EDMONDSON, Circuit Judge

Plaintiff appeals the district court's dismissal of her claim — a claim brought on behalf of Plaintiff and Plaintiff's minor daughter — that Defendants, Georgia Military College ("GMC") and several of its officials, violated Plaintiff's and her daughter's substantive due process rights. Because we agree with the district court that the individual Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity, we affirm.

Background

GMC is a state-run institution that serves as both a high school and a college. Plaintiff's daughter, H.S., was a 13-year-old high school freshman enrolled at GMC. According to GMC policy, high school freshmen were required to stay on campus and to live in the barracks for the first four weeks of school. During this period, only the high school was in session; but GMC's college football team was on campus for pre-season training.

Before enrolling H.S. at GMC, H.S.'s parents inquired about security on the campus. In response to these concerns, several school officials represented to H.S.'s parents that H.S. would be adequately protected. School officials specifically told H.S.'s parents these things: that H.S. would be housed in a room near a school official's — Defendant Major Banks's — living quarters; that an adult supervisor would be assigned to H.S.'s barracks and available at all times; that a piece of sliding cardboard would be placed on the inside of the observation window in the door to H.S.'s room so that she could observe visitors; that security personnel would be present in the barracks to monitor visitors; and that a nightly bed check would be conducted to ensure that all students were in their rooms by 10:00 p.m.

About one week after H.S. arrived at GMC, she and her roommate (the other female high school student at GMC) were moved to a room in the opposite wing from the room in which the two were originally placed. No other school personnel or students lived in that wing of the barracks, and this new room was some distance from Major Banks's living quarters. In addition, the new room had a wooden board nailed to the observation window of the door — not a piece of sliding cardboard — which prevented H.S. from observing and identifying visitors.

On 1 September 1995, after being moved to the new room, H.S. was awakened by a knock on her door. H.S. opened the door and allowed GMC college football player, Kareem Holmes, to enter her room. Holmes then raped H.S.

Plaintiff, the parent of H.S., asserts that on the night of the attack, no security personnel were present to monitor the barracks, no bed check was conducted, and all supervisory responsibility for the barracks had been delegated to Defendant Major Banks. Major Banks was left in charge because Lt. Diane Ortega, the official actually assigned to supervise the main barracks and the female hall on the night of the incident, was not on campus.

Plaintiff filed suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Plaintiff's claim is based on the rape of H.S. by a private third party on the campus of GMC while H.S. was a resident high school student there. Plaintiff alleges that GMC and GMC officials — by failing to protect H.S. from harm by a private actor (Holmes) — violated H.S.'s Fourteenth Amendment rights to personal security and to physical integrity and violated Plaintiff's related right to maintain family integrity. The district court dismissed the complaint, before discovery, concluding in relevant part that the individual Defendants were entitled to qualified immunity. Plaintiff appeals the dismissal of her complaint against the individual Defendants — General Peter J. Boylan, Colonel Frederick Van Horn, Major Walter Banks, and Sergeant Larry Swint — challenging the district court's conclusion that these Defendants were entitled to qualified immunity.

Discussion

"Qualified immunity protects government officials performing discretionary functions from civil trials . . . and from liability if their conduct violates no clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." Lassiter v. Alabama A M Univ., 28 F.3d 1146, 1149 (11th Cir. 1994) (en banc) (internal quotations and citations omitted). To overcome this immunity, Plaintiff has the burden of pointing to case law which "pre-date[s] the offic[ial]'s alleged improper conduct, involve[s] materially similar facts, and `truly compel[s]' the conclusion that the plaintiff had a right under federal law." Ensley v. Soper, 142 F.3d 1402, 1406 (11th Cir. 1998) (citing Lassiter, 28 F.3d at 1150).

Defendants "assert[ed] the defense of qualified immunity in a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss, and they are entitled to qualified immunity at this stage in the proceedings if [Plaintiff's] complaint fails to allege a violation of a clearly established constitutional right." Williams v. Alabama State Univ., 102 F.3d 1179, 1182 (11th Cir. 1997). Whether the complaint alleges the violation of a clearly established right is a question of law, which we review de novo. See id. In deciding this case, we accept all facts alleged in the complaint as true and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the nonmoving party, Plaintiff. See id.

Plaintiff recognizes that her complaint, which is premised on a violation of the Due Process Clause, is based on the rape of her daughter, not by a school official, but by a private third party. And, "nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors." DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep't of Social Servs., 109 S.Ct. 998, 1003 (1989). "As a general matter, . . . a State's failure to protect an individual against private violence simply does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause." Id. at 1004.

