photo by: Journal-World/File

In this Journal-World file photo, a University of Kansas student straightens some of the 3,067 flags in front of Watson Library representing the statistically one in four women who will be sexually assaulted during their time at KU on Wednesday, April 6, 2016. The flag display is in conjunction with Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Nearly five years have passed since the University of Kansas last had a task force working to remedy issues of sexual misconduct on its campus.

In light of the #MeToo movement and a growing discourse that advocates for calling out the systems that permit sexual violence to take place, a group of students in KU’s student government had called on Chancellor Douglas Girod to reinstate a dedicated sexual assault task force for the first time since the 2014-15 academic year.

Those efforts appear to have failed, according to a message Girod sent Thursday to leaders of Student Senate. The message was provided to the Journal-World by Girod’s office as his statement for this story.

“Please know I wholeheartedly share your interest in this topic and your concern for students’ wellbeing,” Girod wrote. “That said, I do not agree that the creation of another task force is necessary at this time.”

Grant Daily, a junior from Wichita and the former Student Senate Government Relations Director, authored a December resolution calling for a task force to relaunch, writing that the university is “among the least transparent large, educational institutions in the nation regarding sexual violence.”

That sentiment came from the fact that since the original task force dissolved in 2015, KU continues to release almost no statistics on sexual violence to the greater campus community, Daily said.

Girod’s decision not to reopen the task force was disappointing, Daily said, but also serves as a good first step in addressing the issues KU’s campus still faces regarding sexual violence.

“Acknowledgement is a massive step in the right direction,” he told the Journal-World. “That is a great first step to address the needs of our students.”

But KU still faces daunting statistics when it comes to addressing sexual misconduct on its campus. A 2019 survey of 33 Association of American Universities institutions revealed that 26% of undergraduate women at KU said they’d been sexually assaulted since entering college, which is roughly equal to the average reported by the other schools in the survey. Fifteen percent of undergraduate women at KU in the same survey reported they’d been raped.

If the results of the AAU survey held true campus-wide, that would mean — based on current enrollment totals — more than 2,600 women at KU had been sexually assaulted since entering college and more than 1,500 had been raped.

How those figures compare to the actual number of complaints the university receives related to sexual assault and misconduct is unknown, as KU consistently declines to release those types of statistics. Daily and student leaders said the university’s secrecy around those figures is among the most troubling issues they would like a new task force to address.

In conversations Daily has had with survivors who have come to him seeking guidance, he said KU’s culture of secrecy surrounding sexual misconduct has made some hesitant to come forward.

“Some students have told me that it feels like they’re shouting into the void. That their experiences may not be invalidated, but they certainly don’t feel like they’re being taken seriously,” he said. “From a student perspective, I think it feels like no one is listening.”

Throughout his three years at KU, Daily said it was overwhelmingly apparent that sexual misconduct was a problem.

He has had unique experiences with the issue, working as both a desk assistant and resident assistant in multiple KU dorms, and described the behaviors he’d witness at 1 or 2 a.m. as “horrific.” It made him wonder how he’d feel if it was a friend or family member experiencing the same treatment.

Daily has never been personally affected by sexual violence, he said, but three years into his college career, it’s difficult for a week to pass without his phone ringing and a friend or peer on the other end wanting to talk about their experience with sexual assault.

It’s what motivated him to draft the resolution calling for Girod to reopen a sexual assault task force in conjunction with two Student Senate standing committees — something he’s wanted to do for the better part of a year.

“A lot of really important people in my life have been wronged by their peers and by this university,” he said. “And I was tired of us not saying anything at all. It’s been too many people to count.”

Often, a task force charged with fixing a specific issue on a sprawling university campus can languish without producing many concrete results.

The 2014-15 task force was not one of those.

Comprising 11 members including university professors, deans and students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the task force met 15 times before presenting then-Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little with 27 recommendations for improving the campus climate surrounding sexual violence.

It didn’t mince words when evaluating the state of KU’s response to sexual misconduct or the university’s efforts to prevent it from happening in the first place.

“As presently configured, prevention efforts at KU are limited in a variety of key ways. The University’s sexual assault prevention efforts are not conceptualized as a comprehensive approach,” the group’s April 2015 final report read. “Instead, efforts by individual campus units are decentralized, uncoordinated, and often result in isolated implementation. Prevention efforts are short-term in their scope. Additionally, the sexual assault prevention programs are not rigorously evaluated to determine their efficacy.”

