Survey finds college sexual assault widespread
Nearly one-quarter of undergraduate women in the United States said they have been the victim of sexual assault or misconduct since entering college, according to results of a major nationwide survey of 27 schools, including Harvard and six other Ivy League institutions.
The survey of 150,000 students, which was commissioned by the Association of American Universities and carried out this spring, is one of the largest studies of sexual assault at U.S. colleges and appears to confirm previous findings that about one in five women nationwide are assaulted while in college.
The numbers varied widely among the schools. At Harvard, the rate of sexual assaults was somewhat higher than the rate among all 27 schools, with 25.5 percent of undergraduate women surveyed saying that they had experienced “nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching involving physical force or incapacitation,” since entering college.
Harvard president Drew G. Faust called the results “deeply disturbing.”
“Sexual assault is intolerable, and we owe it to one another to confront it openly, purposefully, and effectively,” Faust wrote in a campuswide letter Monday. “This is our problem.”
At Brown, 25 percent of undergraduate women surveyed said they had been sexually assaulted since enrolling. At Dartmouth, it was 27.9 percent. Among Yale students surveyed, the figure was 28.1 percent.
The survey found that the crime was reported to either campus officials or law enforcement just 5 percent to 28 percent of the time, depending on the specific type of behavior. Critics said that students often find the judicial system difficult to navigate and favoring the suspect in the assaults.
Students on several campuses said the results confirm what they have known anecdotally for a long time. They also called on administrations to do more.
Because of the variations among schools, the authors of the survey cautioned that applying the overall percentage as a global standard would be “at least oversimplistic, if not misleading.”
The survey included colleges of a wide range of sizes, both public and private, but the authors of the report said they did not find strong correlations between the results and the characteristics of schools.