Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Senior Executive Vice President, Daniel Swinton, quoted in The Courant

Feds Will Investigate Title IX Complaint Against UConn

The senior executive vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management said cases can take from six months to as long as three to five years.

"It's a long process," Daniel C. Swinton said. "They'll come in and they'll do an investigation, which is really more like an audit. They'll ask to see anywhere between the last three to five years of sexual assault complaints …"


He said the Office for Civil Rights has the power to pull federal funding from a school, but has never done so. "What they are looking for is compliance," Swinton said. "They seek voluntary compliance" to Title IX regulations.

Click here for the full article.

Monday, December 2, 2013

Brett Sokolow, NCHERM Group President and CEO, interviewed in Campus Security Report on the civil rights investigation model

Brett A. Sokolow, an attorney who serves as the executive director of ATIXA and managing partner of NCHERM, a law and consulting firm specializing in higher education risk management, recently explained how the model works during a webinar.

“If you look across our entire society, you will find that just about every entity but colleges and universities uses a form of civil rights investigation procedures, so we really are the anomaly,” he said. Federal case law has established that students must be given due process rights prior to being disciplined. But too often, such cases devolve into episodes of he said/she said. That can further traumatize the victim or victimize a wrongly accused individual. The civil rights model ensures the rights of the accusing and accused party are roughly in balance. “It’s not about creating parity but equity,” Sokolow explained. “If we do something for one person, why not do it for the other?”

Click here to read the full article.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Brett Sokolow, President & CEO of The NCHERM Group, quoted in Politico

“We appreciate that the government has given greater clarity but we could always use more, and there are probably some very simple ways OCR could be communicating with campuses instead of scolding them every time they get this wrong,” said Brett Sokolow, executive director of the Association of Title IX Administrators.

Click here to read "Advocates: Campus sexual violence under-addressed."

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Daniel C. Swinton, Senior Executive Vice President with The NCHERM Group, quoted in Inside Higher Ed

"Wrongly Accused?" 

Daniel Swinton, senior executive vice president at the NCHERM Group, a law and consulting firm that advises schools and colleges on safer schools and campuses, said he wasn't familiar with the Gupta case, but that it's possible in general for such high-profile events as the Bustamante murder-suicide to "negatively influence" sexual harassment cases that follow.

That said, it is possible for institutions to render fair judgments in those cases, he added. Anti-sex discrimination legislation, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, requires that institutions investigate such cases "fairly, impartially, and promptly," as well as thoroughly, he said. "There shouldn't be a skew in the investigation one way or the other -- let's just see the facts and information and where it lands." Where impartiality is difficult to ensure, he said, institutions may bring in an outside party to investigate claims.

Absent "clear and convincing" evidence in sexual harassment cases, universities typically opt to establish a preponderance of evidence, Swinton said. Absent that, or in "50-50" scenario where it's equally possible that the claims aren't true as that they are, faculty are typically found "not responsible" due to insufficient evidence.


Click here to read the full article.


Wednesday, November 13, 2013

W. Scott Lewis, Partner with The NCHERM Group, quoted in Inside Higher Ed

"Study Links Binge Drinking and Low Critical Thinking Skills"

The implications of the findings extend beyond the individual students’ academic outcomes, said Scott Lewis, partner at The NCHERM Group, LLC. Alcohol or drug use is almost always involved in rape and non-sexual assault cases on campus, Lewis noted, and students will have a harder time binging Thursday through Sunday once they’re in the work place.

“We know that when they’re drunk they’re making less good decisions, but you can’t do that for four years and think it’s not going to have an impact on you developmentally,” Lewis said, adding that coping and conflict resolution skills are not helped by heavy alcohol use, either. “For prevention education, it stresses the importance of making sure students understand more clearly the definitions of consent and force and incapacity in terms of sexual misconduct, as well as making students even more aware of how to be appropriate interveners.”

But Lewis questioned the feasibility of targeting first-year students whose critical thinking is substandard.

“I don’t know how we would identify that specific group short of some sort of testing,” he said. “I think if you just focus on the whole, that’d be smarter.”

Click here to read the full article.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

President & CEO of The NCHERM Group, Brett A. Sokolow, Esq., quoted in The Huffington Post

"A Big Problem in How Campus Police Handle Sexual Assaults"

This sort of communication failure by authorities can amount to a "second victimization" for sexual assault survivors, said Brett A. Sokolow, President & CEO of the The National Center for Higher Education Risk Management Group. "I continue to worry about this phenomenon on many campuses. We educate students about sexual violence, and then they are disappointed when campus or local police dispense quickly with the case."

Click here to read the full article.

Monday, November 4, 2013

NCHERM Group affiliated consultant, Mary Ellen O'Toole, Ph.D., interviewed on CNN about profiling the suspected LAX shooter


Former senior FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole talks about the shooter and what might have triggered the airport shooting.

Click here to see the interview.