The current Presidential election has brought the conversation and topic of sexual assault once again to the forefront of the news.
It is estimated that the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions may be between 20% and 25% over the course of a college career.
Among college women, 9 in 10 victims of rape and sexual assault knew their offender.
Almost 12.8% of completed rapes, 35% of attempted rapes, and 22.9% of threatened rapes happened during a date.
2.8% experienced either a completed rape (1.7%) or an attempted rape (1.1%) during the six-month period in which the study was conducted. Of victims, 22.8% were victims of multiple rapes. If this data is calculated for a calendar year period, nearly 5% of college women are victimized during any given calendar year.
It is estimated that for every 1,000 women attending a college or university, there are 35 incidents of rape each academic year.
Off-campus sexual victimization is much more common among college women than on-campus victimization. Of victims of completed rape 33.7% were victimized on campus and 66.3% off campus.
Less than 5% of completed or attempted rapes against college women were reported to law enforcement. However, in 2/3rds of the incidents the victim did tell another person, usually a friend, not family or school officials.
The A.A.U. survey found that even in the most serious assaults, those involving penetration, almost three-fourths of victims did not report the episode to anyone in authority, let alone law enforcement. The reason victims gave most often for not reporting episodes was that they did not think the episodes were serious enough to report; others said they felt ashamed, or did not think they would be taken seriously.
“This survey is significant confirmation of a major problem, and it confirms what we’ve been saying about the mind-set on campus and the reception survivors expect to encounter,” said Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, deputy director of Know Your IX, an advocacy group that fights sexual assault.
Most of the institutions in the study released their own figures from the survey, and several of the most respected ones had some of the highest rates of sexual assault by force or incapacitation for undergraduate women — 34.6 percent at Yale, 34.3 percent at the University of Michigan, and 29.2 percent at Harvard.
Transgender students and others who do not identify as either male or female had higher rates of assault than women. Experts said this was the first large-scale study they knew of to measure the extent of the problem for transgender students.
One in 5 women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college. More than 90% of sexual assault victims on college campuses do not report the assault
63.3% of men at one university who self-reported acts qualifying as rape or attempted rape admitted to committing repeat rapes.
Sheetal Tadiparty
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