UT report on rape offers flashpoint in debate on sex assault
Most female undergrad victims across system kept attacks a secret; Straus calls survey results ‘shocking’
One in 10 women at the University of Texas’ academic institutions report they have been raped since enrolling in college, says a study released Friday that lawmakers hope will prompt a crackdown on campus violence.
AUSTIN — One in 10 undergraduate women at the University of Texas’ academic institutions report they have been raped since enrolling in college, according to a study released Friday that lawmakers hope will prompt a crackdown on campus violence.
Of 28,270 students surveyed by the University of Texas system, 72 percent of sexual assault victims at UT’s academic institutions reported that they did not tell anyone they had been raped prior to taking the survey.
“It’s shocking and it’s not acceptable, and I’m glad it’s getting the attention that is has long deserved,” said House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, who hopes the Legislature can collaborate with colleges to reduce instances of rape on campus.
The findings, emailed to the campus community, are likely to sharpen the debate in Texas and around the nation over campus sexual violence. The report comes as the state is already reeling over sexual assault scandals at Baylor University, one of the state’s premier private schools.
The Cultivating Learning and Safe Environments study was commissioned by UT to examine the prevalence, perceptions and experiences of students on campus. It found 12 percent of students at UT said they were the victims of unwanted sexual contact since enrolling in college, and that 84 percent of instances of unwanted sexual contact happened off campus.
At the UT System’s five health institutions, 22 percent of LGBTQ students reported having experienced student-perpetrated sexual harassment, compared with 43 percent of undergraduate LGBTQ students at UT’s eight academic institutions.
“We are not going to run from this. We are not going to hide from this. We are going to take this head on,” UT Chancellor William McRaven said Friday in a conference call to reporters.
‘A wake-up call’
The $1.7 million multiyear study comes as Baylor University, an elite private Baptist school in Waco, struggles to recover from the fallout of several highprofile rape allegations among its football players. The cases have led to a Title IX investigation into the school for mishandling sexual assault cases, a fight with its former Title IX officer and a lawsuit against Baylor by survivors of sexual assault.
Title IX is part of a more than 40-year-old law aimed at ensuring equal rights for those participating in educational programs that receive federal financial assistance and applies to all facets of a school’s environment, including the policing of sexual assault complaints.
While 10 percent of female academic students who responded to the yearlong nearly systemwide poll reported being raped, 15 percent of women at the system’s flagship school in Austin reported being raped while a student at the university.
“This survey is a wakeup call to me, as it should be for every student, faculty member and staff member at UT Austin,” said Gregory Fenves, president of UT Austin, which the survey revealed had the highest percentage of rape victims. “I have said throughout my presidency that sexual misconduct will not be tolerated.”
The survey found 15 percent of undergraduate women at the UT System’s eight academic institutions said they experienced “crude sexual harassment” by a staff or faculty member, and 14 percent said they were victims of sexist gender harassment by faculty or staff.
Began polling in 2015
Performed by UT Austin’s Institute on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault, the system began polling students in the fall of 2015 at all but one of the system’s 14 universities, opting to exempt the University of Texas Health Northeast because it does not enroll enough students to protect their anonymity.
State lawmakers pushing bills to increase accountability on universities say they hope the study will pressure the Legislature to do something about campus sexual assault.
“For me, once you have knowledge of something terrible that is going on in your university, then you have a responsibility to fix it,” said Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican.
She is sponsoring one of the more aggressive bills at the capitol this session to address campus sexual assault. Her bill would require university employees to report instances of sexual assault within 48 hours of becoming aware of the incident. Lawmakers are also considering legislation to require schools to develop outreach programs on sexual assault, family violence and stalking, define consent standards on campus, allow people to report rapes electronically and grant amnesty to students who report incidents of sexual assault.
Sen. Kirk Watson, DAustin, is pushing five bills, including efforts to define “consent” and make it easier for victims to report assaults. He said the study offers the Legislature a prime opportunity to act.
“It’s timely. What I mean by that is, it provides us with the background knowledge base with which we need to act. The opportunity is there. We have to seize that opportunity, and it would be wrong for us to ignore it,” he said.
The UT statistics are consistent with trends from across the country which show 10 percent to 20 percent of students experience sexual assault during their college years, said Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
“If we had a 10 percent influenza outbreak or a 20 percent syphilis outbreak, we’d be in up in arms,” said Houser.
‘Investing in solutions’
“We’re sort of accepting that rape happens and we don’t want to believe people’s personal accounts of it,” she said. “We can hopefully help the public move forward from questioning the data to investing in the solutions.”
The University of Texas System released the results of its comprehensive sexual assault survey five days earlier than planned after Huffman on Thursday began sharing the results in a committee hearing, spotlighting the number of UT Austin women who have said they’ve been raped.
J.B. Bird, a spokesman for UT Austin, said the media attention surrounding that statistic led to the university’s decision to share the full report ahead of time. UT-Austin released its campus-wide data Friday morning. The UT System shared the data from its 13 schools Friday afternoon.
“We just received the final results of this study Wednesday,” Bird said. “But the minute our students were reading about it in the media, we made the decision last night to get the information out immediately.”
The study respondents, men and women, were all anonymous.