The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault was formed on January 22, 2014, after President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

directed the Office of the Vice President of the United States and the

White House Council on Women and Girls The White House Council on Women and Girls was an advisory council within the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs of the Executive Office of the President of the United States. It was established by on March 11, 2009, with a broad mandate to advi ...

to "strengthen and address compliance issues and provide institutions with additional tools to respond to and address rape and sexual assault".Memorandum: Establishing White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault
''WhiteHouse.gov'', Washington, DC: The White House, 22 January 2014, Retrieved 10 June 2014.A renewed call to action to end rape and sexual assault
''The White House Blog'' , Washington, DC: Valerie Jarrett, 22 January 2014, Retrieved 24 January 2014.Obama admin: Freedom from sexual assault a basic human right
''MSNBC.com'', New York, NY: NBC Universal, 22 January 2014, Richinick, M., Retrieved 24 January 2014. The Task Force is part of a wider federal move to bring awareness to sexual violence on American campuses, which also included the

Office for Civil Rights The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is a sub-agency of the U.S. Department of Education that is primarily focused on enforcing civil rights laws prohibiting schools from engaging in discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex ...

release of a list of American higher education institutions with open Title IX sexual violence investigations and the It's On Us public awareness campaign. The co-chairs of the Task Force are Vice President Joe Biden and

Senior Advisor to the President Senior Advisor to the President is a title used by high-ranking political advisors to the president of the United States. White House senior advisors are senior members of the White House Office. The title has been formally used since 1993. Res ...

Valerie Jarrett Valerie June Jarrett ( Bowman; born November 14, 1956) is an American businesswoman and former government official. She currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Obama Foundation. She previously served as the senior advisor to U.S. ...

Background and history

Official portrait of President Obama and Vice President Biden 2012

Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett in the West Wing corridor cropped

While formed through an official government memorandum on January 22, 2014, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault exists as part of a lineage of government interventions against sexual violence, notably the

formed in 2009 and the

Violence Against Women Act The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA) is a United States federal law (Title IV of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, ) signed by President Bill Clinton on September 13, 1994. The Act provided $1.6 billion toward investi ...

first drafted by Biden when he was a senator in 1994.Rape and sexual assault: A renewed call to action
''White House Council on Women and Girls'', Washington, DC: White House Council on Women and Girls & Office of the Vice President, January 2014, Retrieved 10 June 2014. Simultaneously, activists within The New Campus Anti-Rape Movement have pushed for legislative changes in the ways the U.S. government enforces regulations, as demonstrated in the collaborations between nationally recognized activists and U.S. senators. Data published in a 2014 government report on sexual assault in American colleges and universities reflects the numbers and backgrounds of college students who have experienced sexual assault.
report
published in January 2015 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the result of a nine-school pilot to conduct a campus study on "school-level data on sexual victimization of undergraduate students," found that * Younger students (between 18–22 years of age) experienced sexual victimization at a rate higher than those 23 or older * Non-heterosexual students are more likely to be victimized than heterosexual students at the nine schools surveyed * On average, the rate of victimization for completed sexual assault among undergraduate females was 176 per 1,000 * On average, the rate of victimization for rape among undergraduate females was 54 per 1,000

Responsibilities

The Task Force was created to protect students from sexual assault, to help improve the safety of American college and university campuses, and to help American colleges and universities to "meet their obligations" and be in compliance with federal regulations in this area. By 2016, the Task Force, in collaboration with federal agencies, produced training, messaging and guidance materials "concerning sexual assault in educational spaces," which can be found in a public-facin
Resource Guide

Members

Obama specified in his official memorandum those people who are to be members of the Task Force. Those individuals include Joe Biden or his designee;

or her designee; the Attorney General; the Secretary of the Interior; the Secretary of Health and Human Services; the Secretary of Education; the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; the Director of the Domestic Policy Council; the Cabinet Secretary; and agency or office heads as may be designated by the co-chairs.

Joe Biden

Joe Biden's goal from the campaign is to prevent sexual assault. He also strives to create less discrepancies with sexual assault, calling for a future in which a victim of sexual assault does not need to question his or her doing. Biden issued federal guidelines while presenting a speech at the University of New Hampshire. He stated that, "No means no, if you're drunk or you're sober. No means no if you're in bed, in a dorm or on the street. No means no even if you said yes at first and you changed your mind. No means no." Biden has taken a stance on sexual assault, making speeches to students, asking them to stand against assault. Biden stated to the victim of sexual assault at Stanford University, "you did it... in the hope that your strength might prevent this crime from happening to someone else. Your bravery is breathtaking."

References

External links

Official memorandum establishing the Task Force

Valerie Jarrett's article regarding Task Force establishment
{{Authority control 2014 establishments in the United States United States Presidential Task Forces Sexual Assault Campus sexual assault Sex crimes in the United States Victims' rights Presidency of Barack Obama