Understanding Milton’s New Standalone Sexual Misconduct Policy
By NATASHA ROY ‘19
On Monday, October 15th, Upper School Principal David Ball announced to both students and parents Milton’s new sexual misconduct policy, the product of months of focused harassment-related work on campus. “Our primary goal with this policy was to ensure the safety of our current and future students” Mr. Ball said in an interview.
The idea for the policy came from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network organization, or RAINN, which “identified the value of crafting a standalone sexual misconduct policy,” said Mr. Ball. “In the Student Handbook for a number of years we’ve had a number of policies that outlined the school’s values, including prohibitions of sexual assault and harassment. Similarly, in the Faculty and Staff Handbook there have been clear policies. RAINN recommended that Milton create a policy that covered all members of the community, and it be identified separately as our Sexual Misconduct Policy. Now, when you go to the website, you can find our sexual misconduct policy without looking through the Handbook. That ensures an appropriate kind of consistency; all sections are guided by the same principles and definitions articulated in the community section.”
The administration and Board of Trustees decided to work with RAINN last year. “We believed that RAINN could support our institutional goals in a variety of ways,” explained Mr. Ball. Over the course of the 2017-18 academic year, the organization facilitated training with both adults and students and performed a thorough investigation of the school’s current practices regarding sexual misconduct. At the examination’s end, it provided the administration with a list of recommendations to address sexual misconduct. “When we received their recommendations late last spring, we examined all of them. When we began implementing them, we focussed first on the ones we could complete over the summer… As we revised our existing policies, we also recognized that the sexual misconduct response team belonged with the rest of the policy, so we combined those two recommendations in that way,” said Mr. Ball. When asked if RAINN made recommendations that we have yet to act on, he responded that there are currently ongoing efforts to re-evaluate existing sexual misconduct-related practices.
Over the summer, a lead consultant at RAINN worked closely with several Milton faculty members to design this new policy. The efforts were fronted by Mrs. O’Toole, Chief Human Resources Officer, the school’s primary liaison, Mr. Ball, Mr. Ruiz, the Dean of Students. Ms. Morin, Director of Counseling, also offered advice on the counseling elements of the policy. “What is in this revised policy represents both what we had been doing already and what RAINN recommends for a strong approach,” said Mr. Ball.
Among the chief differences between the new policy and earlier rules outlined in the Handbook is the Immunity clause, which offers immunity for offenses, like the consumption of drugs or alcohol, that a reporting student may have committed during the incident. The writers included this protection because they “recognized that there may be reasons why people choose not to come forward to share with us harms that have been done to them,” said Mr. Ball. “As a community that wants to respond firmly and clearly to those harmful actions and provide support to survivors, we needed to signal our priorities in formal policy.” Milton hopes this policy can eliminate some of the barriers that prevent cases of sexual harassment from coming to light. The school hopes too that the ”Sanctuary Policy makes clear our prioritization of our students’ safety,” said Mr. Ball. Because, however, Sanctuary can only be called during an unsafe moment, and not after, it would be insufficient in aiding survivors to come forward.
Administrators are committed to maintaining confidentiality while also notifying those who need to be notified, namely parents and, in some cases, external authorities. Mr. Ball said he “wanted to make sure that students knew that if we needed to report to external authorities, we will need to communicate that with parents. At the same time, we will work with students to discuss how best to make that communication.” The main objective is to “maximize confidentiality within some bounds,” and “not compelling people to share more than they want to”. In some circumstances, however, confidentially will necessarily have to be compromised. “We want people who are considering speaking to us about an experience they’ve had—or one other people have had—to have an understanding on the limits to confidentiality as well as our belief in confidentiality,” said Mr. Ball. “What we want to avoid is someone coming forward thinking something is confidential and then finding out it wasn’t.”
The school is still considering a process for students to sign a statement saying they’ve read the policy, as exists with the Student Handbook, in order to ensure the student body fully understands the policy. In the meantime, Mr. Ball’s aim, with the rest of the administration, is to “highlight sections in the student section that seemed different from the handbook, because some of the things I didn’t cover in detail were very close to existing policy, so presumably students would be familiar with them”.
Moving forward, Mr. Ball anticipates that this new policy will be examined and revised before the next academic year. “What seems firm for us, and this is at the heart of RAINN’s work, is that we remain victim standard and trauma informed,” he said, stressing an intention to “continue to examine the ways in which we educate members of the community about sexual misconduct.”
The full policy can be found at:
https://www.milton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Milton-SMP-Policy-2018-2019.pdf