Students, women’s rights and education groups have sued to block Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s campus sexual assault rules from taking effect next month. Plaintiffs as young as 10 joined arguments that the rules will harm students and burden institutions. Seven students joined a lawsuit by the National Women’s Law Center against the Education Department, outlining how the new rules, which bolster the rights of the accused and relieve schools of some liability, would derail their cases or deter them from pursuing them, the New York Times reports. Plaintiffs include a fifth grader in Michigan who fears that her elementary school will not be required to investigate and punish her classmate for assaulting her four times over two months, and a recent graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara, who decided not to report her rape at an off-campus apartment because she believed that the final rule rendered her complaint futile.
The law center’s Shiwali Patel said, “The rule isn’t about evening the playing field — it’s about directly harming survivors and making it harder for them to come forward.” The law center’s suit, filed on behalf of four organizations that represent student survivors, is one of several challenging the new rules, which are to take effect on Aug. 14. The suits have drawn the support of education groups that say the enforcement date is unreasonable as schools focus on reopening during the coronavirus pandemic. “Schools have been on notice since 2017 that change was coming, and civil rights and due process cannot wait,” the Education Department said. “We know schools can rise to the challenge of protecting all of their students. We know that institutions are still receiving Title IX complaints while students learn remotely, and to pretend otherwise would mean doing students a disservice.”