Report: Women on college campuses are less likely to be sexually assaulted than female non-students the same age.(Photo: Elise Amendola, AP)
Female college students are less likely than non-students to be sexually assaulted, but they're also less likely to report an assault to police when it happens, a Justice Department study shows.
Department of Justice researchers estimated that 31,302 female students ages 18-24 were raped or otherwise sexually assaulted each year from 1995 through 2013, compared with 65,668 non-students the same age.
In about one in 10 cases, on campus and off, the attacker used a weapon.
One in five victims reported a rape or sexual assault to police. Among non-students, the rate was nearly one in three.
Students are often encouraged to go through the campus disciplinary system instead of local police.
The findings, released Thursday, confirm that most victims know their attackers: One in five sexual assaults is committed by a stranger. .
The findings stand in contrast to an often-invoked statistic that says one in five female undergraduates will experience "an attempted or completed sexual assault" during her college years.
That statistic, from a federally funded study in 2007 of two unnamed large state colleges, said most campus sexual assaults took place when the women were "incapacitated due to their use of substances, primarily alcohol." The new findings show that alcohol was involved in 47% of attacks involving students and 40% of those involving non-students.
A recent
Rolling Stone magazine story describing a "culture of rape" at the University of Virginia has called attention to campus sexual assault, although the magazine's editor has since acknowledged substantial flaws in the story of an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house in 2012.
The new findings suggest that female college students, including part-time students, are at slightly less risk than non-students. From 1995 through 2013, students 18-24 were victims of sexual assault at a rate of 6.1 per 1,000, or about 0.61%, compared with 7.6 per 1,000, or 0.76%, for non-students.
Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), which operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, notes that even though college students are less likely than others to be victims, women in that age group who are in college are about five times more likely than the average American to be sexually assaulted. Women who are not college students are six times more likely, he says. "They're both at risk."
The Justice Department report found that women 18-24 are three times as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as younger or older women.
Berkowitz says he's not surprised by the new findings. "Our experience with the National Sexual Assault Hotline has been that the people contacting us after an assault tend to be in the age range of 18-24, most commonly."
Looking at crime overall, especially violent crime, college students are slightly safer than their non-student peers. In the years studied, the rate of violent crime victimization for students was 46.3 per 1,000, or 4.6%, vs. 73.1 per 1,000, or 7.3%, for non-students. "Violent crime" includes rape and sexual assault as well as robbery and assault with or without a weapon.
The report also found that about 17% of campus sexual assault victims were men.
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