But "in certain limited circumstances the Constitution imposes upon the State affirmative duties of care and protection with respect to particular individuals." Id. Where "the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will . . . the Constitution imposes upon [the State] a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being." Id. at 1005. Thus, a duty may be imposed on States to protect involuntarily committed mental patients, prisoners, and involuntarily placed foster children. See, e.g., Youngberg v. Romeo, 102 S.Ct. 2452 (1982) (mental patients); Estelle v. Gamble, 97 S.Ct. 285 (1976) (prisoners); Taylor v. Ledbetter, 818 F.2d 791 (11th Cir. 1987) (foster children).

The question presented in this case is whether, given the status of the pre-existing law, the Defendants, at the pertinent time, clearly owed Plaintiff or H.S. some constitutional duty to protect H.S. based on the voluntary, custodial relationship between H.S. and GMC. So, we consider cases where we have talked about the possibility of a constitutional duty when the State has a "special relationship" with either the victim or the perpetrator. See Wyke v. Polk County Sch. Bd., 129 F.3d 560 (11th Cir. 1997); Mitchell v. Duval County Sch. Bd., 107 F.3d 837 (11th Cir. 1997); Cornelius v. Town of Highland Lake, 880 F.2d 348 (11th Cir. 1989).

"The contours of what constitutes a `special relationship' between a [State institution], acting through its officials, and its citizens are hazy and indistinct." Wideman v. Shallowford Comm. Hosp., Inc., 826 F.2d 1030, 1035 (11th Cir. 1987) (quoting Ellsworth v. City of Racine, 774 F.2d 182, 185 (7th Cir. 1985)). During oral argument, Plaintiff's counsel acknowledged that whether a voluntary, instead of an involuntary, custodial arrangement between the State and a citizen could give rise to a special relationship, and thus a constitutional duty, remains "unclear" in this circuit. But still Plaintiff argues that the pre-existing law was somehow so clearly established that Defendants should not be protected by qualified immunity.

Plaintiff points us to three cases, which Plaintiff claims clearly established that GMC owed a constitutional duty to H.S.: Taylor v. Ledbetter, 818 F.2d 791 (11th Cir. 1987); Cornelius v. Town of Highland Lake, 880 F.2d 348 (11th Cir. 1989); and Spivey v. Elliott, 29 F.3d 1522 (11th Cir. 1994). None of these cases, however, provide the "bright line" necessary to delineate the concrete circumstances in which officials will violate the Constitution. See Lassiter, 28 F.3d at 1150 ("If case law, in factual terms, has not staked out a bright line, qualified immunity almost always protects the defendant.") (internal quotations and citations omitted).

When considering whether the law applicable to certain facts is clearly established, the facts of cases relied upon as precedent are important. The facts need not be the same as the facts of the immediate case. But they do need to be materially similar. . . . Public officials are not obligated to be creative or imaginative in drawing analogies from previously decided cases.

Lassiter, 28 F.3d at 1150 (quoting Adams v. St. Lucie County Sheriff's Dep't, 962 F.2d 1563, 1575 (11th Cir. 1992) (Edmondson, J., dissenting), approved en banc, 998 F.2d 923 (11th Cir. 1993)).

Given the facts, the cases relied on by Plaintiff are not materially similar to the case before us and would have required Defendants to draw inferences — inferences of highly debatable validity — to reach the conclusion that H.S. (and secondarily Plaintiff) was owed a constitutional duty. These cases do not address the situation in this case: where an individual is voluntarily in the custody of the State or where the State represented that it would provide the individual with security. Cf. Taylor, 818 F.2d 791 (The court wrote these words about involuntary custody in foster homes: "The liberty interest in this case is analogous to the liberty interest in Youngberg. In both cases, the state involuntarily placed the person in a custodial environment, and in both cases, the person is unable to seek alternative living arrangements.") (emphasis added); Cornelius, 880 F.2d 348; Spivey, 29 F.3d 1522, withdrawn, Spivey v. Elliott, 41 F.3d 1497 (11th Cir. 1995) (Spivey II). Thus, these cases did not (and do not today) clearly establish that Defendants owed Plaintiff or H.S. a federal constitutional duty to protect H.S. from the incident in this case.

Given their facts, the cited precedents gave much too little guidance. We cannot properly require Defendants in this case to have drawn inferences when the facts of the existing cases were considerably different from the circumstances facing these particular Defendants.