Gray-Little, who convened the task force in response to a nationwide outrage over KU’s handling of misconduct cases, ultimately chose to implement 22 of the 27 recommendations, which brought dramatic changes to the university.

“Our desire has always been to position KU as a leader in how universities address this national problem, and the task force’s efforts have helped make that aspiration a reality,” Gray-Little said in a September 2015 news release announcing the changes.

By October of that year, KU had announced the creation of its Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Center and detailed efforts to require training of incoming KU freshmen and subsequently refreshing that training each year a student was enrolled.

It also committed to releasing a list of sanctions issued to student violators of the university’s sexual harassment policies — which it still does on a yearly basis — though some argue the list isn’t transparent enough, as it isn’t organized by date or what the misconduct was.

Nearly five years after the original task force closed up shop, the issues that remain on KU’s campus, according to Daily and the authors of the December resolution, center around the university’s lack of transparency in communicating with its student body the frequency with which sexual violence actually takes place.

Girod did not address those concerns in his Thursday message to student leaders.

“I’m not asking for names. No student is asking for names. What we’re asking for is more transparency of statistics,” Daily told the Journal-World. “How many cases are being filed a year? Where are these cases taking place and who is involved? How many are actually brought through the resolution process? How many have you tried all the way through? What are the forms of punishment? How many of them are actually followed through on, and where are those judgments coming from?”

Such information would be drastically more detailed than the limited crime statistics KU is required to release every year under the Jeanne Clery Act. That legislation, passed in 1990, dictates that any university receiving federal funding must release a blanket list of crime statistics every year. The statistics required to be released in a Clery report, however, are limited only to crimes reported to a police agency.

A sexual assault reported to KU’s Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access — which investigates reports of misconduct — for example, would not be required to appear on KU’s annual Clery Report. As such, there’s never been a complete picture of how prevalent the issue of sexual misconduct is at KU.

KU officials have long been hesitant to release such statistics to various media outlets or the KU student body. They say it would violate federal student privacy laws, even though other universities around the country — such as the University of Connecticut, the University of Michigan and Yale University — regularly release the exact type of report Daily is advocating for to their student bodies.

Those more-transparent schools, Daily said, encourage sexual assault survivors to come forward because they have a friendlier culture around reporting.

“It encourages the university to follow through and be responsible to its student body,” Daily said. “By us lacking transparency and not trying to directly address the issue, we’re hindering our own student body.”

In Girod’s message to student leaders, he expressed his appreciation for them taking the initiative to highlight “sobering statistics regarding sexual violence.”

“As a chancellor, physician and father, I think about this topic every day,” he wrote. “Addressing sexual violence remains a priority at KU, and we are always improving our efforts.”

Though the resolution passed Student Senate in December, it took until the second week of February for a copy to be delivered to Girod’s office. This, KU Student Body President Tiara Floyd told the Journal-World, happened because of a miscommunication in the Student Senate office.

“There’s no excuse for a two-month turnaround on legislation being sent out,” she said. “… Things can get hectic in the office. Of course, this is not a reason to be two months behind, but it’s possible that (Student Senate), like every office, falls behind or has slow turnaround.”

Despite the delay in the resolution reaching the chancellor’s desk, the issue of addressing sexual misconduct on the KU campus remains important to the Student Senate executive staff, Floyd said.

“As a survivor myself, advocating for things like this is personal and a priority,” she said.

The campus has made strides in recent years, Floyd said, in its addition of therapy groups, classes and training, but it’s obvious KU still has work to do.

“I think it’s unfortunate that the efforts seem to only lie in the hands of (the Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Center), but I’m grateful for the work they’ve done and continue to do,” she said.

Moving forward, Girod indicated in his note to Student Senate leaders that incoming Provost Barbara Bichelmeyer would continue working with student leaders on initiatives to address sexual violence on campus.

While the chancellor did not address any parts of the resolution that called on KU to be more transparent, Daily, who has launched a campaign to be the next student body vice president, said those issues are ones that he and his peers in student government will continue to emphasize.

“If you have an issue to talk about, people are usually willing to listen. Your approach matters, your research matters, but they’ll usually listen,” he said. “Maybe it will be impactful to be the student body vice president, but at the end of the day, it’s really not why I’m doing this. There are issues on campus; I’m trying to address them.”