Site outages prevent comments on sexual assault Title IX rule changes

The fight to reform sexual assault policies on campus is facing a maddeningly bureaucratic hurdle. 

On the final day during which citizens could share comments with the Department of Education about its proposed changes to Title IX protections for sexual assault victims, the government website went down.

Starting at 10 am ET, comment submissions sections on regulations.gov and federalregister.gov were inoperable for “a few hours” Wednesday morning, and have been “finicky” since, according to organizers. 

As of this writing, the comments section was back online. But organizers fear that Wednesday’s glitch, as well as previous site outages and messages about suspended operations during the government shut down, may have confused and deterred the public from weighing in on the controversial proposed rule change.

“Our concern is just how many people have been impacted by this,” Shiwali Patel, senior counsel of education at the National Women’s Law Center, told Mashable. “Organizations like ours, and other advocacy groups have been tracking this, were having challenges. But what about members of the public? Would they know to keep trying?”

In November, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos proposed changes to the way colleges must handle sexual assault cases under Title IX. Title IX is a federal civil rights law that gives the government the ability to pull funding from schools if they discriminate on the basis of sex; in recent years, it has become a powerful tool for prosecuting rape cases and de-stigmatizing sexual assault on campus. 

DeVos’ changes would roll back Obama era policies that give accusers rights against the school and their accused assaulters. The change requires a 60 day public comment period — one that many advocates have taken advantage of.

The timing of the department of education’s proposal has irked organizers. DeVos announced the proposal right before the Thanksgiving holiday, meaning that the people most affected by the changes — students and faculty — were either away from campus or wrapped up with finals for half of the comment period. 

“DeVos claimed when she went into rule making that she wanted the public to participate in this process,”  Patel said. “That means more than a comment period around finals and the winter holidays. It means giving time to digest these rules, and to be able to comment on them.”

The comment period also coincided with the record-long government shutdown. During that time, Patel said that the ability to comment malfunctioned several times. The site also did not make clear that citizens could still submit comments despite the shut down, and even delivered a message that said that operations were suspended. All of this, organizers fear, could have deterred potential commenters.

“DeVos and the Department of education have said that feedback from the public is essential to ensure a rule that is fair for all– but every step of the way students and survivors have been cut out of the process,” Sage Carson, the manager of Know Your IX, wrote in a statement sent to Mashable.

Finally, on the last day of the comment period, organizers estimate that commenting was down from 10:am am ET to around noon. Some commenters were even given the message that commenting ended on the 29th. 

The NWLA and other organizations have petitioned the department of education to extend the comment period. It has yet to hear back.

Despite these hurdles, NPR reported Wednesday that there have been over 100,000 comments. Some of the submissions have been particularly personal, some have come from citizens generally angry with the Trump administration, and some even come from universities opposing the changes. Others came from a template, in which submitters can include their own particularly phrasing, created by Advocates for Youth’s Hands of IX campaign.

“It is unacceptable that on the last day of the comment period, students, survivors of sexual violence, and their families are unable to voice how the proposed changes will impact them,” Carson wrote. 

Mashable asked the Department of Education what was responsible for the outage, how long it lasted exactly, and whether the department will extend the comment period at all. We will update this story when and if we hear back.

This is just the latest example of the Trump administration coming up short in its use of technology to dispense democracy. In 2017, the White House vowed to overhaul the IT infrastructure of government websites; there has been no public follow up to this initiative. That was after the White House dismantled much of the Obama-era WhiteHouse.gov website to remove pages such as “climate change,” and make it overall less useful. And this latest outage comes less than a week after the longest federal shutdown in history, which rendered many government websites out of date and out of commission.

Know Your IX and NWLA are urging the DeVos administration to extend the comment period; NWLA’s request, submitted soon after the proposal went up, went unanswered. 

But even if the department extends the comment period, the department of education has stated that it makes decisions on the changes based on “sound reasoning and scientific evidence rather than a majority of votes.” So there’s no guarantee that even this avalanche of comments will make the difference.

It’s almost like there needs to be legislation that protects the rights of women to be heard in cases of sexual assault. Actually, it’s exactly like that.