Every parent sending a child off to college wants to know that they’re going to be safe as they pursue their education. Unfortunately, sexual assault continues to plague most campuses.

Some victims file complaints with their schools’ Title IX offices -- either instead of or in addition to pursuing criminal charges -- but what happens then? If you haven’t been personally involved in a Title IX investigation and hearing, it’s hard to imagine how it might unfold. We’re familiar with scenes from criminal trials, but this process isn’t like that, even though the university may be making decisions about crimes as serious as rape.

The Title IX process has been the center of political and media attention in Missouri lately, as legislators and lobbyists pushed bills designed to better protect students accused of sexual assault. The Kansas City Star reported last month that Richard McIntosh, a Jefferson City lobbyist, launched a campaign to change Title IX law for every campus in the state after his son was accused and subsequently expelled from Washington University last year through the school’s Title IX process.

The proposed law’s platoon of lobbyists and supportive lawmakers have made this an issue of protecting due process rights for the accused.

So is the process, as it stands now, unfair? I reached out to Lori White, vice chancellor for student affairs at Washington University, where I have taught college writing as an adjunct, to explain the process.

Here’s what White says happens when a student makes a complaint.

-- The student is advised of their options: They can simply get the emotional and psychological support they need from the university’s resources, or they can choose to go through the criminal process, the student conduct process, or both. The support is available regardless of any other action taken.

-- The student decides which path to pursue.

-- If the student files a complaint with the Title IX office, an administrator meets with the student, takes the complaint and determines if it meets the requirement for a Title IX investigation, which looks into sexual assault, misconduct and harassment. If it does, the person accused is notified that a complaint has been filed.

-- An investigator employed by the university interviews both parties separately and any witnesses that either party provides. There is no limit on the number of witnesses.

-- The student who files the complaint can request another investigator from the university’s investigative team if they have any reservations about the hired investigator.

-- The investigator writes a detailed report about the information collected, which is seen by both parties in the case. Either party may provide any additional information after reading the report. The report is delivered to a three-person panel, which typically includes a faculty member, staff person and student. The panel calls each party separately to tell their side of the story and answer questions. The panel may also call and question witnesses from the report.

-- Both the complainant and accused are allowed to have one support person during the hearing, which can be a friend, parent, attorney, or whomever the student chooses. However, only the complainant and accused can speak during the hearing.

-- The panel issues a finding of either “responsible” or “not responsible.” The panel uses the standard of “a preponderance of the evidence,” similar to what is used in civil cases and other cases involving violations of student codes of conduct. It’s a lower standard than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” used in criminal trials.

-- If the accused person is found “responsible,” there is a range of consequences including probation, educational sanctions, suspension or expulsion. A report is given to both parties explaining the decision.

-- Either party can appeal the decision to the university provost, whose decision is final.

White shared data on cases that have gone through the Title IX process at Washington University from 2013 to 2018. In that time, there were 45 cases investigated by a contractor hired by the university. The accused was found responsible in 25 cases; seven of those 25 were expelled, eight suspended, and 10 got probation or an educational sanction or no-contact order with the student who made the complaint.

Washington University’s crime statistics, obtained through the Clery Report, indicate there were 122 reports of rape on campus from 2013 to 2017. The fact that only 45 Title IX investigations were pursued over a nearly concurrent time period could be due to complainant students’ decisions not to pursue the cases, White said.

“The process is designed to be fair and equitable to all parties,” White said.

The university joined other colleges in the state to speak against the proposed legislative changes to the process, which they say would discourage victims from reporting sexual assaults and misconduct.

There’s no reason to be shocked by the extremists in Alabama who would a force a girl raped by her father to bear his child. This is the holy war they’ve been waiting for. And this is the endgame that all religious zealots seek: the ability to control the most intimate, the most brutal, the most private decision a woman can ever face.

Since Jan. 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional, the anti-abortion warriors have plotted for ways to upend that ruling. And now, Donald Trump, of all people, has delivered their moment. They needed judges who share their view of America as a theocracy, in which their interpretation of God’s will supersedes all others.

White, conservative Republican men can finally decide for all the women what God says about when life begins. The 22 white Republican men in Alabama’s state senate know better than any woman what God wants, and they’re ready to jail any doctor who defies them.

This week, they passed legislation banning abortions at every stage of pregnancy, including for victims of rape and incest, and criminalizing the procedure for doctors.

They must know that some pregnant women will surely die for their vision of God’s will to be done. So they must also believe that God doesn’t care about those lives. It doesn’t matter that less than a quarter of Americans share their views. The rest of us are murderers-in-waiting because we don’t believe that the moment a sperm fertilizes an egg, a fully formed human exists.

