IU Sexual Assault Case

I recently came across an interesting article  about two high-ranking members of Indiana University’s Association for Student Conduct Administration (ASCA), which deals specifically with sexual assault cases. The current President of ASCA, John Casares, was accused of sexually assaulting another board member, Jill Creighton, who has recently been voted ASCA’s next president. The two were at a bar having drinks at a work convention in Texas and Creighton claims that when the two went back to a hotel room together, Casares took advantage of her in her drunken state, and says that she did not consent to sexual contact. Casares continues to deny the claims of sexual misconduct, even after Creighton filed a police report, released a statement about the issue, and actually confronted Casares via text message about the incident. A report of ASCA’s write-up of the incident  “blames me for being in the same hotel room, blames me for not crying out for help in the moment, blames me for not taking physical pictures [of my injuries]…and blames me for confronting him,” according to Creighton.

This is a really interesting and actually ironic case to come across because in this situation both parties are very knowledgeable about sexual assault and the processes involved with dealing with it. The two people involved in the case are actually arguably the most knowledgeable because they are both either past or future presidents of the University’s sexual assault organization. For this reason, it was really interesting to see that when faced with this story, their own organization did not follow typical protocol to resolve the situation, and Creighton feels that she was treated very unfairly in the process, citing rape myths such as victim blaming in the official report of the incident.

A letter that Casares posted to her Twitter account offered a her take on how this situation should have been handled, but was not:

“This is not something the Association can afford to be ambivalent about. We cannot claim national leadership in addressing sexual misconduct, only to fail miserably in our first test within our own Association…I don't want to hurt the Association by speaking out, I want to strengthen it, cause us introspection that this can happen even within our own profession, and challenge us to walk our talk not just on our campuses, but in all phases of our professional engagement.”

The article itself seems very favorable to the victim, though it does on several occasions refer to her as the “accuser,” which frames her in a problematic light. Other than that, however, the article is very informative and perhaps even a little biased against the perpetrator because it only includes quotes from the victim and definitely frames the perpetrator in a guilty light.