A report released today from the U.S. Department of Justice shows that only about 20 percent of campus sexual assault victims go to police.
Rape happens more to young women between the ages of 18 and 24 than to any other age group, researchers say. And when a woman is assaulted on a college campus, and decides to report, she could go to campus police, off-campus police, a professor or someone else. That’s where it’s difficult to track numbers.
“At Boston College we do not pressure students into reporting. What we do is encourage them to get into that network of care. And we have a number of locations on campus where they can confidentially report and seek help.”
Katie O’Dair is Associate Vice President for Student Affairs at Boston College. It is not one of the schools the federal government is investigating. But the Justice Department is attempting to track sexual assault data and has found that about 1 in 10 college women say that a sexual assault was not important enough to bring to the attention of police.
The research is part of a larger effort the Obama administration ordered earlier this year to pressure colleges to better treat victims. Congress is trying to figure out how to get colleges and law enforcement to work together on these cases.
