Teen Abstinence Promoter Leads Bid to Conduct County’s Title IX Gender Harassment Audit

A Scotts Valley nonprofit is set to tackle a $1 million Title IX investigation across Santa Clara County’s hundreds of K-12 and post-secondary schools, despite having neither college-level experience nor legal staff for the task.

Education, Training and Research Associates is the intended awardee of a contract to assess and codify how educators countywide comply with state and federal laws on sex- and gender-based harassment and abuse, according to documents obtained by San Jose Inside.

The decision will be final on June 10, if none of the other four bidding agencies protest the selection.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the audit in October 2020, after Title IX rollbacks essentially increased protections to accused abusers by raising the bar for evidence. The estimated 12- to 18-month audit will focus on seven different phases, including ease of access to information, prevention and education on campus safety.

But browsing ETR’s website only uncovers a “K12T9 Initiative,” excluding any post-secondary material, and a staff of primary researchers, developers and project coordinators. Additionally, alongside “safer sex” resources, the 40-year company distributes abstinence-based sexual health programs, which were included in Trump administration initiatives.

Michele Dauber, who works in the trenches of sexual misconduct as chair of the Enough is Enough Voter Project, thinks ETR’s public resume and catalog raise concerns, especially as headlines of major sexual assault accusations and scandals continue flowing from San Jose State, Santa Clara and Stanford universities.

“The county owes it to the survivors who campaigned relentlessly for this audit to select someone who is capable, experienced and ready to tackle a task of this complexity,” Dauber said. “Maybe [ETR is] completely qualified and they have done legal compliance audits of extremely wealthy, high-ranking institutions. If so, they should bring that forward now.”

The Fly is the valley’s longest running political column, written by Metro Silicon Valley staff, to provide a behind-the-scenes look at local politics. Fly accepts anonymous tips.

2 Comments

  1. It has long been the default for reporters to ask Michele Dauber how she feels about any sexual misconduct issue.
    This is very sad, because Dauber is not at all objective.
    In the Brock Turner case, Dauber told interviewers Turner had nearly killed Chanel Miller. This false claim was made to fuel outrage so her recall of Judge Persky would succeed. In fact, Miller was not injured at all. Dauber was completely aware of this while she was telling national media outlets precisely the opposite.
    During the Recall Persky campaign, Dauber presented two women from the movie, “The Hunting Ground” as “survivors” and had them speak on the issue of campus sexual assault – but one, Kamilah WIllingham, had not been victimized at all – the claim was her friend was, but not her – and had presented false evidence to the police, (gave them a condom saying it was used by the alleged rapist, when it had not) – and another (Sofia Karasek) had been given a back rub with her all her clothes on – the “assault” was the guy did not ask first. In addition to not being victims, the eternal grievance claim by Dauber, that sexual assault was not taken seriously by schools, was belied by the fact the man who accused of assaulting her friend was immediately suspended, for literally, years while his case played out, and the “massage without explicit permission” guy got forced into counseling and restrictions on his social life on campus. (Karasek was not impaired in any way during the massage, and did not object, in my opinion she wanted to be part of the #MeToo movement and had to find some kind of incident to claim “Survivor” status)
    Before she was misrepresenting the facts of the Brock Turner case, Dauber promoted, secretly, because it was probably against Stanford University’s policies, the complaint of Stanford Undergrad Leah Francis, who wanted her on and off boyfriend expelled for having sex with her – after she chased him down, went home with him, took off her clothes, and got into his bed and did not in any way indicate sex was unwanted – and, reportedly, went to brunch with him and his family afterwards – she decided it was rape about two weeks later, when he did not want to get back together.

    Dauber’s history of extreme bias is very extensive, and yet she is the go to interviewee. I believe most local reporters know about her personal tragic family history, from which her bias appears to arise, but that has been kept out of the media. Why?

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