For Immediate Release March 19, 2003

Washington, DC-According to new guidance from the federal government, victims of violent crime on college campuses won't run afoul of a student privacy law if they publicly share the final results of disciplinary action taken against their assailants when the school has found the accused violated institutional rules. Responding to concerns raised by Security On Campus, Inc. (SOC), a national non-profit victim assistance organization, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) last week clarified regulations that some schools have used to justify policies keeping victims from talking about their cases, often subjecting the victim to disciplinary action themselves if they talk.

"Campus crime victims have an inalienable right to talk about their cases," said Howard K. Clery, Jr., co-founder of the victim assistance organization, rebuking image conscious schools that have abused the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to silence victims. Most colleges handle campus crime in-house by diverting reports into student disciplinary proceedings that are out of the public eye rather than off-campus criminal courts. They then classify the crime as a part of the accused student's confidential "educational records."

A letter sent last week to SOC from a DOE official makes it clear that when "an institution determines that an accused student is an alleged perpetrator and has violated the institution rules, then there are no restrictions on disclosure or redisclosure of the final results of a disciplinary proceeding." The letter from LeRoy Rooker, Director of the Family Policy Compliance Office, also indicates they "are in the process of considering what statutory or regulatory latitude there may be to permit limited redisclosures" when the accused student isn't found responsible.

FERPA, a law designed to protect the privacy of student grade and financial information, has for many years been abused by colleges and universities to hide the true extent of crime on their campuses. Congress has been taking steps for more than a decade now though to eliminate these abuses. Most recently, in 1998 Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) secured an amendment to FERPA that stripped confidentiality from student disciplinary information when the accused student was found responsible in a case involving a crime of violence or non-forcible sex offense. Many schools, however, have been exploiting ambiguous regulations to keep victims silent, requiring them not to tell anybody the results of the hearing as a condition of being told themselves.