Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
What started as a complaint from two students about how the University of North Carolina handled their sexual assaults has spread across the nation’s colleges and attracted the attention of President Obama.
The USA Today reports that Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino were so outraged that university officials blamed them for the assaults that they wrote a Title IX complaint against the school and filed it with the Department of Education in 2013.
“What Annie and I realized was for this to be effective, not just at Carolina, but historically something that would make other things happen, we had to make this bigger. We had to make it a movement,” Pino says. “And we had to come out. We couldn’t stay in the closet about our experiences.”
Worried about the treatment of other victims at universities across the country, the women shared their stories and encouraged others to file complaints.
“Nobody else was really doing it,” Clark told the USA Today. “We knew the law. We had our personal stories, and we kind of put the two together.”
A task forced created by Obama was expected to make its recommendations this week about addressing the complaints at universities, where one in five women is the victim of an attempted or completed rape.
