More college students are stepping forward to report sexual assaults, survey indicates
Nearly 100 colleges and universities had at least 10 reports of rape on their main campuses in 2014, according to federal campus safety data, with Brown University and the University of Connecticut tied for the highest annual total — 43 each.
The data reflect what victim advocates say is a positive trend: More students who may have experienced a sexual assault are stepping forward to tell authorities about incidents that in years past might have gone unreported.
“(This) indicates that we are building trust among our campus community members in how the university responds to reported incidents of sexual and gender-based violence,” Brown spokesman Brian E. Clark said in an email.
Brown, a private Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island, has about 9,200 students, and the University of Connecticut, a public flagship, has about 26,500.
The data on campus rape reports, available through a U.S. Department of Education
website, provides valuable context as recent sexual assault cases have raised furors at Stanford and Baylor universities and on many other campuses nationwide.
Last week a former Stanford swimmer, Brock Turner, was sentenced to six months in jail and three years of probation for sexually assaulting a woman outside a fraternity party in 2015. The sentence, far more lenient than what prosecutors sought, provoked public outrage and drew fresh attention to an issue that in recent years has roiled campuses.
At Stanford, there were 26 reports of rape in 2014. At Baylor, there were four.
Having a low number of rape reports is not necessarily a sign that all is well. Baylor’s governing board last month demoted the school’s president, Kenneth Starr, and fired its football coach, Art Briles, following an investigation that found the school had failed to respond effectively to reports of sexual assault involving football players and others.
“Universities need to stop trying to treat this as a PR problem, and treat it as the civil rights and public safety issue that it is,” said Lisa Maatz, vice president for government relations at the American Association of University Women.
This year, students and parents for the first time can obtain precise data on the volume of rape reports on each campus because of recent changes to federal disclosure rules. Previously, colleges were required to disclose under the federal Clery Act the number of reports of “forcible sex offenses,” which cover a variety of crimes including rape. Now rape reports are a separate statistic.
It is important to note that the totals reflect only rape reports, not the number of rape cases prosecuted through criminal courts. Experts say that rape and other forms of sexual assault are generally underreported.
The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation published in June 2015 a national poll
that found 1 in 5 women who attended a residential college during a four-year span said they had been sexually assaulted.
Reed College, a liberal arts school in Oregon with about 1,400 students, has focused in recent years on ensuring that students know they can report incidents of sexual violence. “We have made the process very transparent and as friendly as it can possibly be,” Myers said. “It’s about helping the students who come forward get the help they need, in a way that they can control.”