To Curb Sexual Assaults, Colleges Give Students Alternative Reporting Options

Dan Vander Beek

A presentation in March at a summit for college administrators caught Peggy Fitch’s eye. As Title IX coordinator and vice president for student development at Central College in Iowa, she had noticed a numerical discrepancy between the sexual assaults reported to her office and those that showed up in the institution’s campus-climate and safety data.

“We have a gap,” she had thought to herself, “between the number of students who are experiencing this problem and the number who come to me.” So when she saw a presentation for the sexual-assault reporting website Callisto, she decided the system “could be just what we need” to remedy the problem.

Administrators and consultants agree that the underreporting of sexual assaults on college campuses is a significant problem. Although there are different opinions on how to combat it, many people, like Ms. Fitch, think letting students report online or anonymously could be a promising fix.

Callisto offers a way to do this. The system, currently in place at Central and three other colleges, acts as a hub where students can find campus-specific resources, make private notes, or file signed reports to a campus administrator. Tools like it are designed to coax responses out of “reluctant reporting parties,” in the words of Saundra K. Schuster, a partner at the Ncherm Group, a consulting and law firm.

Callisto is sensitive to traumatized students, and its menu of options could encourage those who don’t want to have a face-to-face interaction to still come forward.

Malika Wilson, student-body president at Coe College, one of the campuses that adopted Callisto this year, says the preference for online reporting may be evidence of “a generational change.” She says it’s easier to reveal something uncomfortable via email or text message than in person.

“It can be hard to go talk to someone who’s in student development,” Ms. Wilson says. Telling a stranger about a traumatic event, she says, “can be very intimidating.”

Callisto is one of several options that college officials hope will encourage more students to report offenses by making the process friendlier. Claremont McKenna College, for example, offers students a variety of reporting options, including a chat-type tool that lets users keep their identities secret. Virginia Commonwealth University’s police department recently adopted a program called You Have Options that gives people who report sexual assault some control over both the process and the amount of information they must disclose.

John Venuti, campus police chief at Virginia Commonwealth, says the program allows law-enforcement officials to “meet you wherever you are,” and “help you get to wherever it is you want to go.” Students who report assaults are interviewed in a living room-style setting, rather than one furnished with “two metal chairs and a round table,” Mr. Venuti says.

While being sympathetic to survivors is a goal in and of itself, such approaches serve another function: The more comfortable that colleges can make students feel as they report, the more reports they’ll file, and the more data administrators and police departments have to work with. Even if the data is incomplete or anonymous, it can flesh out a larger picture of a campus’s climate and can help identify patterns or repeat offenders.

The Problem With Anonymity

Some people are skeptical, however, of anonymous or alternative reporting. They question the secrecy or the notion that an app can fix a problem as embedded as sexual assault.

“Schools really have to decide how they believe the pros and cons weigh out on their campus and what should prevail,” says Ms. Schuster, of the Ncherm Group. “Is it more important to get more numbers in the absence of identity? Or is it more important to have the identity to enable something to go forward, but in doing so you risk lower numbers of reporting?”

Anonymity also doesn’t challenge systemic problems with sexual-assault reporting, others argue. Wendy Murphy, a lawyer who has helped students file federal sexual-assault and sex-discrimination complaints, says campus assaults should be treated as crimes against the community. That’s hindered if students keep quiet or are ashamed to speak up, she says.

Secrecy enables perpetrators to “predict that they can do what they want with impunity because it’s very likely the whole thing will remain confidential,” Ms. Murphy says. Instead of offering ways for students to report in secret, she says, campuses should focus on why students crave confidentiality to begin with. Why don’t students feel proud to report, she asks, and why don’t they feel their community will support them?

Colby Bruno, senior legal counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center, says confidentiality can help, but raising awareness and changing campus culture are equally or more important, especially because sexual-assault survivors are often not believed. “There is no quick fix” for such a widespread problem, she says. “No app is going to fix it.”

The institutions that have signed on with Callisto generally see it as another tool in the Title IX shed; a resource that adds to, but doesn’t supplant, the ways students can report or prevent sexual assaults.

Take Central College, where Ms. Fitch works. For years the institution has offered prevention programs, including a “Can I Kiss You?” presentation about consent and healthy relationships.

Ms. Bruno likens sexual-assault prevention to a recipe where, “you leave out the baking powder or the baking soda, and the whole thing, it doesn’t rise,” she says. For colleges, there needs to be effective awareness, education and enforcement — and sometimes confidentiality. “But it’s not one of those things,” Ms. Bruno says. “It’s all of that.”