Study: Many students don’t report sexual assaults

The true extent of student-on-student sexual assault in elementary and secondary schools is unclear. There are no national requirements for schools to track and disclose such incidents, as there are for colleges and universities, and sexual violence in general is widely under-reported.

Even academic and government research on K-12 student sex assault has limitations. Some surveys focused on certain age groups, were limited by a school’s demographics or were dependent on what students were willing to report.

A study published in 2014 by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center found that one in 250 children said they had experienced forced or unwanted sexual contact at school in the past year. The study was based on surveys taken in 2011 of 3,391 children, ages 5 to 17. Most of the 14 respondents who reported being sexually assaulted said a peer was the attacker, and only a bit more than a half reported it to school officials.

Meanwhile, University of Illinois researchers reported in a 2014 study that about one in five students from Midwestern middle schools said they had faced sexual violence on school property the previous year. Students who were asked to describe the “most upsetting sexually violent act” discussed actions ranging from forced intimate touching to unwanted kissing.

Researchers with the American Association of University Women asked nearly 2,000 students in grades 7-12 nationwide about sexual harassment at their public or private schools during the 201011 academic year. Two percent reported being “forced to do something sexual,” and 8 percent said they were “touched in an unwelcome sexual way” — with girls experiencing much higher rates than boys.

And at the University of Michigan, researchers surveyed nearly 1,100 junior-high and high-school students in the state about peer sexual assault, both in and out of school. The study, published in 2008, said that about half of all girls and a fourth of all boys reported peer victimization of some kind, including rape, forced oral sex or unwanted kissing and touching.