Title IX Experts Sound Alarm as Trump’s Office of Civil Rights Fails to Resolve a Single Sexual Violence Case in 2025, Targets Trans Students Instead

February 23. 2026

For Immediate Release
Feb 23, 2026

Media Contact
Nazirah Ahmad
[email protected]

SAN FRANCISCO — Equal Rights Advocates, along with National Women’s Law Center and 110 other civil rights advocate organizations across the country, sent a letter today to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) asking officials to prioritize investigation of student survivors’ complaints after failure to address a single sexual violence or harassment case in 2025.

This is just the latest result of the Trump Administration’s systematic gutting of enforcement that has harmed students of many different identities across the country.

“Zero resolution agreements don’t mean zero harm. It means the federal office charged with protecting students from sexual violence chose to look the other way.”

– Maha Ibrahim, Program Managing Attorney

New analysis reveals no student who filed an assault or harassment complaint with OCR has seen their case reach a formal resolution under the current Trump administration. Overall, OCR resolutions (which span cases from racial discrimination to disability access to unequal athletics opportunities) plummeted from 518 in 2024 to 177 in 2025, a 66% decline and the lowest since 2013. This is the result of deliberate policy choices that prioritize harmful ideology over student safety, going back to the first Trump Administration.

Meanwhile, OCR severely increased and expedited Title IX investigations targeting transgender students‘ access to facilities and athletics — an issue affecting an estimated 0.5% or fewer high school athletes — while nearly half of students in grades 7-12 report facing sexual harassment, and 13% of all students on college campuses experience sexual harassment. 

At a time when the administration is under scrutiny for accusations of sexual violence against children, this year of inaction failing to protect students is the latest move to dismantle protections in schools.

“Zero resolution agreements don’t mean zero harm. It means the federal office charged with protecting students from sexual violence chose to look the other way,” said Maha Ibrahim, Program Managing Attorney at Equal Rights Advocates. “While the OCR spent 2025 targeting transgender students in schools, survivors of sexual assault and harassment were left without any federal recourse. It is a deliberate strategy to dismantle civil rights enforcement while using the law as a weapon against the very students it was designed to protect.”

At a time when the administration is under scrutiny for accusations of sexual violence against children, this year of inaction failing to protect students is the latest move to dismantle civil rights protections in schools and workplaces for everyone. The future of Title IX depends on sustained resistance at state and local levels, where advocates, educators, and parents must fight to maintain protections for their school communities despite federal rollbacks.