Opinion ID: 2994082
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Title IX Liability

Text: 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.