U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill is getting ready for a third "roundtable" discussion of sexual assaults on college campuses, and told Missouri reporters Tuesday she and some colleagues continue working on legislation to combat the issue.
In a news release last month, the Missouri Democrat said she wants "to know that survivors are getting the services they need and that the perpetrators of sexual violence are held criminally accountable. But I know that's not all that's required."
McCaskill hopes to have results from a survey about campus sexual assaults by the end of the month, and she hopes to "release the draft of the legislation that we're working on" close to the same time.
"We gave schools the opportunity to give us additional information, and fill in various parts of the survey with more information, so it's taking some time to compile all the results," she explained. "And we want to make sure that we get it right, that the information is reliable."
The first two roundtables have shown "an acknowledgement on college campuses that this is a problem. There certainly is a wide inconsistency across the country as to how this problem is handled, and prioritized, on various campuses," she said.
The federal law known as Title IX gives Congress and the administration authority to look at how such assaults are handled and investigated.
"Parents all over this country send young students to college campuses at the age of 17 or 18 years old, and for many of those students, it's the first time that they have been away from home," McCaskill said, "and there is an assumption that they are going to an environment that is safe.
"If in fact there are policies at that university that do not take seriously situations where there is sexual assault occurring, then that university is contributing to an unsafe environment for that student, and I think it's important that they be held accountable for that."
But some have questioned the focus on sexual assaults.
For instance: "Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. "sexual assault,'" commentator George Will wrote in a June 6 Washington Post column. "The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported.
"Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous."
McCaskill said Tuesday: "I don't think the problem is overblown, and I think the people who have said the problem is overblown have not spent much time really looking at this problem - talking to victims, talking to survivors."
Last year, McCaskill was one of several in Congress who studied sexual assaults on military bases and, she said, that has helped focus the current look at college and university campuses.
McCaskill also said the two roundtables so far have shown many campus victim advocates have "a complete distrust of the criminal justice system."
So, she said, "I am very concerned about that mistrust, because if we do not get to the point where victims feel comfortable with coming to law enforcement when they have been criminally assaulted, then we're never, really, going to turn the corner on this."
The third roundtable session, next week, will focus on that issue, she said, asking: "How well do college campus security officers and officials work with local police and local prosecutors to try to provide support to victims - and bring cases where there is sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution, to bring those cases to trial?"
When it finally is drafted, she said, the proposed legislation should cover a number of issues, including simplifying some federal requirements for universities.
"I think we've got so many rules that we are imposing on them that, sometimes they spend more time checking boxes and doing paperwork than actually looking at the programs they have in place for victims on college campuses," McCaskill said.