Oh yes: Not just Obama, but his VP Joe Biden, who in a recent interview on NPR about rapes on college campuses, said plainly:
Look, folks, rape is rape is rape.
Among the points made by the administration, are:
— When a woman brings a complaint that she was a victim of assault, a school cannot punish her for using alcohol or drugs. In most allegations of sexual assault, alcohol is involved. Laws in every state say when a woman is drunk to the point of passing out, she can’t give consent. But some women have complained that when they went to school administrators to say they’d been sexually assaulted, they ended up getting punished for breaking school rules on drinking or using drugs.
— Schools must fully inform a person who brings a complaint of her or his (men are victims in about 6 percent of assault cases, according to federal officials) rights to an investigation and then they must be told the outcome of the investigation. Some schools thought they could not tell the victim the result of an investigation because it would violate the privacy of the alleged perpetrator.
— Even if a student is said to have assaulted another student in off-campus housing, the school must investigate.
— Schools must investigate in a timely manner. Some schools told women they could not get involved until after local police completed a criminal investigation. That often left a woman on campus — and even in the same dormitory or classrooms — with the man she said had assaulted her.
I would like to see this same points used to investigate accounts of hate crimes, too.