The White House Removed an Important Sexual Assault Report From Its Website On The DL

The White House has discreetly removed an important sexual assault prevention report produced during the Obama administration from its website.

The removal came to light when KnowYourIX founder and civil rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky tweeted that the report, “Rape And Sexual Assault: Renewed Call To Action,” was missing from the White House’s website on Wednesday morning, The Huffington Post reports.

“I went looking for it because I’m working on briefing for a client who’s a survivor and was looking for some literature about the impact of sexual violence and that’s been a really helpful resource for that kind of research," Brodsky told HuffPost. "But it was no longer on the White House website. It’s not anywhere on the White House website."

According to Bustle, the report was created in 2014 by the Council on Women and Girls, along with the help of former Vice President Joe Biden, and is a collection of important information and data regarding sexual assault, as well as how criminal justice system and college campuses can better combat sexual assault issues.

“The report is titled ‘A Renewed Call To Action’ and taking it down is really a discouragement from action. That’s particularly troublesome when we know that the administration is actively considering undermining important policies for survivors like those reaffirmed by the Obama administration regarding Title IX,” Brodsky told HuffPost. KnowYourIX has since added the report to its own website.

Brodsky told HuffPost that the removal of the report reminded her of another instance where the White House removed climate change information from its website, just days after President Trump took office.

“I think one of the reasons that that example comes to mind is because this is a report of facts and research,” Brodsky said. “This is a summary of really important and, in some cases, government-funded work that was done to understand the causes and effects of sexual and gender violence. What does it mean that the Trump administration doesn’t want the public to have that information?”

It has since been speculated that the removal of the sexual assault report was due to the Trump administration’s handling of sexual assault and Title IX issues. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was looking to roll back Title IX guidelines and met with so-called Men's Rights Activists back in February, and was met with great criticism. The removal of the report also follows that recent inaction and reported "evaluation"by the Trump administration of the Council on Women and Girls — the very council that authored the recently removed report.