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University of Colorado at Boulder Faces Clery Act Violation Complaint from Sexual Assault Victim

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A new Clery complaint has been filed against the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder for not properly reporting its crimes and allowing students guilty of sex crimes onto campus, the Huffington Post reported.

The complaint alleged CU-Boulder violated the Clery Act, which states schools must report timely and accurately crimes committed on campus to the proper authorities. Several institutions of higher education are currently under investigation or have been for such violations.

Sarah Gilchriese is one of two students who filed the complaint against CU-Boulder Tuesday. She said her assailant was allowed on campus for a month after being found guilty of "nonconsensual sexual intercourse" and was also allowed to continue participating in his university club sport.

The complaint also alleges that the school did not alert any students of his crime. Gilchriese said he was allowed to travel with the team and stay in a hotel with people who did not know what he had been found guilty of.

"They're supposed to prevent similar occurrences from happening, so people should've been able to know," Gilchriese said.

CU-Boulder spokesman Bronson R. Hilliard responded by saying the school will be diligent in investigating an alleged Clery violation. He could not comment on specifics of the complaint, however.

"We will always consider any complaint that comes to the university from students who believe that we have not been in compliance with Clery regarding any specific incident," Hilliard said.

Gilchriese said students are given email notifications when a crime is reported to authorities under the Clery Act. She said those notifications come in about two weeks after a crime is reported to the campus police and she wants the school to be quicker.

The other complainant, who wished to remain anonymous, said her claim was not listed in CU-Boulder's Clery Report. Under "forcible fondling," where the incident should have been listed, there is nothing.

The U.S. Department of Education's (ED) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) launched an investigation in June based on a Title IX complaint filed by Gilchriese in May. In that complaint, she said the school took four weeks to remove her assailant from campus, but in that timeframe, he approached her multiple times despite an order not to.

"Overall, the school seems to really not get the message," Gilchriese said. "While they tell us there was a sexual assault on campus, there's no education piece they're giving us. We have to put the pressure on them even more before they're actually going to respond."

OCR seems to be spread thin, with ongoing or recent investigations at schools such USC, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, Swarthmore College, Yale University and others.

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