations at CC to better help survivors find closure.
