Longhorns playing texas tech. Not sure what the score is. Fairly strong. We have at my alma mater against ole miss, not sure what the score was and baylor against tcus a great Football Games going on. We want to talk about the intersection of football, College Sports and Sexual Violence and Sexual Assault. I am from bartlett, texas, a huge football fan in a small rural town, a small football town, we went to three state the 90s so s in÷÷÷÷ football is ingrained not only in myself but the state of texas and beyond and graduated from clemson university, another huge college town. So you can imagine my cognitive dissonance every week during the fall, when i get excited about Football Games but at the same time being Deputy Director at Texas Association against Sexual Assault i know the reality of Sexual Assault on campuses and i know the reality and dynamics of college courts, young men and young women going to colleges and we owe a great deal of both Jessica Luther and daniel solomon for the work they have done in uncovering a lot of the stories at baylor and the work that went into this book, unsportsmanlike conduct College Football and the politics of rape. What we are going to do is i am going to have each of them introduce themselves. Jessica and dan will follow up with what they are working on and we will take a couple questions from you. We will start with rick. Good afternoon. I am rick gifford and i work alongside rose. I hail from san antonio and the work that we do is very specific to being a voice for survivors in our state and working directly with the over 85 Sexual Assault programs that make up the population and geography so÷ i am excited to be here and looking forward to hearing what jessica and dan have to say. I am a reporter with Texas Monthly. I have been working with jessica for the past 14 months or so and working on that. The story that never ends. I am the author of unsportsmanlike conduct College Football and the politics of rape and Texas Monthly last august in 2015, opening the baylor story. Hi, yall. Are we okay . Am going to keep talking. We are all awake now. So i want to talk a little bit about the book at the texas book festival. I went to Florida State. I was born in 2 Florida State football fandom. My mom and dad and i watched a lot of games, i only applied to one school. I was going to go to Florida State. I was on crutches, the one thing the doctor said was dont go to the Football Game so of course i was like 20 and i went to the ballgame. People ask me a lot where the book came from. ÷÷ it really came out of my fandom÷ and i care about the issue of Sexual Violence. This is a pretty wellknown story but in november 2013 the quarterback at Florida State, it came out he had been under investigation for Sexual Assault for 11 months and at that point the Tallahassee Police department had not done anything with the case. Florida state had not been good at football for a few years. It was exciting, we had a team, to line, amazing quarterback, heisman chatter by november, chatter that we were maybe good enough to go to the national championship, it became a national story, the Police Department forwarded the case, 11 months later we waited to find out if he would be charged and he was not. At that point i was following everything because i was a fan, i did not like how we covered this topic and i started to intervene. ÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ it is important for me to say there are studies that suggest athletes commit more violence than other students. I dont like to talk about it like that and perpetrators of violence, we talk about it more when it involves ballplayers or basketball players, there is intense fandom around College Sports. When you report on any university you learn quickly how intense that fandom is. People took care of a lot, when a player is in trouble they might impact the ability to win games so we end up talking about it a lot. That is my intervention was i want to intervene where we are talking about it so we write about firstaid and that is a school i have written the most ÷ about, and i was asked to write this book and was nervous about doing it, that people would be mad, more than that, 21 2 years ago i thought no one will care about this when the book comes out. I am heartened to be sitting here, that the texas book festival would have me and the fact that you are here to talk about this, people show up and have this conversation over and over again, that gives me hope. The book itself is set up to look at this as a systemic issue rather than individual. That is how we consume it. One player, one coach, one university. Easy to see those things as isolated. Obviously that work is important and i see that too, it was great or me to look at this on a÷÷÷÷÷ systemic level and talk about the ways this repeats over and over again. Division one, division 3, money does it matter for division i football. And what coaches say or they do or do not do, how the media doesnt uncover it, the words we use, the National Fleet of Athletic Association is with service, to push it on anyone they can. I really do try i argue strongly in the book this is a within the sport ÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ but especially rose can talk about this is a systemic issue outside football. We can talk about that if. I also in the book it was a hard book to write, the topic is hard to write on. It is bad. A lot of time it is really bad. It is important to me that the end of the book the about solutions, possible changes we could make. A third of the book, there are 13 chapters where i suggest things