Nearly one in 10 high school students reported experiencing rape or sexual assault in the most recent survey from the New Mexico Department of Health — a number that advocates say is likely an undercount.
The U.S. Department of Education oversees public schools’ responses to sexual assault and harassment on campus. Under Title IX, the federal student civil rights law, schools are required to investigate reports of sexual violence and take steps to protect students, including proactive measures to ensure a student’s education doesn’t suffer as a result of sexual assault or harassment.
But enforcement of those federal protections has long been uneven and has been scaled back significantly in recent years. Under the Trump administration, Title IX investigations have deprioritized student-on-student assault, focusing instead on transgender athletes in school sports, teacher-on-student assault and other issues aligned with the administration’s policy goals. Staffing cuts at the federal Office of Civil Rights have further strained oversight.
Many states have developed their own laws and policies for protecting K-12 students against sexual violence in schools, giving students and parents an additional avenue of accountability if Title IX fails to address a complaint. New York, for example, passed the Dignity for All Students Act in 2012, a law that mirrors many of the federal protections offered under Title IX.
But New Mexico defers entirely to federal oversight of sexual assault and harassment at school. That leaves parents with few options when a school district mishandles a report of sexual assault.
A recent case in Hobbs brings this gap into clear focus.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
In April, a middle school student named Larissa told school administrators she was raped on campus as at least one onlooker filmed on their phone. The video of the alleged assault was shared among students throughout the school district. When Larissa — her middle name — told school administrators she had been assaulted, the officials determined it was consensual. The video, they said, didn’t show her fighting back or crying out — a common and predictable trauma response, according to experts.
Both the alleged assault and the video should have triggered Title IX investigations, according to experts interviewed for this story. School officials disagreed.
“Based upon the evidence that we had available, no, we did not believe that Title IX needed to play out,” Hobbs Municipal Schools Superintendent Gene Strickland said in an interview July 20.
Instead, the school wrote up Larissa for violating the student code of conduct and assigned her three days of on-campus suspension. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is now being homeschooled.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
“This girl has the right to attend class without sexual harassment, without retaliation, without a hostile environment at the school,” said Esther Warkov, executive director of Stop Sexual Assault in Schools. “And the school did nothing to stop the hostile environment. To me this is a very, very clear violation of Title IX.”
“We’ve seen this all across the country, schools accusing the survivor of sexual consent and then punishing them,” Warkov said. “This is another way of chilling victims from reporting.”
The Hobbs school district did eventually open a formal Title IX investigation into Larissa’s case, more than four months after her alleged assault and one day before Searchlight’s final deadline for the district to comment for this story. By the time the investigation was opened, Larissa had already withdrawn from the school district.
Larissa’s case was one of 47 instances of rape, sexual assault, or sharing of explicit images of students reported to police from Hobbs schools over the past three school years, according to police dispatch records.
Hobbs police did not have documentation of nearly half of the rape or sexual assault calls originating from the district. According to the records on file, at least five of the calls alleging sexual assault or rape were for incidents that occurred on campus; others were for incidents that did not involve the schools.
Schools are required to report student-on-student rape or sexual assault to the New Mexico Public Education Department. But according to a public records request filed by Searchlight, Hobbs schools have not reported a single such incident to the department for at least the past three school years.
Dismissing a report of sexual violence, or responding in a way that feels hostile, can have lasting impacts for students.
“When a response is not made to actually meet the needs of the survivor, to meet them where they’re at and hold healing at its center, it can be equally as harmful as the event itself,” said Jess Clark, director of prevention at the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs.
Advocates in New Mexico have been pushing for legislation they say could prevent many of these cases from arising in the first place.
In the 2023 legislative session, the coalition worked alongside lawmakers to introduce a bill that would have required schools to adopt policies and procedures to educate students on “affirmative consent.” Sometimes called “yes means yes” education, these programs teach kids about autonomy and consent, and have been shown to reduce incidents of sexual assault and dating violence.
The bill did not make it to the Senate floor for a full vote, and was opposed by some lawmakers, including the Republican representatives from Hobbs, Randall Pettigrew and Larry Scott.
A similar bill focused only on higher education was signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in 2024. The Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs and other organizations providing sexual assault services are exploring a plan to introduce a new bill that would include affirmative consent education for K-12 students in the upcoming session.
Some school districts have enacted strong prevention programs of their own.
Santa Fe Public Schools, for instance, has worked for over a decade with Solace Sexual Assault Services, a local nonprofit, to provide comprehensive sex education programs in its classrooms. Those programs include affirmative consent education.
“Students coming up today deserve access to this information,” Clark said. “They deserve to know that they have agency in their lives, in their bodies and the relationships they have. If we’re actually about protecting children, then we will give them the information they need.”
