Colleges should embrace plan to battle campus sex assaults

Many high school graduates in the nation and the Mahoning Valley will proudly walk across stages this month to collect diplomas as their ticket to the college adventure they envision as a rewarding gateway to the American Dream.

That enriching adventure should open vast new vistas of wordly knowledge, critical thinking and professional development for them. Sadly, however, far too many college students discover that an otherwise enriching college adventure can quickly and horridly go sour.

Many, if not most, campuses across America have become breeding grounds for rape, sexual assault and sexual exploitation. For too many years, too many victims have remained silent. At the same time, too many college administrations have looked the other way.

Silence, ignorance and apathy do nothing but invite ongoing turmoil for victims while providing implicit passes to rapists to continue their vile behavior.

That’s why a new initiative from a White House task force under the leadership of Vice President Joe Biden offers hope to lessen the incidence and scars of college rape. The initiative released in a formal report aptly titled “Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault” should be required reading for all college and university administrators, faculty and students alike. It is long past time that this scourge comes out of hiding and receives the serious attention needed to combat it.

As Biden points out, the initiative’s premise is based on bedrock American ideals: “Freedom from sexual assault is a basic human right… a nation’s decency is in large part measured by how it responds to violence against women… our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our mothers, our grandmothers have every single right to expect to be free from violence and sexual abuse.”

SCOPE OF COLLEGE RAPE

Toward that end, the report lays out in no uncertain or sugar-coated terms the mammoth scope of the pernicious problem of campus rape: “One in five women is sexually assaulted in college. Most often, it’s by someone she knows — and also most often, she does not report what happened. Many survivors are left feeling isolated, ashamed or to blame. Although it happens less often, men, too, are victims of these crimes.”

More importantly, the initiative outlines and promotes a battle plan, based on three months of intensive interviews with thousands of college students across America. Among the recommendations in the 20-page report, available online at whitehouse.gov, are viable tools such as teaching bystanders appropriate ways to intervene to prevent sexual assaults, suggestions on improving guilt-free access to confidentially reporting sex crimes and developing formal university policies on perpetrators’ punishment — up to and including expulsion.

The first step, however, must be for all colleges and universities to educate themselves on the scope of the crime. Toward that end, the task force recommends all campuses voluntarily conduct a campus-climate survey to gauge the prevalence of sexual assault, test students’ attitudes and awareness about the issue, and provide tools for crafting solutions. A model survey is included in the task force’s report.

We urge Youngstown State University and other colleges and universities in our region to build a survey and implement it during the upcoming 2014-15 academic year. Its results should then serve as the first of many steps toward preventing the college adventure from turning into a college tragedy.