Editorial

Dealing with sexual assault on campus

Posted

The numbers from the U.S. Justice Department are sobering: from 1995 to 2013, more than 10,000 women in college were raped. Nearly 10,000 more were victims of other forms of sexual assault, and another 10,000 fought off attempted assaults or were threatened with one.

This national problem has a local dimension as well. At Adelphi University in 2013 — the most recent year for which data is available — two people were the victims of sex crimes. There was one reported victim at SUNY Old Westbury. At Hofstra University, the number was four. There were six rapes reported at Stony Brook University that year. And those were just the incidents that were reported. The Justice Department estimates that a staggering 80 percent of college sexual attacks go unreported.

And they don’t just involve women. According to the Justice Department’s report, issued last December, 6,500 college men surveyed reported sexual assaults during those 19 years — more than double the number of assaults among 18- to 24-year-old men who were not in college. Men make up 17 percent of college sexual assault victims.

It’s long been known that sexual crimes are a uniquely insidious problem on college campuses. Many victim advocacy groups claim that colleges try to cover up sexual assaults, in effect protecting the perpetrators rather than the victims. After all, no one wants to pay for their kids to go to a school where a number rapes have been reported.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is making an effort to combat sexual assault on college campuses in New York state, and we applaud him for it. Last year he implemented a series of reforms directed at all of the SUNY campuses. New York has the largest public university system in the country, so it was a good place to start. Now the governor is proposing a bill to make all of the state’s colleges comply with the new SUNY standards.

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