Opinion ID: 2994082
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the title ix issue

Text: In reviewing a grant of dismissal pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, this Court must take as true all factual allegations in the plaintiff’s pleadings and draw all reasonable inferences in her favor. Antonelli v. Sheahan, 81 F.3d 1422, 1427 (7th Cir. 1995). Such a motion may be granted only if it appears beyond a doubt from the pleadings that the plaintiff is unable to prove any set of facts that would entitle her to relief. Moss v. Healthcare Compare Corp., 75 F.3d 276, 279 (7th Cir. 1996). We review the district court’s grant of a motion to dismiss de novo. Sidney S. Arst Co. v. Pipefitters Welfare Educ. Fund, 25 F.3d 417, 419 (7th Cir. 1994).
Title IX provides that [n]o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. 20 U.S.C. sec. 1681. As noted in Part I above, the Civil Rights Remedies Equalization Act, 42 U.S.C. sec. 2000d-7(a)(1), expressly made the States subject to suits to enforce the guarantees of Title IX. It is well settled that sexual harassment of a student in a federally funded educational program or activity, if it is perpetrated by a teacher or other employee of the funding recipient, can render the recipient liable for damages under Title IX. See Franklin v. Gwinnett County Pub. Schs., 503 U.S. 60, 63-64, 76; Smith v. Metropolitan Sch. Dist. Perry Township, 128 F.3d 1014, 1021 (7th Cir. 1997). What is less clear, and what is before this Court today, is whether a school (or other educational fund recipient) can be liable for failing to take prompt, appropriate action to remedy known sexual harassment of one student by other students. Three courts of appeals have considered the question, with two finding no liability, see Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Educ., 120 F.3d 1390 (11th Cir. 1997) (en banc); Rowinsky v. Bryan Indep. Sch. Dist., 80 F.3d 1006 (5th Cir. 1996), certiorari denied, 117 S. Ct. 165, and one finding such liability if the school knew or should have known that the harassment was occurring, see Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Inst. & State Univ., 132 F.3d 949 (4th Cir. 1997). Further, a number of district courts have found such liability to exist under Title IX. See, e.g., Doe v. Londonderry Sch. Dist., 970 F. Supp. 64, 74 (D.N.H. 1997); Nicole M. v. Martinez Unified Sch. Dist., 964 F. Supp. 1369, 1377 (N.D. Cal. 1997); Bruneau v. South Kortright Cent. Sch. Dist., 935 F. Supp. 162, 173 (N.D.N.Y. 1996); Wright v. Mason City Community Sch. Dist., 940 F. Supp. 1412, 1419-1420 (N.D. Iowa 1996); Bosley v. Kearney R-1 Sch. Dist., 904 F. Supp. 1006, 1023 (W.D. Mo. 1995). The district court in the present case, ruling without consideration of any court of appeals decisions on the issue,/7 held that the University could be liable for failing to take action to address Doe’s harassment, but only if Doe alleged (as the court believed she had not done) that school and University officials’ failure to respond resulted from the University’s sexual discrimination against her. In other words, the court held that the University’s allegedly intentional failure to act in the face of knowledge of the sexual harassment was not sufficient to sustain Title IX liability; in the court’s view, Doe needed to allege that the failure arose out of an intent by the University to discriminate on the basis of sex. For reasons set forth below, this Court holds that a Title IX fund recipient may be held liable for its failure to take prompt, appropriate action in response to student-on-student sexual harassment that takes place while the students are involved in school activities or otherwise under the supervision of school employees, provided the recipient’s responsible officials actually knew that the harassment was taking place. We reject the district court’s further requirement that plaintiffs in such cases plead or prove that the recipient, or any of its officials, failed to respond as a result of sexually discriminatory intent. The failure promptly to take appropriate steps in response to known sexual harassment is itself intentional discrimination on the basis of sex, and so, once a plaintiff has alleged such failure, she has alleged the sort of intentional discrimination against which Title IX protects.
Because today’s holding is inconsistent with the decisions of two of the three other courts of appeals that have directly addressed the issue, it is appropriate that this Court should explain the grounds for its disagreement with those decisions. The Fifth Circuit in Rowinsky, 80 F.3d at 1006, held that a school’s alleged failure to respond sufficiently to sexual harassment of a student by other students could not incur liability under Title IX. The court considered the pertinent question to be whether the school could be held liable for the acts of third persons (the harassing students) who were not its agents. See id. at 1011 (noting that when a student is the harasser, a theory of respondeat superior has no precedential or logical support); id. at 1012 (stating that Title IX’s language does not support an inference that the statute applies to the conduct of third parties and noting factors that weigh in favor of imposing liability only for the acts of grant recipients). As a result of this analysis, the Rowinsky court concluded that the only way in which the plaintiff could state a cause of action under Title IX based on sexual harassment by other students would be by showing that the school district responded to sexual harassment claims differently based on sex by, for instance, treat[ing] sexual harassment of boys more seriously than sexual harassment of girls. Id. at 1016. Such a showing, the court believed, would be sufficient to show that the school itself discriminated on the basis of sex in its response to the complaints. With respect, the Fifth Circuit’s analysis fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the claim that plaintiffs in this kind of case advance. See Doe v. Petaluma City Sch. Dist. (Petaluma II), 949 F. Supp. 1415, 1421 (N.D. Cal. 1996). Jane Doe does not ask that the defendant be held liable for the acts of the harassing students; rather, she asks that it be held liable for its own actions and inaction in the face of its knowledge that the harassment was occurring. Were Doe in fact requesting that the harassing students’ actions be imputed to the University under agency principles, then her claim would be properly dismissed. See Smith, 128 F.3d at 1034 (Agency principles . . . cannot impute discriminatory conduct of an employee to the ’program or activity’ under Title IX.). Instead, Doe alleges that responsible school and University officials knew of the harassment and failed to take measures to address it. Thus, [the alleged] institutional liability rest[s] on the institution’s actions rather than those of the harassers. Id. at 1022 (discussing Franklin, 503 U.S at 60). The Fifth Circuit’s agency-based analysis, therefore, does not resolve the issue. Moreover, the Rowinsky court’s demand that a plaintiff such as Jane Doe, in order to state a Title IX cause of action, allege and show that the school reacted differently to sexual harassment claims made by girls and boys misunderstands sexual harassment itself. This Court has noted in the Title VII context that the arguments underpinning the Rowinsky requirement interpret sex discrimination in too literal a fashion. McDonnell v. Cisneros, 84 F.3d 256, 260 (7th Cir. 1996). As we recognized in that case, occasional exceptions do not alter the rule that sexual harassment is an evil that affects mostly women and girls. For this reason, it must be exceedingly rare that a school receives any complaints of sexual harassment from its male students. The Fifth Circuit’s rule would leave schools completely free to ignore the more frequent complaints of sexual harassment from girls, while imposing only the minimal cost that such schools would be required likewise to ignore any complaints they might receive from their male students. See Petaluma II, 949 F. Supp. at 1421.