Campus Sexual Violence by Elizabeth Schmermund

Author:Elizabeth Schmermund [Schmermund, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC

9

Sexual Assaults on Campuses Are Underreported or Not Reported At All

Kristen Lombardi

Kristen Lombardi is an award-winning journalist and senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity. Her investigative work into campus rape cases won her the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the Dart Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, among other awards.

This investigative report finds that many schools don’t even include sexual assaults on their annual security or crime reports. According to Lombardi, this is actually legal because of loopholes in the Clery Act, a federal mandatory campus crime reporting law. According to some watchdogs, schools are intentionally underreporting sexual assaults on campus in order to protect the reputations of their campuses. But that’s not the only reason. Schools also ignore or refuse to address sexual assault cases and, just as troubling, only an estimated 5 percent of students who experience rape report it to school officials.

Asexual assault prevention program documented 46 sexual assaults at West Virginia University in a recent academic year. But those 46 incidents didn’t show up in the university’s annual security report.

A counseling and victim advocacy program at the University of Iowa served 62 students, faculty, and staff who reported being raped or almost raped in the last fiscal year. Those incidents didn’t show up, either.

A victim advocate program at Florida State University compiled statistics on 57 sexual offenses both on and off campus in 2008. Only a fraction of those incidents appeared in the school’s official crime statistics.

Across the higher education community, such discrepancies are not unusual. A nine-month investigation by The Center for Public Integrity has found that limitations and loopholes in the federal mandatory campus crime reporting law, known as the Clery Act, are causing systematic problems in accurately documenting the total numbers of campus-related sexual assaults. The most troubling of these loopholes involves broadly applied reporting exemptions for counselors who may be covered by confidentiality protections. Confusion over definitions of sexual offenses, as well as the law’s comprehensive reporting provisions, have created additional problems. “When you talk to 10 different institutions,” explains Marlon Lynch, president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, “you almost find 10 different ways of reporting under the law.”

Available data suggest that, on many campuses, far more sexual offenses are occurring than are reflected in the official Clery numbers. A Center survey of 152 crisis-services programs and clinics on or near college campuses requested incident numbers over the past year: 58 facilities responded with hard statistics. Clery totals from higher education institutions are theoretically supposed to include information from such service providers, but confusion remains over exactly who must report. A comparison of the survey data with the schools’ previous five-year average of official Clery totals shows that the clinic numbers are considerably higher, suggesting a systematic problem with Clery data collection.

Responses to the Center’s survey found that 49 out of those 58 crisis-services programs and clinics recorded higher reports of sexual offenses in a recent one-year period than the average yearly figure

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