Topical look: options for reporting campus sexual assault
How uncomfortable are college students who have been sexually abused on campus — most often by another student — with reporting details of that violence to campus or law enforcement officials, much less mentioning its occurrence at all?
Put another way: How comfortable — that is, how confident — might some sexual abusers in a university environment feel when they assess the likelihood that they will be identified and convicted for sexual violence perpetrated on another person?
Here are a few startling statistics on campus-based sexual assault and sexual violence generally that might surprise — and will undoubtedly disturb — all of our readers who are not already intimately familiar with the deplorable reality surrounding sexual violence and its reporting.
According to a poll jointly administered earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post, about 20 percent of female respondents (women who were college students within the past four years) stated that they had been sexually assaulted on campus.
Although that is indeed an eye-opening revelation and profoundly sad reality, what is equally — if not far more — disturbing is research revealing that fewer than one in 10 students who are sexual assault victims report the incident to either police officers or college officials.
Any carefully calculating perpetrator would certainly be attracted by those odds.
And then there’s this: One study on sexual assault reporting concludes that, when an incident is reported, officials first hear about it in an average case about 11 months after it occurred.
Quite clearly, much needs to change. Victims — certainly women in most instances, but also males — need to feel more empowered to report crimes, and offenders need to be identified and criminally prosecuted with far more regularity.
We will continue with this subject matter in our next blog post, noting specifically an interesting assault-reporting program that has been developed and is currently being tested on select California campuses.
Serving clients throughout the Greater Los Angeles and Southern California area, we represent victims in a variety of civil litigation cases. If you or a loved one has been injured, turn to an experienced Los Angeles personal injury or sexual assault lawyer.
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