Why are campus sexual assault cases going unreported by colleges?
Women who report sexual violence on college campuses seldom see their accused attackers arrested and almost never see them convicted, according to a Tribune survey of several Midwestern universities.
The survey of six schools in Illinois and Indiana found that police investigated 171 reported sex crimes since fall 2005, with 12 resulting in arrests and four in convictions. Only one of the convictions stemmed from a student-on-student attack, the most common type of assault.
The rate of arrests and convictions is far below the average for rapes reported nationally.
The trend leaves untold number of college women feeling betrayed and vulnerable, believing that their allegations are not taken seriously. The Tribune's findings also raise fresh questions about the way college administrators and law enforcement officials handle the allegations, even as the Obama administration calls attention to the issue with a series of initiatives and investigations aimed at better protecting students from sex crimes.
Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, said the Tribune's findings are in keeping with anecdotal evidence her office has gathered from victims.
"I say this, albeit, with a very heavy and saddened heart," Ali said. "These kinds of data are illustrative of the disturbing and alarming trend we are seeing across this country."
For its survey, the Tribune selected public and private colleges with varying student enrollments in Illinois and Indiana. The Tribune compiled its information from crime data that campuses are required to report under federal law, and then checked with college administrators, prosecutors and others to obtain arrest and conviction information.
Indiana University has seen only one conviction from its 69 allegations of sexual attacks reported to police during that time period. On Thursday, a Monroe County judge accepted Hai Yu's guilty plea to sexual battery and criminal confinement, making him the only one convicted of a student-on-student sex crime in the Tribune survey.
The university's numbers do not surprise Margaux Janda, a suburban Chicago woman who accused a fellow Indiana student of rape after she had a night of drinking in 2006. Police declined to press charges against her alleged attacker; the university eventually suspended him for a year.
Though the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights investigated her complaint during the Bush administration and found that the university acted "promptly and appropriately," Janda still left the school rather than share a campus with the man.
"Part of me wonders why someone would even bother making a report," she said. "What's the point in going to police if they don't do anything about it? It almost makes me feel worse."
Kim Lonsway, director of research for the nonprofit group End Violence Against Women International, worries that low arrest and prosecution rates could discourage future victims from coming forward, leaving them with the impression that reporting a sex crime is pointless and only serves to cause further pain and humiliation.
"If you're a parent or student looking at those numbers, it suggests rapists can commit their crimes with impunity," she said.
The Department of Education currently is investigating a number of colleges for how they have handled sex offense reports, including Yale University, Ohio State University and Notre Dame. The department began looking into the pre-eminent Catholic university in November following a Tribune story about a student who killed herself shortly after telling campus police that a male student there sexually attacked her.
The department this year also began a new initiative to push educators, police and others to aggressively pursue reports of sexual violence on campuses, where nearly 1 in 5 women will be a victim of an attempted or actual sexual assault during their college careers, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-campus-sexual-assaults-0617-20110616,0,769086,full.story
D.C. Chief Lanier disputes Human Rights Watch report on sex assaults.
Washington - The D.C. police chief has asked federal authorities to review the city’s handling of sexual-assault reports after a human rights group complained that detectives in recent years failed to conduct investigations in many cases and routinely behaved “in a dismissive or insensitive manner” toward alleged victims.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said that after researching cases dating as far back as 2006, it intended to publish a study criticizing the way D.C. police deal with reports of sexual assault involving adults later this month. The group summarized its study in a May 30 letter to Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier, who disputed the findings and asked the Justice Department to conduct a review “as an impartial third party.” She sent her request to the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Late Thursday evening, Lanier met with the study’s author, Human Rights Watch lawyer Sara Darehshori. Lanier agreed to make additional departmental files covering sex assault cases available to Darehshori; Darehshori said her group will publish its report after seeing the files.
In her May letter to Lanier, Darehshori says her research indicated that the number of sexual assaults reported at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in recent years was far higher than the number investigated by police, suggesting that detectives were quick to dismiss many reports as untrue. Interviews with alleged victims, hospital workers and others supported that conclusion, she said.
“Our research indicates that a significant number of sexual-assault cases are not being documented” by police, Darehshori said in her letter to Lanier.
Darehshori also cited the “revictimization” of women, telling Lanier that “detectives regularly treat victims in a dismissive or insensitive manner, adding to their trauma and undermining the possibility that their perpetrator will be brought to justice.”
The behavior included “questioning survivors’ credibility; actively discouraging victims from reporting or providing forensic evidence; threatening victims with prosecution if they are found to be lying; asking victim-blaming or inappropriate questions; telling victims that their stories are not serious enough to investigate; and failing to keep victims informed of progress on their cases,” Darehshori wrote.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/2012/06/14/gJQALzQcdV_story.html