If you’d have asked me before my son was accused of sexual misconduct, I would have said that trauma-informed investigations were a good idea. Living through the ’90s as a female college student, then as a woman motivated to be successful in a male-dominated field, sexual harassment, inequality, and forcible rape happened. It still happens today. Then so many victims were afraid to come forward as they are now. However, in our rush for justice, we are bearing witness to the creation of a new class of victims on college campuses and in the criminal justice system: The innocent.

These new victims aren’t given the presumption of innocence. They aren’t entitled to know the accusation against them. Evidence is withheld from them and their lawyers. Police officers ask deceptively leading questions, and school investigators are both judge and jury making life-altering sanction decisions based on the presumption that a ‘victim’ never lies.

In my son’s case, he suffered through all of that and more. We were told to trust the system. That the system works. Hate to tell you, it only works for you if you have the will, courage, and financial resources to fight.

My son was accused of a felony sexual assault punishable up to 40 years in prison. What did he do? He accepted a woman’s invitation to lay on her bed. They were clothed at all times, and consumed no alcohol and no drugs. There was no sex, no fondling, no skin to skin contact, no kissing. She was on top of him and she was in control the whole time. We will never know what caused her to falsely accuse my son of assault.

Her accusation was fabricated and disgusting. All of her statements were lies, used to destroy my son or manipulate the truth. As campus employees, the police officer and the school Title IX investigator worked hand in hand with the district attorney’s office. Not once was my son told his rights. The entire time, I kept asking myself, won’t someone just look at the evidence? Talk to the witnesses? But in the well-intentioned battle against sexual assault, facts become irrelevant, and truth never seems to matter. 

What we witnessed is that once you start from a position of believing the purported victim, you never move from it, despite evidence that proves the accusation to be false. While there is value to treat potential victims with care, something that has often been lacking, if you start by believing, you start by assuming he is guilty.

• My child endured terribly unfair treatment as a result of trauma-informed methods.
  My son was arrested and spent the night in jail based on a DNA collection warrant. The DNA test results were exculpatory; unfortunately they were ignored by the school and disregarded by the prosecutor.
• His accuser was interviewed for 75 minutes and nothing was recorded or documented.
• The Prosecutor continued despite knowing the accuser destroyed exculpatory evidence and lied on a police report.
• The campus detective, while testifying under oath, stated that he did not use leading questions. Yet when interviewing my son’s ex-girlfriend, the first question asked to her, “Please tell me about the time xxx sexually assaulted you.”
• The Campus detective admitted on the witness stand he did not follow proper police procedure.
• Neither investigator nor the prosecutor interviewed the very first person to interact with my son’s accuser after he left her, the responding RA. The RA had evidence that supported my son’s innocence.

Even though all of the evidence pointed to a false allegation, my son was forced to endure four days of a trial. He faced a sentence of up to forty years. The jury acquitted him in less than one hour.

My family suffered significant, irreversible damage. Tears, anger, and heart-wrenching hate is a “new normal.” We do our best to push through the bad days. If the investigators would have done their jobs with integrity, my son would not have lived in fear for over a year in terror of just about everyone and everything.

The prosecutor can claim victory, though. Every time my son undergoes a background check it shows that he was acquitted of felony sexual assault, and he is judged guilty. Getting a good paying job is impossible. He will never get to live as an innocent person should. This is the result of a rush to believe, a lack of objective fact-finding, and the sheer bias with which my son was viewed. He did not break the law, his accuser did. And he will pay for it for the rest of his life.

* A. Pebble is the author’s pen name, used because the author’s son is still recovering from the psychological after-effects of the experience.

Source: http://www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.1451