Betsy DeVos, United States Education Secretary, is being soft on college sexual assault.

DeVos criticized the Obama era Title IX guidelines. Her three points for the rollback of the 2011 directive was because it did not require the accused to be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt and that the accused also lacked due process as required by U.S. law.

Her second reason was that school administrators were ill-equipped to play the roles of judge and jury when deciding if a sexual assault took place.

DeVos’ last point was that schools were spending more time on data collection for sexual assault cases rather than creating policies to stop them.

Being fair and looking at both sides of the situation is an understandable idea, but, there’s already enough victim blaming.

The fear that title IX could potentially protect those accused of sexual abuse who actually committed the crime is horrifying.

Title IX can be another discouragement to students from reporting sexual assault.

It is unsettling for women, men and the LGBTQ+ community to know that although they have been assaulted, the accuser might be able to question them in a trial setting.

Sexual assault survivors take a huge step in coming forward about their assault. So why would a victim make up a story about getting raped?

Throughout time there have been false rape cases, but those are extremely rare.

False allegations of sexual assault occur at a rate of 2 to 10 percent. But several cases that were examined by the authors of the study came to a conclusion that the accusations that were labeled as ‘false’ were cases where there was simply not enough evidence to file charges.

Victims already choose to stay silent about their assault in fear that no one will be able to help or believe them since everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

Oftentimes, victims rarely have proof that they were raped. Sexual assault usually does not happen around other people, the victim is usually placed in a hard situation where they have to prove they were assaulted.

Unfortunately, we are still not too far away from the male advocating paradigm we are used to seeing so much where victims are blamed for what happened to them. They get asked what they were wearing to justify if they were ‘too revealing’ and accuse them of ‘asking for it.’

Survivors of a sexual assault get asked if they had alcoholic drinks, where they were at, and examine their sexual history.

Accusers in most cases are doubted and judged because they report their abuse ‘too late.’

Just because a person does not report an assault does not mean that it never happened.

According to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, some of the reasons why victims do not report their sexual abuse is because they believed the police would not do anything or could not do anything to help, thought it was a personal matter, assumed it was not important enough to report, or did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble.

DeVos was insensitive on the rollback of title IX. Society already has a way of normalizing rape culture and the modification of title IX will favor the accused now more than ever.

Unwanted sexual contact should be unacceptable and it should not have to matter if one flirted, was drinking, wearing revealing clothing, one’s whereabouts, one’s reputation, or if one did the same sexual act with someone else.

It is not rocket science if they did not get a consent it is assault.

Various people fail to see sexual assault for what it really is and it is truly disturbing.