Andrea Pino

Last updated
Andrea Pino
Born
Andrea Lynn Pino

(1992-02-15) 15 February 1992 (age 32)
Education University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Title Civil rights activist

Andrea Lynn Pino (born February 15, 1992)[ citation needed ] is an American women's rights and civil rights activist, author, and a public scholar on issues of global gender based violence, media framing of violence, gender and sexuality, and narratives of survivorhood. She is the queer daughter of Cuban refugees and has stated that she is a survivor of sexual assault. [1]

Contents

As a student, Pino was one of the primary writers [2] and one of five complainants in the 2013 Title IX and Clery Act complaints against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [3] Along with Annie E. Clark, Sophie Karasek, Kamilah Willingham, Wagatwe Wanjuki, and Caroline Heldman, she became a national leader in filing this sort of complaint, advising sexual assault victims at universities across the United States. [4] Pino is a primary subject in the 2015 documentary film The Hunting Ground , directed by Kirby Dick and produced by Amy Ziering [5] and is also the author of “We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out". [6] Pino has since been dogged by claims from fellow activists in the field and journalists [7] that there is little truth behind the stories she told to gain her national reputation, some going as far as to call it an elaborate “web of lies.” [8]

Early life

Pino was raised in Miami, Florida, United States, in a family of Cuban descent. She attended International Studies Charter High School.

Education

Pino attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; she was the first in her family to go to college. [9] She has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.

She has stated that she was raped twice while in college. The first incident occurred several weeks into her freshman year, when she was in a fraternity member's room and he gave her a drugged drink. According to her, she fell unconscious, and only woke up the next morning, in her own dorm room, with scratches and bruises, with a note attached to her that said "We found you by the road". She did not report the incident. [10]

Her second rape occurred, she says, in March 2012, during her sophomore year, when an unknown male student whom she had just met brought her into a bathroom and forcibly raped her; she emerged, bloodied, and ran back to her room, dripping blood the whole way; she went to sleep, and woke up in a pool of her own blood. [10]

The veracity of Pino's accounts of her rapes has been questioned by journalist Cathy Young, as well as by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor in their 2017 book The Campus Rape Frenzy. [7] Young also wrote that, after the first time she questioned Pino's story in print, she was contacted by another female anti-rape activist, who did not want to be named, who told Young that she and some other activists were "frustrated" by what she called Pino's "web of lies". [7]

Activism

Title IX and sexual assault activism

According to Pino, her activism was driven by her experiences with sexual assault and harassment at the University of North Carolina.

After telling administrators that she was raped, Pino claimed that she had been unsupported by the university administration and policies that purported to protect her and other students reporting sexual violence. She alleged that an administrator told her that her problem was that she was "just lazy." [10]

According to Pino, when she began to communicate to the UNC administration her desire to receive support for her assault and for the assaults of students who approached her for help, UNC administration denied that their policies were in non-compliance. In response, Pino approached UNC alumna Annie E. Clark, who also had reported being mistreated. The two began to research Title IX, a federal legislation which grants students the right to an education without sex discrimination, as well as the Clery Act, which grants protections for sexual assault victims on college campuses. [11]

Their research yielded a strategy originally proposed by feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon in the 1970s. She argued for using the threat of withdrawing federal funding as a means to force universities to effect changes in sexual assault policies. [4]

In January 2013, Pino and Clark, together with several other UNC students and one former administrator, filed a 34-page complaint against the university with the United States Department of Education's OCR. [4] After the women filed the complaint, the OCR and the Clery Compliance Division both launched investigations into how the university was handling sexual assault and crime on campus. [12] [13]

Following the media coverage of the UNC complaint, Pino and Clark connected with sexual assault survivors from institutions across the country and began assisting them in filing Title IX and Clery Act complaints against their institutions. As a result, students have successfully filed complaints against Swarthmore College, Occidental College, the University of California, Berkeley, Dartmouth College, The University of Southern California, and Columbia University, among others. [14]

Clark and Pino's activism are the subject of a 2015 documentary film, The Hunting Ground [15] which featured a song by Lady Gaga titled “Til it Happens to You”. Gaga’s song was nominated for Best Original Song at the 88th Academy Awards and performed it after an introduction by Joe Biden, then Vice President of the United States. During the live performance Pino and 51 other survivors appeared on stage. [16]

Pino’s work has been featured in multiple books [17] [18] and profiled in The New York Times, [19] Vogue, [4] and Cosmopolitan Magazine. [20] She has also appeared on PBS Newshour, [21] RealTime with Bill Maher, [22] AlJazeera, [23] and Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC [24] and Pino has spoken for herself in blogs for the Huffington Post. [25] In 2013, she became the first student featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Influence List, [26] was listed on The Huffington Post’s most influential forces in higher education list, [27] and in 2015 Planned Parenthood awarded her their “Care. No Matter What.” Award. [28]

Pino has also helped co-write and introduce the Campus Accountability and Safety Act [29] with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand [30] and advised the White House Task Force To Protect Students from Sexual Assault.