that could be better, that we could do better in order to make the sport better, talk about this issue better, things like i start that whole section by talking about education. Im a huge proponent of prevention. We have been doing a lot of punitive stuff that clearly hasnt worked very well. I start out, if you make it 5 yous in, i will have gotten÷ . ÷÷ to read about consent but stuff like we need to hire more women everywhere but specifically within college work administration, put them in locker rooms, a lot more than they are and a year and a half ago, the top of the system, i try very hard to focus, an individual case, what happened to the one, this perpetually over and over again, over and over again, and argue those guys should be held accountable. And at the university. It is very complicated. Book does and e÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ will pass the football. And specifically highlights a lot of stuff we talk about in the book. In august of last year, there is a baylor football player, and no one had written about that dont seem like there is anything there. He google toed to him and tried to find information and we couldnt find anything which he state, he wasnt÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ practicing, as recently as june, expect him back on the field, personal issues but nothing about a trial or Sexual Assault. And questioning it, i found a copy of the docket from Clinton County that day and saw a trial about to happen so we decided to go to waco and start looking to what was going on and what we found were a lot the story hadnt made it into the press. His name hadnt been ported. The Court Reporters missed it and we started looking into it. We wrote about that and the narrative. ÷÷÷÷÷ i remember google alerts and twitter alerts, and for weeks we were reporting the story nothing came up because no one knew who he was and he published and was convicted after we published our story and suddenly those hashtags and google alerts were on fire and i would turn on espn, it was very strange because until that point we were the only ones who knew it. Reporting about that has been interesting. This case was the flash point, in college, a lot of that because we too were convicted. Is t harder to say who÷÷÷÷÷÷ telling the truth. That is a big part of how baylor ended up being at the forefront of this story. Over the past 14 months, we learned there were many other players, and investigation, schools that have these accusations of Sexual Assault to and to investigate them÷÷÷÷ they found a pattern of coaches handling things internally that should have been handled by different entities and this kept going on. Right now baylor is very much at a flash point where there are a lot of decisions to make. They fired our head coach of the time and the athletic director, ken starr, the president , was demoted, they did an unconscious uncoupling of that relationship. Applause]÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ but as this has gone on, there are elements at baylor that want them back and there is what looks to be a civil war between forces at the schools that move past this and forced the school to feel their glory days were tight, the Football Program being what it was, there are a lot of questions. As many answers as we havent as much we learned there are many more questions than answers in terms of what it looks like when a program decides to clean itself up. Is it possible to clean it up . Is it about football or the culture of the school . The leadership of the school . Who is leadership . Is it the president , the coach or the people who work under them to handle daytoday positions, and other questions are hard to answer but things we try to learn after you get past day one of the story, this is days one through 400. I want to add two things about baylor. One is through the unfolding of÷ august y we held in÷÷ there is a huge brouhaha, because of our reporting there was a low, early in the year a survivor wrote a blog post about her experience at baylor and it went viral and is normal response a lot of survivors started to come forward that we have been watching the president ial election, the normal things that happened when a survivor, the survivors who come forward to tell their stories, there are huge reasons these things get out there and it is hard to do that, to be in the public in that way. Very kind to survivors. Really pushed everything so whe÷ hamilton released the report there was yet again a wave of news around everything and i cant remember what else i was going to say. One of the things about Pepper Hamilton, we are here to talk about politics of all, we are in texas, but one of the things about Pepper Hamilton is very clear, there was definitely failure in the Athletic Department and they are clear o÷ it was an institutional failure. This was not just Football Players doing violence on campus. Not just the victims of Football Players when they went to report. And an issue for all kinds of students. All kinds of perpetrators of students as well. It was important and it was also football. I want to acknowledge the work i mentioned earlier of dan and jessica because some things we do against Sexual Assault, we are constantly challenging reporters, challenging the media, the angle in which they report these stories, questions they ask, after reading this book and the story they put together, we were jumping for joy in our office because of the way it was handled and you write ÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ to handle those stories but what i wanted to say is we are lucky, everyone knows that, a set of statistics in regards to Sexual Assault would normally be for this, there were natural stats but with the institute of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault out of the social work in austin what they found is one in 5 texas men and two in five texas women have experienced Sexual Assault at some point in their lifetime. That equates to 6. 