21% of Undergraduate Women Have Been Sexually Assaulted in College, Survey Finds

A survey of students on nine campuses has found that 21 percent of female undergraduates reported having been sexually assaulted since starting college. On one campus, that proportion was 38 percent.

Conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the firm RTI International, the survey grew out of the work of a White House task force on sexual assault, formed in 2014.

The survey also found:

• About 10 percent of female undergraduates reported being sexually assaulted during the 2014-15 academic year; 4 percent reported being raped during the same period.
• On the nine campuses, rates of sexual assault of female undergraduates during that academic year ranged from 4 percent to 20 percent.

Many colleges have conducted such surveys as one way to deal with the issue of sexual assault in the aftermath of heightened federal enforcement of the gender-equity law known as Title IX.