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Campuses must do more to stop sexual assaults

Ohio’s Department of Higher Education has been keeping track of sexual-violence prevention efforts at institutions of higher education, through its Changing Campus Culture initiative. Last week, the agency released the good news that there have been significant improvements in those efforts.

Note the careful wording there, on improvements in efforts to prevent sexual violence.

A survey of those efforts found 92 percent of participating campuses are collecting sexual-violence data now, and 77 percent have awareness campaigns, compared to approximately one-third a year earlier. All private, public and community-technical colleges now offer prevention training to staff, faculty, campus police and students. Trained responders to support survivors of sexual assault are now in place on 95 percent of campuses, and confidential advisers at 85 percent.

Fantastic. The $2 million allotted by the state for such initiatives must really be paying off, right? Not quite. A survey of students, not “efforts,” found more than 18 percent of Ohio public college students and 11 percent at private schools witnessed a situation last school year they thought was, or could have led to, a sexual assault. Twenty percent of public school students and 17 percent of private school students had a friend say they were raped, sexually harassed or stalked.

In 2015, there were 82 sexual assaults reported on Ohio college campuses — 30 of them at Ohio State University. But the executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus was dismissive of the increase in reports from the year before. (By the way, these numbers include only assaults reported on campus. Any incident not “tied to university-owned property” is left out of the reports.)

“Often this means that students are comfortable reporting and know how to report. If a campus does a lot around awareness, typically we see numbers increase,” Allison Kiss said.

So, the number of people trained in prevention or counseling, and the amount of money spent on “efforts” has increased.

Sexual assault is not being prevented at all. Clearly a shift in priority, and a new approach to all that prevention training, is in order.

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