Focus on colleges obscures country’s broader problem

According to a Department of Justice report issued several months ago, there is a rape epidemic among 18 to 24 year-old women in the United States. To be clear, there is nothing about attending a college or university that makes someone more likely to be a victim of sexual assault. Indeed, one of the key conclusions in the report is that the incidence of sexual assault is higher for non-students than college students.

In trying to solve any problem, it is important that we frame it appropriately. Here, the country does not have a “campus rape problem.” It has a “rape problem.”

Of course, college and universities are primarily made up of 18 to 24 year-olds and are particularly impacted by the increased risk of sexual assault for this age group. While the media has attempted to construct a narrative of institutional indifference about sexual assault on college campuses (the most reckless version of this being the now infamous Rolling Stone article about the University of Virginia), reality is often far different. Primarily in response to already existing federal laws dealing with campus sexual misconduct (Title IX and the Clery Act), colleges and universities have largely done more than any other segment of the country to combat our national rape epidemic. Walk on to most major campuses today and you will likely find a move towards campus-based bystander intervention programs, student sexual-assault training, thorough institutional sexual misconduct policies, campus-based mental-health resources for sexualassault survivors, campus conduct proceedings centered on resolving claims of sexual misconduct, and trauma-informed investigations of sexual-assault allegations.

That this progress is happening at a perilous time for higher education makes this work even more remarkable. Public resources, whether through direct state support or grant funding, have dried up at the exact same time colleges and universities are facing significant market-based and governmental pressure to keep costs down. Additionally, whereas there is a long history of courts providing institutions of higher education with considerable discretion in making decisions affecting their enterprise, that deference has begun to erode and colleges and universities are frequently being targeted with a bevy of lawsuits.

This lack of institutional deference has entered the regulatory sphere as well as colleges and universities face an exacting regulatory climate which has required them to swell the ranks of administrators to ensure that schools are complying with a byzantine maze of regulations.

To add to this list of non-academic responsibilities the sole responsibility of solving this country’s rape problem only serves to trivialize what should be a much more substantial national civil-rights issue.

To be clear, additional laws targeting only colleges and universities are not required. What is required is a fundamental rethinking of the problem.

According to the Department of Justice, 1 in 5 women in the United States experience a completed or attempted rape at some time in their life. The overwhelming majority of these rapes go unreported by the victim to law enforcement, and even for those reported, only a small minority ever result in the successful prosecution of the offender.

The discussion about rape in this country should focus on creating a criminal justice system where victims feel comfortable coming forward to law enforcement and rapists are brought to justice in courts. It should focus on providing resources to victims. It should focus on changing a national climate — both on and off campus— that creates exceptionally high rates of violence against women.

On these scores, colleges and universities are not laggards in need of additional regulation, they are leaders.

Colleges and universities have largely done more than any other segment of the country to combat our national rape epidemic.