Student survivor group rolls out new national tool to track campus assaults, hold schools accountable
The campus sexual assault prevention and survivor advocacy group End Rape on Campus on Wednesday is launching a first-of-its-kind tool meant to help students and advocates hold their schools accountable and inform better policymaking in regard to Title IX.
The group’s new “campus accountability map,” shared first with The Hill, will allow users to easily access and compare sexual assault statistics, prevention efforts and survivor support resources between more than 750 colleges and universities nationwide.
Until now, statistics and resources have been scattered across a variety of federal databases and university websites, making it difficult for students to collect detailed information on services available to them and how they can hold their campus leadership accountable.
Kenyora Lenair Parham, the executive director of End Rape on Campus, told The Hill in an interview this week that she hopes the tool will empower current and prospective university students and their families to push for widespread change.
“Our hope is to centralize all the data, instead of having students go through pages of digital PDFs on the school’s website and find information to no avail,” she said. “The mapping tool makes it much easier for those students to have those resources, that data and that knowledge readily available to them. That also, in turn, allows them to hold their campus leadership accountable.”
The accountability map’s numerical statistics — including the number of rapes and fondlings and instances of stalking and domestic and dating violence reported at each university — were collected using campus safety and security data compiled by the Education Department and represent the total sum of incidents reported between 2018 and 2020, the most recent time period for which data is available.
A spokesperson for End Rape on Campus said the organization plans to update those numbers later this year, when 2021 crime statistics become available.
The group’s accountability map also provides users with easy access to information related to colleges and universities’ survivor support policies and definitions of assault, consent and retaliation, as well as whether a school has claimed a religious exemption from Title IX or is currently under investigation for sexual misconduct-related violations.
Preliminary data shows a definitive lack of survivor resources, the group says — particularly trauma-informed resources — on campuses across the U.S.
Only 5 percent of schools, for instance, require Title IX investigators and adjudicators to receive cultural competency training or have campus police who are trauma informed.
Just over a quarter of campuses partner with local rape crisis centers, according to the accountability map, and only 52 percent refer student survivors to local hospitals for forensic exams. Roughly 60 percent offer an amnesty policy protecting students who report an assault.
Parham said End Rape on Campus plans to use the tool to provide the Education Department with recommendations that would make Title IX work better for student survivors.
“Here’s an opportunity to make change on the policy front, where we can not only make recommendations, but potentially mandate some of these policies to go into effect from a federal level,” she said.
In June, the Biden administration issued a slate of proposed changes to Title IX that would, in part, alter how schools handle reports of sexual assault and harassment by rolling back a set of Trump-era rules that have been criticized by survivor advocacy groups for prioritizing the rights of the accused.
Federal legislation has also been introduced to that effect, and the Students’ Access to Freedom and Educational Rights Act, or Safer Act, proposed in December by Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) would strengthen Title IX protections for student survivors of sexual assault or harassment.
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