Last week, the internet was in an uproar as Brock Turner, a former student at Stanford University, was sentenced to only six months in jail with three years probation after raping an unconscious woman. Because of the impact this case has had on the media and conversations around rape, many people are wondering why we are not talking more about the many other rapes that occur on college campuses.
Stanford students demand school take more action https://t.co/r4LGwuVjJ0
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) June 9, 2016
According to The Washington Post, a new data report on campus rape from the U.S. Department of Education shows that nearly 100 different universities had at least “10 reports of rape on their main campuses” just in 2014. The top two schools with the most rapes, Brown University and the University of Connecticut, tied for the highest total per year at 43 each. 43 people reporting rape per year on these two campuses. Let that soak in.
And that’s just the two highest. Dartmouth College doesn’t fall far behind, with 42 reports, and Stanford also made the top 10 list, with 26 total reports of rape. When looking at the data with school size included, other schools emerged as having more reports compared to the size of their student body. Dartmouth came in at 10th place with 6.7 rape reports per 1,000 students.
When discussing the amount of rapes on Brown’s campus, a spokesman told the Post that “officials at the Ivy League school have taken many steps in recent years to address sexual violence issues and comply with the federal anti-discrimination law known as Title IX.”
Overall, the data shows that there are still just too many campus rapes happening—and we need to do more to change things.