A special report issued Thursday by the Justice Department confirmed what is common knowledge among those who don’t think “feminist” is a derogatory term. Women—particularly those who live on college campuses—tend to report sexual assault to police at alarmingly low rates.
The study, which looked at the experience of 18-24 year old women between 1995 and 2013, found that only 20 percent of sexually assaulted college students went to the police. The proportion of non-student survivors who report attacks was 32 percent.
Non-students were also more than three times as likely than students to report their assaults to officials other than police. Most students said they kept to themselves because they felt it was “not important enough.”
The numbers reflect concerns–expressed by lawmakers on Tuesday during a Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on campus rape–that neither college officials nor law enforcement are providing enough assistance to victims of sexual assault.
“Until we’re willing to put more information and control right away in the hands of victims they simply wont trust the system enough to report sexual assaults in the first place,” said subcommittee chair Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
“A crime is a crime wherever it is committed. When it’s treated universally the same way, we’ll have less rape on campus,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said succinctly.
Both Senators are cosponsors of the Campus Safety and Accountability Act, which aim to reduce the frequency with which institutions of higher learning mishandle sexual assaults.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the bill’s author and a witness before the subcommittee, said change is possible. She pointed to recent improvements in military rules that have seen the ratio of reports-to-assaults increase to one in four, from one in twelve. The mandate offering “special victim counselors” to every member of the military who experiences an assault, she said, has made all the difference.
“What we can do is make the information those victims get in the military now available to students around the country,” she urged.
“A victim who is assaulted on a Friday night needs to know on the Friday who she can call and where she can go for confidential support and good information, which we hope gives her the encouragement to make the choice to move forward in the criminal justice system.” McCaskill stated.
Peg Langhammer, the director of a Rhode Island-based center that provides care to survivors of sexual assault, testified before the committee and stressed the need to reform how police deal with allegations.
She called for allowing victims to remain anonymous, with no requirement to meet in person with law enforcement official.
“What we’re talking about doesn’t universally exist today. We have to create it,” she said. “If we expect victims to report these crimes, we need a system that works for them, one in which they are believed, supported, and can be confident in a just outcome.”
In the Justice Department report, 9 percent of students and 19 percent of non-students said they declined to go to law enforcement because “police would not or could not do anything to help.”
The report also found that women both on and off campus don’t receive the proper care, support, and guidance to deal with the trauma of their assault. More than 80 percent of survivors received no assistance from a public or private agency following the crime.
