'Willing to Do Everything,' Mothers Defend Sons Accused of Sexual Assault - The New Yor... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ampus-sex-assault-mothers.html
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shared by annabaldwin_ on 23 Oct 17
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“I was willing to do everything and anything,” Ms. Seefeld said.
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A few days before, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had rescinded tough Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual assault, saying they violated principles of fairness, particularly for accused students like their own sons.
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Women’s groups and victims’ advocates have deplored Ms. DeVos’s moves, saying they will allow colleges to wash their hands of the problem.
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But a growing corps of legal experts and defense lawyers have argued that the Obama rules created a culture in which accused students, most of them men, were presumed guilty.
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Away from the public eye, families have spent tens of thousands of dollars and dipped into retirement savings to hire lawyers and therapists for their sons.
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Their sons may not have been falsely accused, the mothers said, but they had been wrongly accused. They made a distinction.
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The most active mothers said they stepped forward because they often had more time than their husbands, and because they made a strategic decision that they could be effective on the issue of sexual assault precisely because they are women and, as some described themselves, feminists. “We recognized that power,” Ms. Seefeld said.
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They have not been shy about expressing their view of the mothers as “rape deniers” and misogynists who blame women for inviting male violence against them.
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“And pretty much the most significant weapon I had was the weapon of public opinion, so that was the weapon I was wielding the hardest.”