Science Insider quotes Swinton on repeat faculty sexual harassment

It’s not clear exactly how to make sure a university is alerted to a job candidate’s past violations, said Daniel Swinton, a lawyer and managing partner at the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, which advises universities on issues including Title IX.

Often a university doesn’t know when an employee is applying to work elsewhere, so they wouldn’t know to disclose the information, he told ScienceInsider. Also, universities are often loath to release details of a person’s personnel record. State employment laws frequently restrict disclosure of such information, and universities are gun shy of potential lawsuits, Swinton said. Universities already have the option of noting disciplinary actions on student transcripts, he noted, but many don’t.

One possible option is to require the hiring institution to ask recent employers and references about any disciplinary action or Title IX violations, Swinton said. But he predicted any federal efforts to open up personnel files would face legal challenges by groups representing employees. And if violations were disclosed, he predicts that the disclosure would almost certainly not include a complete investigator’s report.

“A few sentences is what I think most institutions would be willing to do,” Swinton said. “And that’s not being chicken. That’s just the world we live in.”

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AP quotes Sokolow on FSU settlement

"This case has raised awareness nationally because of the high-profile coverage and how starkly the systemic failures were chronicled in the media," Sokolow said.

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Van Brunt et al. publish "The Unfit Parent: Six Myths Concerning Dangerousness and Mental Illness"

There is a pervasive assumption that mental illness equates to dangerousness and violence as it applies to parenting. We examine this assumption and present a comprehensive literature review of how issues of mental illness impact violence and dangerousness. A range of issues is explored, including the unpredictability of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, stress from mental health problems inhibiting emotional stability, and past in-patient hospitalizations for suicide attempts as they impact parenting. Risk mitigation strategies are also presented.

Practitioner's Key Points:

• While the stress and difficulties of living with a mental illness certainly present challenges for any parent to overcome, this article answers the larger question, “Does having a mental illness equate with being an unfit parent?”
• In order to explore what makes an unfit parent, it is necessary to first operationalize what skills, traits, and abilities fit parents possess. The article offers a summary of what it means to be a fit parent.
• For an individual with mental illness, there may be a risk of unfit parenting or violence. But we can only understand the actuality when we look at the severity of the mental illness, environmental stressors, and additional risk factors.
• We offer a constellation of protective approaches to better assess the risk by attending to competent risk factors, rather than making broad assumptions concerning mental illness and the ability to parent or proclivity to behave in a violent fashion.

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