Ultimately in 2018, after a five-year federal investigation into its policies and procedures governing sexual assault and harassment cases and as a result of the work of Pino and others, UNC-Chapel Hill was found in violation Title IX. [31] [32]

In 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill was also found in violation of the Clery Act, which resulted in a  $1.5 million fine in a settlement with the U.S. Department of Education after violating federal campus safety law for years. [33] The review, which the university released in November 2019, found that “UNC misrepresented and under-reported campus crime statistics, including sexual assault, failed to properly alert the campus community to serious crimes and did not adequately operate its system of ensuring campus safety.” [34] The results of the review became public weeks after an alarming campus sexual assault survey that revealed nearly half of young women in their fourth year or higher at UNC reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual touching or penetration during college. [35]

Queer activism

Pino serves on the Board of Directors for Outwords [36] and is currently serving as an Impact Producer for the film, Ahead of the Curve. [37] She recently spoke at Sundance Film Festival on a panel for the film My Name is Pauli Murray and Ahead of the Curve. [38] Pino was awarded the 40 under 40: Queer Women of Washington from The Washington Blade in 2019.

Career

Since 2013, Pino has predominantly worked at non-profits in communications and policy at End Rape on Campus, [39] the National Center for Lesbian Rights, [40] and most recently at the Community Justice Action Fund. [41]

End Rape on Campus

In 2013, Pino and Clark co-founded End Rape on Campus (EROC), an advocacy group for survivors working to end sexual violence on campuses around the country. [4] EROC helps people who have been sexually assaulted with direct resources, with pro bono therapists and attorneys, and it provides assistance with filing complaints. [42] During her tenure at End Rape on Campus, Pino was the Director of Policy and Support as well as co-founder. [43] [ failed verification ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Title IX</span> United States federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally-funded education programs

Title IX is the most commonly used name for the landmark federal civil rights law in the United States that was enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government. This is Public Law No. 92‑318, 86 Stat. 235, codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clery Act</span> 1990 US federal law

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act or Clery Act, signed in 1990, is a federal statute codified at 20 U.S.C. § 1092(f), with implementing regulations in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations at 34 CFR 668.46.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is a sub-agency of the U.S. Department of Education that is primarily focused on enforcing civil rights laws prohibiting schools from engaging in discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, or membership in patriotic youth organizations.

Campus sexual assault is the sexual assault, including rape, of a student while attending an institution of higher learning, such as a college or university. The victims of such assaults are more likely to be female, but any gender can be victimized. Estimates of sexual assault, which vary based on definitions and methodology, generally find that somewhere between 19 and 27% of college women and 6–8% of college men are sexually assaulted during their time in college.

Annie Elizabeth Clark is a women's rights and civil rights activist in the United States. She was one of the lead complainants of the 2013 Title IX and Clery Act charges lodged against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, claiming that the institution violated the law by the way they handled sexual assault complaints. Clark and Andrea Pino, then a fellow UNC student and also a victim of sexual assault, launched a nationwide campaign to use Title IX complaints to force U.S. universities to address sexual assault and related problems more aggressively. Clark is co-founder with Pino of End Rape on Campus, an advocacy group for victims of campus sexual assault.

Angie Epifano, a former student at Amherst College, gained widespread media attention and millions of page views after she wrote an essay on her personal experience of sexual assault that was published in the Amherst student newspaper, The Amherst Student. After the publication of her essay, Amherst College began investigating its sexual assault procedures, and women from other college campuses in the United States came forward to file federal complaints under Title IX and to form groups to reduce sexual assault on college campuses.

Visible Music College is a private Christian music school in Memphis, Tennessee. It opened in 2000. Visible Music College is authorized for operation as a post-secondary educational institution by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, offering three-year Bachelor's degrees, two-year Master's degrees, and a one-year certificate program. It is accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS).

The Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) was a bill introduced in the 114th United States Congress with the goal of reducing sexual violence on college and university campuses. First introduced in 2014, a revised bill was introduced in February 2015 by Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri with nine bi-partisan cosponsors. 43 cosponsors eventually signed on. The bill died in committee at the end of the session without reaching a floor vote in either house.

In April 2013, Occidental College was one of the first in a series of US higher education institutions to be accused of failing to take campus sex crimes seriously by improperly reporting and adjudicating sexual assaults and covering up rapes. Occidental students and faculty filed two federal complaints against the College, alleging violations of Title IX of the US Education Amendments of 1972 and the Clery Act.

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