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Study: Illinois schools need guidelines for dealing with sexual misconduct cases

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Illinois

A new report says Illinois lacks comprehensive guidelines when it comes to dealing with sexual misconduct cases in elementary and high schools.

Wendy Pollack heads the Women’s Law and Policy Initiative of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. She authored the report, based on a series of interviews with students and service providers across the state.

Pollack says the lack of guidance leads too often to problems like school employees mishandling survivors’ confidentiality, and survivors being revictimized by having to explain the abuse repeatedly. Pollack says when situations are mishandled it can even lead to bullying, and some students interviewed dropped out of school as a result.

In the midst of the #MeToo movement, there are more conversations about the existence of problems resulting from sexual violence. But Pollack says not enough of those conversations involve young survivors.

* From the report…

This report provides a snapshot of Illinois K-12 schools’ responses to student survivors of domestic and sexual violence. The report’s findings are based on four focus groups and 31 in-person and phone interviews conducted in 2015 and 2016; a total of 59 students (middle school and high school students) and service providers participated. The participants were diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and LGBTQ status; in addition, the participant service providers served diverse student populations. Geographically, participants were from all over the state, including Chicago and surrounding suburbs, and smaller cities and rural areas in northern, central, and southern Illinois. The schools varied in size, the availability of resources, and their response to and support of students and their experiences of domestic and sexual violence.

Although since 2007 Illinois law requires K-12 schools to conduct trainings by experts in domestic and sexual violence once every two years for all school personnel who work with students, including teachers, administrators, counselors, and nurses, the lack of comprehensive school policies creates barriers to student survivors’ success in school. Focus groups uncovered issues due to the lack of survivor-centered, trauma-informed policies in the following areas:

• Protocol and Training — Protocols that are sensitive to survivors and their needs were too often either absent or not followed by school personnel.

For example, staff generally did not know when and to whom they report. Compounding the problem, the required training of school personnel is generally not conducted, leaving school personnel unequipped to appropriately respond to disclosures of domestic and sexual violence.

• Confidentiality — School personnel often lacked understanding of the need for confidentiality and how to ensure it. Even when processes were in place, they were often unaware of confidential reporting processes. Routinely, confidentiality was either knowingly breached or there was a lack of privacy necessary to maintain confidentiality.

• Accommodations and Support Services — Schools too often did not provide any accommodations in response to student survivors trauma — whether academic-, safety-, or health-related. And if offered, in-school support was often
inadequate, and relationships with external service providers in the community that could offer expert support to student survivors were lacking.

• Revictimization — School personnel often dismissed the experiences of student survivors out of disbelief or through minimization, criticism, or even punishment.

posted by Rich Miller
Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 10:38 am

Comments

This is one of those times when I say: “You mean, there aren’t already comprehensive guidelines to deal with this issue?”

For crying out loud, for years we had the redundancy of a made-up “Secretary of Education” and the ISBE. Neither thought that was their job? What the heck were they doing, counting milk money?

Yeah, get on this, please.

Comment by wordslinger Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 10:51 am
= the required training of school personnel is generally not conducted =

= often unaware of confidential reporting processes =

And yet no one, other than the victims, will suffer any consequences for the officials’ failures.

Comment by cover Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 10:54 am
Gross negligence - this is the POINT of school management, bureaucracy, and administration, right?

Pathetic. Those responsible ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Get this done now.

Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 11:06 am
DCFS has policies and procedures for this. That staff do not know what to do, even when training is mandated, speaks to widespread incompetence or indifference.

More rules will not solve the problem when current rules are ignored.

Comment by Last Bull Moose Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 11:11 am
Schools are all to report suspected abuse to DCFS. From there, they walk a fine line between child and parent rights. Schools are regularly threated with legal action in many cases. Victims are often shuttled to relative’s home in other school districts, repeating the cycle. Many parents move to other states when things heat up.

We’re not describing stable situations, but intensly fought situations where children aren’t old enough or capable of telling why they have bruises, anger or other problematic symptoms.

This report is a little unrealitic.

Comment by VanillaMan Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 11:12 am
I find their focus group info to be interesting.

Student information, of any kind, is confidential in Illinois. One of the problems that we run into is that parents want to know what happened to the offender (we deal with this almost everyday for infractions large and small). We cannot share that information so many parents then infer that nothing was done. Students do this as well. The point being that information related to the outcomes is usually not known to the victims unless the court/law enforcement is involved.

Access or coordination with services is a huge problem, especially outside of metro Chicago. They just aren’t there. Rich shared a story last week regarding the dearth of psychiatrists in McLean county and that serves as a prime example.

They aren’t wrong about staff not knowing what to do sometimes. We train staff every year on mandated reporting and every year we have someone get it wrong. It is very frustrating.

Comment by JS Mill Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 11:43 am
What about the statute of limitations on civil lawsuits. It seems the statute for Catholic schools is basically unlimited and there is a cottage industry for trial lawyers, but for public schools kids only have 6 months to come to terms and file a civil lawsuit? Not exactly honoring victims and allowing them the time they need to come to consciousness for what happened. My guess is that we only know the very tip of the iceberg about what is happening inside schools.

Comment by Ed Equity Tuesday, Dec 11, 18 @ 3:57 pm