3 million texans. Also what they found is over 90 did not report to Law Enforcement. My question for the panel is being the College Campuses are microcosm of our society is there anything you saw with your work, and what actions or lack thereof of Law Enforcement contributed to the culture of silence around these cases . A good question. ÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ anytime you look at these institutions you will find people are nervous to go to Law Enforcement. You think about it, it is difficult to report this kind of crime. Theres a lot of trauma involved and you are telling your story over and over again. You are often met with someone who is skeptical of what you are saying and they are questioning whether you are lying, the kind of thing you are trying to report. For the person who has been accused, and you can help it. You tell your story over and we again, we as a society÷÷÷÷÷ enjoy taking stories apart, you have the story 7 times, change the details three times, and Law Enforcement participates, they do the same work, people get nervous about that. One of the things the institute÷ doing is creating a blueprint, you can download, obama mentioned it before, Health Campus police especially first responders, most of the time survivors, i am sure rick can speak to this, want someone compassionate to listen to them and hear what they have to say and they often feel they are met with indifference, we dont have anything specific but this is a common theme you hear about. This is also true with reporting to the institution at College Universities as well. The fear of indifference and picking apart every little thing they say about this violent happened. T ÷÷÷÷÷÷ one of the issues, investigators are trained to be skeptical. That is part of being an investigator, there is not necessarily aware of the way that trauma informs memory. Investigators who were skeptical of people who suffered trauma and self reinforces the idea they will not be believed because they wont tell their story that doesnt involve direct firsthand trauma. That is an important part of why investigators do a bad job ÷÷÷÷÷ because they dont have the training necessary, to hear the same story different ways and assume it was true but the research and science indicate that is what it is. One of the reasons rose and i are here is to talk about advocacy perspective, Texas Association against Sexual Assault, we didnt tell you where we are. We are in austin where the state coalition, every state in the country have a coalition like us, we work specifically to ensure no survivor gets left behind and the system and programs and folks we work with÷ across the state have the capacity to respond when a survivor makes an outcry, and this isnt a normal everyday conversation, we recognize that. We went our community to be involved in talking about these issues without it being so scary, that being said, i want to acknowledge there may be some survivors sitting among us, and this might be triggering for you, the conversation might bring up stuff you never told anyone. Please know that you are ÷÷÷÷ supportive, and need to take care of yourself and rose and myself, here for you after if you want to focus on anything at all. I want to acknowledge the fact that some of us have been through this. What i do know is almost every single one of us no one person in our lives if it is not us has been through this as well so this hits close to home. ÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ on the recording sided comes from the community perspective, one thing i found interesting, working on Sexual Assault program, a lot of College Students were getting counseling and Case Management or calling hotlines and we looked at the stats and reports on campus by going to the campus website and finding how many Sexual Assaults were reported and we were finding 0. We were finding one. We were finding none. And that was a huge disparity and it made us step back and say why . What is happening . Why are survivors not comfortable . Are they afraid . To investigate, we have to meet the campuses where they were and ask what we can do to help, how can we increase capacity, what can we do to change things, your climate to wear students, if something happened to them feel supported and hopefully those reports will go up. It is unfortunate they will go up but they will. When you look at it from the good side the campus is doing its job and the community is the one holding the campus accountable as well. Another question i would like to hear each of your responses to. We will start with you. How do you respond to College Coaches or the phantom as jessica mentions, when we have transfer athletes or whatever that have allegations and responses, if there is no criminal conviction there is nothing to worry about. What is your response to that . That is a tough one because i think as society in general, we may not be trained or understand how complex these issues are, so for a lot of what we found comfort and solace in knowing whether this person was found guilty or not guilty. If they were found guilty there÷ re people feel that is an÷÷÷÷÷÷ incredible injustice and other people feel okay, we got justice, and that is how this person