DeVos defends new guidelines for colleges on sexual assault

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said during a Tuesday interview that the department’s new procedures for handling sexual assault policies on school campuses will be “fair for all” students and a major shift from the approach taken by the Obama administration. 

“We want to ensure that students know that they are going to be treated fairly and that we are going to put a process in place that’s going to be fair for all of them,” DeVos told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. 

DeVos drew fierce criticism for her decision to rewrite the department’s Obama-era guidance for universities on handling assaults on campuses, in an effort to better protect and ensure due process to those accused of assault. 

{mosads}The department has sent out “a set of questions and answers to help schools” to use until it issues its final guidance to universities. DeVos has previously critiqued the complexity of the previous guidelines, which made it difficult for attorneys to help students. 

The secretary also said that the former policy of the Obama administration’s guidelines have wronged both survivors of sexual assault and those who have been falsely accused. 

“There’ve been too many students wronged in a well-intentioned attempt to endure that this issue is not swept under the rug and not hidden in back rooms of schools any longer. We have no intention of doing that, we have every intention of continuing to make sure that students feel safe and that they all have a fair and equal forum in which to work through such issues as this,” DeVos said. 

The secretary said that the department will look to partner with schools in order to take preventative measures against assault in a more proactive stance on sexual assault.