As colleges continue to scramble under federal pressure to overhaul how they handle cases of sexual assault, the list of schools under investigation for botching cases continues to grow.
That's left some wondering if campuses will ever get it right, or if they might be better off leaving the job to others.
A growing number of campuses already have made the choice to do just that: Rather than try to train their provosts and professors to act like prosecutors, they're outsourcing the job to real ones instead.
Djuna Perkins is a former prosecutor who is now an investigator-for-hire focusing on sexual assault. Her office, just outside Boston, is lined with college pennants from a growing list of Massachusetts schools that are her clients: Amherst, Brandeis, Bentley, Harvard, Tufts, Williams, Emerson and more.
"The phone starts ringing, you know, the first day after Labor Day, and I sort of joke that I'm like legal 911," Perkins says. The schools are "stressed like you cannot believe," she says. They would rather have someone else handle the investigations, she adds, "because they, at a certain point, might feel a little bit out of their element."
[For more of this story, written by Tovia Smith, go to http://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/...vestigators-for-hire]
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