“It wasn’t something I could go through emotionally,” he says. “That kind of non-ruling might as well have been a victory for him.”

KEEPING IT SECRET

In addition to having apprehensions about the Ad Board process, many victims’ privacy concerns deter them from bringing cases forward, administrators and specialists say.

Many students worry about the number of people with whom they will have to share their painful and often traumatizing stories, Ellison says. Moreover, victims many not want Faculty members with whom they have an academic relationship to know the details of their highly personal ordeal.

In part because of the stigma surrounding sexual assault, victims often worry that the intimate details of their case may be revealed to their friends, classmates, or even worse—the entire campus.

“At Harvard, there’s constant pressure to be strong, independent, and autonomous, and to have that taken away from you and to have that stigma on you is why some don’t report [their cases],’ said OSAPR Student Alliance member T. Truc Doan ’10.

Rankin said that Harvard undergraduates in particular are very concerned about their private information becoming public.

“Harvard students are pretty protective of their information and confidentiality,” Rankin says. “Even if it’s a private hearing, people feel like all their peers will know through the rumor mill.”

While victims are concerned that information about their cases may spread by word of mouth, administrators and students say victims have also decided not to go forward with cases in the past because of worries that The Crimson will cover their stories.

In February 2009, The Crimson published a story on a sexual assault that took place in a River House, based partially on information published in the Harvard University Police Department police blotter.

According to Ellison, there was enough evidence concerning that particular incident that an Ad Board case would likely have resulted in a disciplinary sanction. But he says the student ultimately decided not to pursue a formal complaint for fear that the case would be covered by The Crimson.

Crimson President Peter F. Zhu ’11 says that it is not the newspaper’s general policy to print victims’ names or identifying information in cases of sexual assault.

Zhu said he could not address The Crimson’s coverage of the alleged incident in February 2009 because he was not the publication’s president at the time.

“If we have reported irresponsibly in the past, that’s regrettable,” says Zhu. “Any reporter should always be a human being first and foremost.”

A MISPLACED RESPONSIBILITY