Sexual assault, terrorism focus of Worcester conference
Massachusetts law enforcement and college officials gathered Wednesday to talk about sexual assaults and terrorist threats, two areas of focus that have commanded attention in the past decade.
Massachusetts runs higher education systems at three levels, and state leaders from Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito to Attorney General Maura Healey and UMass President Marty Meehan emphasized the importance of confronting campus sexual assault at the start of the conference organized by the Department of Higher Education.
"Unfortunately across this country, as many as one in four of these female undergraduates will be sexually assaulted on college campuses," Healey told the audience. She said, "Sexual assault is not a rite of passage. It is abusive. It is illegal. And we need to do everything we can to empower young people, staff and others with the tools to recognize it, prevent it, and take it on."
Polito said campus police should have the same type of training as municipal police on responding to sexual assault and domestic violence, and Bay State students can receive an education on the subject before going to college.
"I think there's an opportunity in the curriculum, the health curriculum in the K-through-12 system. We talk about anti-bullying. We talk about drugs and alcohol and tobacco. We should also have a discussion around relationships and what is safe and what is correct," Polito said. Calling a June report to the Board of Higher Education about campus safety "important," Polito said, "You need to actually take those reports and follow through with the recommendations to make it happen."
The report looked at both "active shooter" and terrorist type situations on campuses as well as sexual assault, which law enforcement officials at the conference said are both uniquely challenging. Sex assaults can be perversely intimate, sometimes committed by a purported friend or partner, while terrorist attacks tend to target victims at random.
Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official and 2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate who worked on the report, told the News Service sex assault and terrorism are two of the biggest emerging issues for campuses.
"Over the last 15 years, our colleges and universities - the entire higher education system - has really taken safety and security quite seriously. So if you compare us to other states we're in a really good place, but the threat changes," Kayyem said. "Our obligations change; institutional norms change, and it was incumbent on us to update a lot of these practices."
Kayyem said the report recommends adding someone at the state level who can coordinate safety efforts through the "disparate" system of college and university campuses.
State Higher Education Commissioner Carlos Santiago highlighted new safety enhancements at state schools, saying Roxbury Community College students now have access to violence prevention workshops; Bristol Community College installed an emergency speaker at its Fall River campus; and Bridgewater State University has created an emergency plan, assembled an emergency response team and appointed a sexual violence outreach educator.
The report recommends increased involvement by schools' trustees in safety issues, and says visible and approachable police can prevent incidents from occurring and encourage the reporting of crimes. The report also recommends offering "confidential resources" for students and employees who have experienced sexual violence, such as partnering with Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner hospitals. Video surveillance capabilities, remote-locking doors and emergency notifications were also addressed in the report.
As local police seek to work with campus authorities on sexual assaults they can encounter a thicket of complicated issues, including the victim's desire to keep accusations confidential, the provision of records from the school to police, and decisions around charging a suspect, Boston Police Lt. Detective George Juliano told conference-goers.
Juliano, who is the commander of the department's sex assault unit, said he is trying to reach memorandums of understanding with all of Boston's higher education institutions setting out the ways the Boston Police and local schools can collaborate on law enforcement, but has only reached agreement with Northeastern University.
"Thirty-two colleges, I have one done," Juliano said. He said the level of training and certification amongst campus security varies between the schools, some of which have sworn police who went through the state's police academy.
Secretary of Public Safety and Security Dan Bennett said any campus police officer who carries a firearm would need to have gone through the academy. A former Harvard student who was roommates with former Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone in the Cambridge college's Kirkland House, Bennett recalled the updates he saw as a Middlesex prosecutor working for Leone when there was a murder in that dormitory.
During that 2009 incident, the school sent out an alert to all students to stay away from the area, and investigators were able to look at data logs to see who had entered the basement where the crime occurred, said Bennett, who told the News Service he and Leone lived within about 45 feet from the scene where Justin Cosby later was shot and killed.
Steven Carl, the director of public safety at Assumption College, described how the college scrambled to ensure the safety of students and identify a perpetrator after a former student made a bomb threat against the school.
Carl said the student had been kicked off campus about six months prior to the October 2014 bomb threat because of rape allegations. By working with Worcester Police, authorities were able to trace the internet protocol address of where the threat originated, Carl said.
Terry McLaughlin, a Worcester prosecutor, noted that sexual assault crimes can be difficult to prove because there are usually only two people present at the crime, and police usually need cooperation from the person who was allegedly assaulted.
James Hopper, of Harvard Medical School, told the conference that the natural human response to the trauma of rape can run counter to what people generally imagine. Hopper said humans freeze up when they are fearful, and can even actively participate in an unwanted sexual encounter. Hopper said traumatic memories can often key in on seemingly insignificant details, such as background noise, and efforts to make a victim remember contextual or peripheral facts, such as the timing of events, can create false memories.
The "circuitry of fear" gives rape victims intense memories from the first few minutes of an assault while their brains store less information about the subsequent time of the assault, Hopper said.
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