"Jackie got a different explanation when she'd eventually asked Dean Eramo the same question. She says Eramo answered wryly, 'Because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school.'"
Much of the controversy about the responsibility of colleges and universities to prevent sexual assault, to report rapists to the police and to expel them, is encapsulated by that section of the Rolling Stone article, which is also what probably led Ms. Eramo's attorneys to include that section as part of the lawsuit.
That section describes the administrative oppression of students who are raped and the constricted ability of school administrators who do want to help from being able to do anything effective. It's not surprising that Ms. Eramo was afraid that she would be fired when the article was published; the article portrays her as calling her employer a liar, which her employer is.
Before the verdict, Ms. Eramo was in the tenuous position of being about to be fired from the University of Virginia both for the "rape school" statement and because of the federal government's investigation which criticized Ms. Eramo for being part of the oppression. I would be surprised if Ms. Eramo's employer ever directly asked Ms. Eramo about the "rape school" statement or mentioned it in email or another written form, but, although a statement like that would be a type of rebellion against the school's oppression of rape victims, the school used the results of the federal investigation as the basis of demoting Ms. Eramo both from being an Associate Dean and from chairing the Sexual Misconduct Board. Pending the result of her lawsuit, she continued to be employed by the school, and at a higher salary, as concessions to her years of service and to her being an alumna who has a home, a family, and a life that she has built around the school and Charlottesville. Even if Ms. Eramo had lost her lawsuit and not been fired, she probably would have been ostracized until she felt that she had to leave.
The federal government is not one person or one office; some people are corrupt and some people aren't. The battle for human rights that's fought among school administrators is also fought among people at the federal level, so Ms. Eramo's dilemma is also President Sullivan's dilemma, particularly because there are so many rich people who are either part of the government or whose money buys them direct governmental influence, and who are either graduates of UVA and schools like UVA and/or have sons or other relatives who attend those prestigious schools.
The University of Virginia's proximity to Washington makes it particularly probable that a UVA student who rapes someone also knows powerful people, or has friends or relatives who do.
It should also be obvious to everyone that both the University of Virginia's Police Department and the Charlottesville Police Department actively discourage students who try to report crime, by systematically minimizing reports and neglecting and bullying students into retracting those reports, and that's how they treat the reports that they DO publish. The public has no access to the information that is never published.
Copyright L. Kochman, November, 2016 @ 3:38 p.m.
