More than 1,300 colleges out of over 2,200 surveyed had no reports of rape on campus in 2014, according to a review of federal campus safety data by The Washington Post.
While this may initially be perceived as a positive stride towards the end of sexual assault, it’s actually pretty worrisome. It highlights that a lot of people probably just aren’t reporting their rapes. The review shows the divide between how much we think sexual assault is happening on college campuses, and the actual number of reports that colleges and universities receive. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women are sexually assaulted in college, and a more recent survey has put the statistic at one in four—So a college that really has zero rapes doesn’t seem all that likely.
Laura L. Dunn, founder and executive director of SurvJustice, told The Washington Post that sexual violence on campus is something that society doesn’t want to deal with. “Any time you have a zero, it is not an idicator of safety,” Dunn says. “It is an indicator of comfort in reporting.”
We need to promote a society where people feel comfortable enough to seek help. Just accepting that no one is reporting rape at so many schools won’t help us find a solution ––it only makes us enablers of a problem.