They are unconcerned with questions like the ones Carliss Chatman, a law professor at Washington & Lee Law school in Virginia, asked on Twitter: “If a fetus is a person at 6 weeks pregnant, is that when the child support starts? Is that also when you can’t deport the mother because she’s carrying a U.S. citizen? Can I insure a 6-week fetus and collect if I miscarry?”

One could also ask, if a fertilized egg is a person, then how many attempted murders has a woman with an IUD committed? How many murders has a couple who has undergone IVF committed?

These are next frontiers for their jihad to protect embryos.

But let’s be careful not to confuse the Republican devotion to a fetus with concern for a living, breathing baby outside the womb. They must know that God hates health care for all people. Or even food stamps for poor children. Their God only promises each embryo nine months in a uterus. After that, the free ride is over.

The Alabama extremists are joined by like-minded cells in state houses in Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, Kentucky, North Dakota and Iowa. Missouri would be on that list if Republicans weren’t fighting among themselves about tax credits. They all want to outlaw abortion before many women even know that they’re pregnant.

Meanwhile, Missouri has one of the highest maternal death rates in the country. And yet, legislators voted down a proposal last year to have a committee study the factors contributing to the high number of deaths of mothers during pregnancy and childbirth. God must have whispered to them that those aren’t the lives worth saving.

Focus on the fetus!

It bears repeating that abortion remains legal in all 50 states. The zealots’ draconian laws do not take effect immediately. Civil liberties groups are fighting them in court.

While this battle plays out, the Alabama Republican men leading the assault on women are confident God is on their side.

The men in Afghanistan who imposed their religious will over women shared that conviction.

They can offer their comrade Republicans a battle cry: Remember the Taliban.

We’ve all heard lip service about mothers from our political leaders.

And yet, America’s government treats mothers like dirt.

The cruelest trick is how women have responded to a system built to fail them. Instead of righteous anger, we’ve internalized guilt.

We’re the only high-income country in the world that doesn’t require companies to offer paid maternity leave. More than 50 nations provide six months of paid leave or more. Imagine that: Six months of paid maternity leave. In the U.S., only 14 percent of workers had access to paid family leave in 2016. Even those with access to paid leave worry about how long they should take off.

One in four U.S. mothers returns to work 10 days after giving birth.

One of them is Dr. Hina Sarwar, a psychiatrist in St. Louis, who remembers her panic before her medical residency began. She was nine months pregnant, and afraid to tell the program directors for fear of losing a residency spot she had worked so hard to earn. She asked if she could delay orientation due to family issues. She was told it was mandatory.

So, she found an obstetrician willing to deliver her baby early -- at 37 weeks. She delivered via C-section. After she was released from the hospital, she and her husband packed a car and drove 17 hours from St. Louis to Lubbock, Texas with their newborn and 5-year-old child so she could start her training.

She stopped taking her pain medication in order to stay alert. Eight days after surgically giving birth, she was sitting in her orientation. Then, she was working more than 40 hours a week and racing home during her lunch breaks to nurse.

“I didn’t want to lose my spot,” she said. “It was really very painful.”

When I heard Sarwar’s experience, I was horrified. Caitlyn Collins, a sociology professor at Washington University, was unsurprised. She interviewed 135 mothers in various countries who work outside the home for her book, “Making Motherhood Work.”

Sarwar is a highly educated white-collar professional, who still feared repercussions from taking a leave available to her. The situation for women in lower-income jobs is even worse, Collins said. But Sarwar’s experience reveals a cultural attitude that must also change.

Collins found a relationship between family leave policies in other countries and societal attitudes about parenting and work. In countries with robust paid family leave protections, time with one’s child is seen as a right rather than an obligation or privilege. There’s a cultural understanding -- backed by the protection of law -- that it’s good for mothers to be home after they give birth to a child.

Countries like Sweden have developed policies that have incentivized men into taking time off to care for their children. The cultural understanding is that men and women participate equally in child-rearing and breadwinning.

In America, where more than 70 percent of mothers of young children work for pay, society expects women to work without any legal protection for paid time off after giving birth, or for an illness or sick child, and with few affordable child care options.

“The system is stacked against them,” Collins said. The most pernicious -- and uniquely American -- response to this unjust system is the working mother’s tendency to blame herself. Collins heard mothers universally express feelings of guilt at the impossibility of being able to do it all, in regard to work and child-rearing. But it’s only in America that women internalize blame instead of looking at the role their partners, companies and government play in creating and perpetuating a system unfair to them.

“When I look them in the eye and tell them it’s not their fault, they usually start crying in the interview,” Collins said.

Why have American mothers accepted that we are worth less than the mothers in every other developed nation in the world? We should expect more.

When we hear stories like Sarwar’s, our response should not be to valorize the extreme sacrifices women have had to make in order to pursue their careers or feed their children. Our response ought to be: This is an unjust system.

Our own voices of self-doubt only serve to benefit the existing broken system.

Ditch guilt.

Get angry.