Annual Title IX Report: Message to the community
Dear Stanford community,
Today we are releasing the Annual Title IX/Sexual Harassment Report.
The report contains information on how the university responded to reported concerns of sexual harassment, sexual violence and gender discrimination involving students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty and staff during the period from Aug. 14, 2020, to Aug. 31, 2021.
You can read the entire report here: https://equity.stanford.edu/reports.
The Office of Institutional Equity and Access prepared the report from data collected by Stanford’s SHARE Title IX Office and Human Resources/Employee Labor and Relations. In order to respect the privacy of affected individuals, the data are presented without revealing details about particular cases.
Our daily campus population was greatly reduced during the period this report covers, as well as part of the preceding year, due to COVID-related restrictions. As a likely result, cases declined from 279 in 2018-19, to 187 in 2019-20 and to 98 in 2020-21.
Two important developments occurred during the last academic year. First, the offices involved in preventing and responding to sexual harassment underwent an external review by leaders from peer institutions. Second, in May 2020, the federal government issued sweeping new regulations prescribing how universities respond to sexual harassment allegations under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.
As a result of these developments, Stanford reorganized the offices addressing education, prevention and response into a single SHARE Title IX Office. To comply with the new federal regulations, the university issued an updated policy defining and prohibiting sexual harassment/assault, relationship violence and stalking; and adopted new procedures to evaluate allegations of sexual harassment, among other changes.
We began releasing these annual Title IX/Sexual Harassment reports in the 2016-17 academic year. We believe it’s important to disclose information about the reports we receive and how they are handled in order to be transparent and hold ourselves accountable as a community. We also hope that by making the data visible and accessible, it will encourage anyone experiencing unwanted sexual conduct to come forward so that the issue can be addressed. Information about support and resources can be found at https://sexualviolencesupport.stanford.edu.
Our goal is to ensure that our campus is a safe and respectful environment to live, work and study – one that is free of sexual violence, sexual harassment and gender discrimination. We must all work together as a community to reach that goal.
We hope you will take some time to review the report. We welcome your feedback at provost@stanford.edu.
Sincerely,
Persis Drell
Provost
Patrick Dunkley
Vice Provost for Institutional Equity, Access and Community