Betsy DeVos meets with ‘men’s rights’ activists
DeVos plans to meet with groups that dismiss domestic violence and rape allegations.
https://thinkprogress.org/devos-sexual-assault-bf7801b8264c
After months of receiving requests for meetings from advocates for sexual assault survivors, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has finally decided to sit down with them. But she’s also meeting with groups that are critical of Title IX guidance on campus rape, some of which have histories of intimidating rape survivors and dismissing domestic abuse against women.
The department reached out to the National Coalition for Men, SAVE: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, and Families Advocating for Campus Equality,according toPolitico.
The article gives us some info on these groups for reference:
The National Coalition for Men, which was founded in the 1970s, has a long history of what is now known as “men’s rights activism.” One of the groups’ chapterspublishedthe photos and names of women, while calling them “false accusers.”
In 2012, the groupsupportedthe Republican House version of the Violence Against Women Act, whichremovedprotections for LGBTQ people in crisis centers. The group has been very litigious when it notices events specifically designated as for women. Its members sueda strip clubfor letting women in for free during its “ladies night” andsueda company called Chic CEO for not letting men into a women’s networking event.
Harry Crouch, president of National Coalition for Men, has also vocally blamed survivors for the abuse they faced. In a2014 interviewwith Pacific Standard, Crouch defended Ray Rice, a former football player, who was indicted in 2014 on third-degree aggravated assault for an incident involving his then fiancee. “I’m not saying he’s a good guy,” Crouch said. “But if she hadn’t aggravated him, she wouldn’t have been hit. They would say that’s blaming the victim. But I don’t buy it.”
SAVE: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments isincludedin a list of misogynist websites put together by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2013, SAVE published anarticlealleging that many civil rights, like the “right to privacy in family affairs,” have been “undermined by domestic violence laws.”
Assuming that the article, which is still on the site, represents its views, SAVE also thinks attorneys should be able to ask “detailed, often intrusive questions about the accuser’s prior sexual history.” The group takes issue with afederal rulethat, with a few exceptions, protects survivors by not allowing evidence of a victim’s sexual behavior to be admissible in court.
Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE) is a non-profit founded a few years ago by mothers of sons who were accused of sexual misconduct while they attended college. The website describes the “ruined futures” of the accused and “havoc of unjustly dismantled lives.” Under the text, “Title IX’s future victims,” the sitepublishedthe story of a man who said he was falsely accused of rape and equates his experience to that of a rape survivor.
“Falsely accused students suffer emotional trauma similar to that of rape victims, and yet receive no emotional support from their colleges,” the site*reads.
Researchers estimate that somewhere between 2 to 10 percent of rape allegations are false, but even among those who are falsely accused, it’srarefor men to end up in prison as a result. For students who are found responsible for sexual assault, only30 percentwere actually expelled, according to a 2014 Huffington Post analysis of data from over 100 schools.
But that hasn’t stopped FACE. One of its founders, Sherry Warner-Seefeld,toldthe National Review that on the whole, she found it “dangerous to our country” to require universities to conduct annual surveys on sexual assault and publish the results online.
 
