The statistic was shocking: Nine out of 10 colleges reported no rapes on their campuses in 2014.
That finding, released on Monday by the American Association of University Women, seemed to contradict recent surveys of female undergraduates, as well as an oft-cited — and controversial — statistic that one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college. Advocates and researchers agreed something was amiss.
But what do the low rates of rape reports — drawn from the campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act — really mean? Here are three possibilities:
1. Students still aren’t comfortable reporting rape.
That is the explanation embraced by the association, which argued in its analysis that “the extraordinarily high number of zeros” that colleges reported to the federal government “suggests students may not feel comfortable coming forward to report such crimes.”
The fact that some colleges reported several types of sexual violence, while others reported none, “suggests that some schools have built the necessary systems to welcome reports, support survivors, and disclose accurate statistics — and others have not,” the association added.
Dana Bolger, co-director of the victims'-rights group Know Your IX, agrees with that interpretation. She says the association’s findings are “damning because they show just how many schools aren’t empowering survivors to feel safe reporting.”
“A school with zero reported rapes isn’t a safer school: It’s a school that isn’t helping victims understand where or how to report, or is flat-out discouraging them from doing so,” she wrote in an email.
While many colleges have strengthened their systems for responding to sexual assault in recent years, many other institutions still aren’t meeting their responsibilities under the Title IX antidiscrimination law, according to Tara Richards, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Baltimore. Her research has found that many colleges still don’t have a Title IX coordinator, a confidential victims’ advocate, or an assault-prevention plan.
Even at colleges that are complying with the law, “there are still a lot of victims that are skeptical of the system,” said Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. Convincing them that things have changed could take years, he said.
“So many victims have been pushed away that it’s not going to be an overnight success,” he said. “It’s going to take a generation.”
2. Students aren’t reporting rape for some other reason.
Another possibility is that victims aren’t coming forward because they’re too traumatized or too ashamed to report the crime.
A recent survey by the Association of American Universities found that nearly one in four female undergraduates had been victims of sexual assault or misconduct, yet fewer than one-third of those respondents had reported the incidents. While some didn’t think anything would come of a complaint, many said that they were too embarrassed to report the crime or felt that their experiences were not serious enough to warrant a report.
Other students who have been assaulted may find the reporting process intimidating, said Howard Kallem, director of Title IX compliance at Duke University.
“The school can have the best procedures available, but it’s still not going to be any fun for a student to go through them,” he said. “It’s a stressful process.”
While colleges could take steps to make that process easier, “there are a whole range of reasons why a student may not make a formal report, many of which are beyond the school’s control,” he said.
3. Rapes aren’t being counted — or they’re not being reported to the feds.
Under the Clery Act, colleges must count only crimes that occur on campus property. If a student is victimized on a city street or at a house party, the incident won’t be included in the numbers. That means that nonresidential campuses, including a majority of community colleges, are likely to have reported no rapes. (According to the AAUW, 76 percent of the nearly 4,000 “main or primary campuses” — including community colleges’ main campuses — made zero rape reports in 2014.)
In other cases, victims may have sought help from individuals who aren’t obligated to report alleged crimes, such as pastors or professional counselors. (Campus health and counseling centers are supposed to report aggregate data, though.) Or they may have told friends who then told the college. Such secondhand reports wouldn’t have been counted, either, unless they could be verified.
Other complaints may have been left out of formal Clery Act reports because of a lack of coordination among campus officials. If faculty members, resident advisers, and other “campus security authorities” aren’t routing reports of rape to the campus police or another office compiling the data, the official numbers will be off, said Laura L. Dunn, executive director of SurvJustice, a victims’ advocacy group.
The low numbers “may suggest schools are not properly training their ‘campus security authorities,’” she wrote in an email. “It may also suggest that campus counseling centers are not tracking data like they ought to.”
Brett Sokolow, who advises colleges on risk-management practices, said he suspects that’s what happened with the latest data. “I think this is more dysfunction than malfeasance,” he said.
So what’s the solution?
Some researchers and victim advocates say the latest data make the case for more campus-climate surveys, which allow students to report crimes anonymously.
“The annual security report is never going to be a good measure of sexual assaults on campus,” said Ms. Richards, the University of Baltimore researcher. Surveys — especially statewide ones — allow colleges and policy makers to compare similar campuses to see what works, she said.
Mr. Sokolow argued that colleges should be compelled to designate a senior administrator to collect the crime data and “sign off that the numbers are correct,” much as they’re required to name a Title IX coordinator.
“This is something we absolutely have to fix,” he said. “If you look at the surveys, and then look at the numbers colleges are reporting, it looks like a massive cover-up.”
“Our days of ineptitude have to be done,” he added. “Congress is going to shove it down our throat if we don’t do it ourselves.”
Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.
