September 12, 2022

In short, the current rules hold schools to a far lesser standard in addressing the harassment of students—including the sexual harassment and abuse of children under its care—than schools are held to in addressing the same harassment of adult employees. [...] 9 reality that domestic abusers rely both on physical or sexual violence and various other control tactics to hurt their partners, we urge the Department to incorporate the references to “verbal, psychological, economic, or technological abuse” in VAWA 2022’s definition of “domestic violence.” Finally, we urge the Department to provide examples in the preamble to the final rules and in supplementa. [...] The confidential employee must also make clear to the disclosing individual, including in writing, that the confidential employee will not make any report of the alleged discrimination to the recipient institution, to minimize any misunderstanding of the confidential employee’s role. [...] We ask the Department to issue supplemental guidance to instruct schools on what they can do in these types of situations to protect the privacy of the victims whose identities may be exposed in a report of sex-based harassment or discrimination but who do not want to come forward, while still fully addressing the complaints of those individuals who do wish to proceed. [...] In the Title VII context, it make sense to impose strict liability on an when a supervisor harasses an employee because the supervisor is a representative of the employee; similarly, in the Title IX context, a school should be deemed to have notice and thus required to address employee-on-student harassment, even if the employee-respondent is the only one with knowledge of the harassment, because.