This year students may have heard the term mandatory reporter during orientation, at residence hall meetings or in the classroom. The faculty and staff, including resident assistants, are mandatory reporters. This means that if a student confides about any kind of harassment perpetrated by a member of the St. Edward’s community, it is the responsibility of the mandatory reporter to breech any form of confidentiality and report to St. Edward’s University’s Title IX Coordinator, Lisa Kirkpatrick, or one of the other Title IX deputies. Health care providers, counselors and Catholic priests are the only St. Edward’s staff exempt from this rule.

Although administrators have informed faculty and staff through training of the updates in the Title IX guidelines, not all students have been presented with the new information.

“I actually didn’t even know that this was happening,” Taylor Johnson, a junior at St. Edward’s University, said. “I definitely get the why behind it, but I’m a little creeped out that students might not have any idea that this change is happening and may expect confidentiality, especially from professors considering how close-knit the St. Edward’s community is.”

Title IX is a part of the Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX provides protections for people within the education system. The requirement of mandatory reporting is part of the Title IX guidelines, which are constantly updated, reinterpreted and clarified.

“It’s not a change in the law, it’s…guidelines…that provide more detail and guidance to institutions about what they should be doing,” Kirkpatrick said.

The change of guidelines was also influenced by recent legislation, according to Kirkpatrick. President Barack Obama resigned and reauthorized a strengthened Violence Against Woman Act on March 7, 2013. This act was originally written in 1994 by current Vice President, Joe Biden, at that time a senator representing Delaware. Former president Bill Clinton passed the original bill.

The act was continually renewed until 2012 when procedural disagreements about the updated content that offered protections for different sexual orientations, Native Americans and non-documented immigrants were rejected. The 2013 reauthorization included these protections along with others.

The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act is a provision within the larger act that requires universities to report acts of domestic violence, dating violence and stalking in each university’s annual crime report.

The only St. Edward’s University employees who are not mandatory reporters are the health care providers and counselors available at the Health and Counseling Center. Health care providers and counselors may only breech confidentiality in certain circumstances. These circumstances include if the student is under the age of 18, or if the patient is thought to be a danger to him or herself or others around them.

Interim Director of the Health and Counseling Center, Elizabeth Charrier, said that even though health care providers and counselors do not fall under the umbrella of mandatory reporters, they still have a responsibility to meet their patients’ needs.

 “We will always make survivors aware of their resources and rights to report to both the university Title IX investigator and university or local law enforcement,” Charrier said.