As part of our ongoing ten-month project to expand our Title IX Lawsuits Database in some meaningful way each month, for February we’ve expanded the scope of lawsuits covered in our database. This change has been a long time coming and encouraged by user feedback.

Since 2013, we’ve focused on tracking lawsuits filed by respondents in school grievance processes who were accused of sexual assault specifically. While this has been helpful to many database users, much Title IX-related data had also been left on the table. We will now be tracking lawsuits by respondents who have been accused of other Title IX-related offenses such as:

• Dating violence. In addition to non-sexual violence, this also includes other offenses such as the forced restraint of victims, threats of violence, and attempts of violence.
• Sexual exploitation. This encompasses acts like voyeurism (including inviting acquaintances to observe sexual activity without the sexual partner’s knowledge or consent) and recording sexual activity without consent.
• Stalking, including cyberstalking.
• Sexual harassment. Many university policies broadly define sexual harassment, such as Carnegie Mellon University’s statement that “Sexual harassment includes “Sexual Assault” and any other forms of sexual violence…. With this term we are more narrowly referring to hostile environment / quid pro quo scenarios, however.

We have received requests over the years to include these other types of lawsuits, sometimes by individuals who have sent us legal files which we have saved. We have recently added many lawsuits in the four new categories.

In general, our process is to start implementing monthly expansions 45-60 days prior to announcing them, so you may have seen us adding lawsuits from these four categories as far back as mid-January.

The Scopes Field

Visiting the database, you will see that a new field called “Scope” has been added to every lawsuit record entry. Each lawsuit is now tagged with one of the four scopes. Our search engines have been modified to include the new field. We’ve made a few other, minor changes as well:

• We had to remove the Lawsuit Summary field from the main spreadsheet view due to how much space it was taking up, which also complicated viewing the database on certain devices. The Summary data is still viewable in each lawsuit’s Detail page, however. We are considering adding a toggleable widescreen preference for users who prefer to see as much data as possible in one screen.
• We modified the Changelog to now show the scope of lawsuits added or updated.
• We’ve updated the Guide for new and returning users to see what has been added.

This has been our third monthly expansion/upgrade, which we usually release around the third week each month (click these links to see our January 2019 / December 2018 implementations). We have at least seven more planned and are considering more.

Thank you for reading. If you’re already signed up for our Title IX Lawsuits Database, we hope you like the constant trickle of expansions and new features in addition to the regular updating of raw data. If you aren’t signed up, we welcome you to do so.

Thank you,

The Title IX for All team