Furthermore, some pre-existing case law may have particularly suggested to Defendants (or to be more precise, to every reasonable school official standing in Defendants' place) that no duty would arise in a voluntary situation, despite representations by Defendants that protection would be provided. See DeShaney, 109 S.Ct. at 1005-06 ("The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State's knowledge of the individual's predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf.") (emphasis added). "Unless a government agent's act is so obviously wrong, in the light of pre-existing law, that only a plainly incompetent officer or one who was knowingly violating the law would have done such a thing, the government actor has immunity from suit." Lassiter, 28 F.3d at 1149. Defendants were not obviously violating Plaintiff's or H.S.'s clearly established rights in this case.

Because Plaintiff's complaint fails to allege the violation of a clearly established constitutional right, the district court correctly granted Defendants' motions to dismiss on grounds of qualified immunity. We, given the status of the pre-existing law, view it as obvious that Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity.

But we do acknowledge that the existence or nonexistence of a constitutional right (or duty) in this case presents a perplexing question: a question that we — in part, because it cannot be easily answered — decline to answer at this time. To overcome qualified immunity, Plaintiff must show both (1) that Defendants violated a federal constitutional right and (2) that the right was already clearly established at the time of the violation. See Spivey II, 41 F.3d at 1499. "[A] negative decision on either prevents the plaintiff from going forward." Id. So, to answer the other question is unnecessary to decide the case. Thus, "[o]nce there has been a determination that there is no `clearly established' right, the parties can accomplish little in pursuing the question of whether there is a right at all. . . . [because t]hose who differ with the decision of the court could write it off as dictum." Id.

A Supreme Court opinion recently suggested that the "better approach" — in cases involving the defense of qualified immunity — might be to decide whether the contended for constitutional right exists at all before determining whether the right was, at the pertinent time, clearly established. See County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 118 S.Ct. 1708, 1714 n. 5 (1998) (citing Siegert v. Gilley, 111 S.Ct. 1789, 1793 (1991)) ("[T]he better approach to resolving cases in which the defense of qualified immunity is raised is to determine first whether the plaintiff has alleged a deprivation of a constitutional right at all. Normally, it is only then that a court should ask whether the right allegedly implicated was clearly established at the time of the events in question.") (emphasis added).

We do not understand this footnote as an absolute requirement that lower courts must always follow this "normally" "better approach." In County of Sacramento, the district court decided the case strictly on qualified immunity grounds, that is, on the ground of the unsettled nature of the law; but the Supreme Court never said the district court erred. And if the Supreme Court intended to impose an absolute requirement on lower courts always to address the merits of constitutional issues even where qualified immunity obviously applies and readily resolves the case, we believe the Supreme Court would have said so more directly.

At least in situations like this one — (1) where the existence of a constitutional right (or duty) presents a perplexing question, (2) where the alleged right obviously was not already clearly established, and (3) where the qualified immunity determination does end the whole case — it remains appropriate, and sometimes preferable, to stop at the determination that the right, if any, was not clearly established. "A fundamental and longstanding principle of judicial restraint requires that courts avoid reaching constitutional questions in advance of the necessity of deciding them." Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Ass'n, 108 S.Ct. 1319, 1323 (1988); see also Jean v. Nelson, 105 S.Ct. 2992, 2997 (1985); In re Snyder, 105 S.Ct. 2874, 2880 (1985); Superintendent, Massachusetts Correctional Instit., Walpole v. Hill, 105 S.Ct. 2768, 2772 (1985); Spivey II, 41 F.3d at 1499 (decided after Siegert v. Gilley) ("[A] determination of whether a right is clearly established will always require no more, and will often require less, analysis than is required to decide whether the allegedly violated constitutional right actually exists in the first place. Moreover, deciding the case on the `clear establishment' element comports with the well-established principle disfavoring reaching substantive constitutional issues if a case can be resolved on other grounds."). "[T]his self-imposed limitation on the exercise of the Court's jurisdiction has an importance to the institution that transcends the significance of particular controversies." City of Mesquite v. Aladdin's Castle, Inc., 102 S.Ct. 1070, 1077 (1982).

The Supreme Court looked at these arguments for avoiding the merits of constitutional issues when the Court, in County of Sacramento, said that a decision on those merits was normally the "better approach." Still we conclude the Supreme Court did not mean to nullify all the traditional restraint principles or to take away all our discretion to analyze particular qualified immunity cases, involving perplexing constitutional issues, without first deciding whether the constitutional right exists. We think the Supreme Court was telling us that, notwithstanding the usual restraint arguments, sometimes the courts can and should decide the constitutional issues; and we will but — because we believe the Supreme Court has left us with some discretion — not today.

Because we conclude that Plaintiff and H.S. were owed no clearly established constitutional duty by Defendants at the time of the incident, Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity.

AFFIRMED.