Post-secondary institutions look for ways to track sexual assaults

Symposium later this month will tackle problems with current reporting process

Representatives from all 26 of Alberta’s public post-secondary institutions will come together at an Edmonton symposium to unravel the complexities and help develop a new system to improve the reporting of sexual assaults across campuses in the province.

While independent systems exist for students to make official complaints, the tracking of disclosures — those in which students want to report a sexual assault but who may not necessarily pursue it further — are much harder to accurately quantify, says forum organizer Deborah Eerkes.

Eerkes, a University of Alberta discipline officer and director of the Student Conduct and Accountability office, says just being able to count complaints misses the larger picture of sexual violence on campus.

“We can easily track the number of people who have made complaints, but that number tells us nothing,” Eerkes said.

NEW SYSTEM

What is needed, Eerkes said, is a way to track and report complaints, disclosures and those who use survivor services to understand long-term trends and to help make informed decisions about policy in the future.

At the U of A for instance, three separate entities — protective services, Student Conduct and Accountability and Residence Services — track complaints of sexual assault independently of each other.

Another two services track usage and types of experiences reported by clients and another two teams track the number and types of programming provided to victims of sexual violence.

In essence, if five students came forward to reveal that a friend had been sexually assaulted, five reports could theoretically be created for the one incident.

“We want to reduce the number of sexual assaults but how do you count what’s not happening when you can’t even count what’s happening?” she said.

UNIVERSITY REVIEW

It’s a point that was highlighted in a review of the university’s response to sexual assault presented in January last year and which prompted the creation of a new sexual violence policy.

That review pointed out that without a lack of a central repository, the university is unable to understand the big picture around sexual assault or to understand in terms of national or international trends.

Eerkes says the policy, which is currently going through the governance process, lays out a commitment to survivors of sexual violence and connects to processes already in place.

“This policy is about making clear what we do when someone comes forward with sexual assault and much of it is what we have already been doing but it had never been put down in a policy,” she says.

“The whole idea is to bring it all together, codify it and make it easy to find.”

Whatever the new system looks like, Eerkes said, one of the overarching principles will be the commitment to protecting student confidentiality during the process.

The knowledge exchange will be held at the University of Alberta on March 30-31.

We want to reduce the number of sexual assaults but how do you count what’s not happening when you can’t even count what’s happening?