Abstract
Ashley C. Rondini on the complexities of campus sexual assault data.
In March 2024, the U.S. Department of Education levied a record-breaking $14 million fine against Liberty University for violations of compliance with the Clery Act—specifically, for a pattern of mishandling and underreporting campus sexual violence incidents. The ripple effects of this decision have included a renewed public interest in the responsibilities of higher educational institutions to cultivate and maintain safe campus environments, take concerns about sexual violence seriously, and transparently report prevalence rates.
As it turns out, despite the threat of hefty fines and bad press, few colleges have faced such scrutiny. The legislation currently aimed at tracking compliance with federal mandates around campus violence and reporting is significantly limited for a number of reasons, including incentives to report lower rates, inconsistent reporting of sexual violence crimes, and misunderstandings around what the data mean. It begs the question: What can—and what can’t—the data collected per Clery Act requirements actually tell us?
the clery act
Under the purview of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 ("Title IX"), federal law requires that educational institutions address sexual assaults as crimes that bear upon gender equity issues. Campus Title IX Coordinators oversee institutional compliance with all gender equity civil rights legislation, including the implementation of sexual violence and awareness prevention education, mandated reporting measures, and the provision of victim supportive measures whether or not a formal complaint is lodged with the institution or reported to law enforcement.
The reporting piece was significantly clarified by a companion law for higher education institutions, the federal Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act of 1990. "The Clery Act," or "Clery," was named to honor the memory of Jeanne Clery, a freshman at Lehigh University who was sexually assaulted and murdered in her dormitory room in 1986. As it turned out, this was but one of a number of violent crimes that had recently occurred on Lehigh’s campus—a fact that was little-known at the time. Crucially, rather than address the lack of transparency in reporting as a civil rights violation, the Clery Act’s stipulations instead conceptualized crime rate reports as "consumer protection" measures, meant to better inform a campus’ "consumers" (that is, its students and their families, faculty, staff, and community members).
Indeed, as legal scholar Bonnie Fisher and colleagues have discussed since 2002, the mandate to disseminate what would become known as Clery Act data was not foremost framed in terms of reducing sex-based discrimination, nor on cultivating a climate of support for victims. Instead, Clery advocates took a different tack: to put presumably less-safe schools at a "competitive disadvantage" in attracting students, thereby indirectly creating a financial incentive to enhance campus security systems. An explicit goal of the Clery Act was to provide prospective and enrolled students and their families with up-to-date campus crime statistics so that they could make informed calculations about enrollment decisions. One hitch is that the Clery Act requires that campuses share data, publicly and annually, about formally reported incidents of crime on campus. It is, however, widely known that the decision to formally report sexual assault incidents, on-campus or off-, is complicated by a multitude of factors. Sexual violence victims have gone through trauma, and they may be reticent to file formal reports with authorities. Victimization survey data reveals that while campus sexual violence is pervasive at U.S. colleges and universities, it is, comparatively speaking, infrequently reported.
A further complication concerns a paradox facing the Title IX Coordinators charged with providing Clery tallies. The efficacy of these staff members’ prevention and education work is reflected, in part, in having cultivated trust in institutional reporting processes. As attorney and leading Title IX/Clery Act compliance expert Joseph Storch points out, successful efforts to increase use of sexual violence reporting systems may thus yield a quantitative uptick in crime statistics publicly disseminated through their Clery Annual Security Report (ASR) data. Though these increases may actually reflect more, rather than less, effective campus resources and support structures, the numbers look bad for those college "consumers"—especially prospective students and their families.
Data from my semi-structured interviews with 37 campus Title IX Coordinators reveals the tensions consequent to relying on Clery reporting as a measure of institutional transparency—or, by extension, of campus safety—with regard to campus sexual violence. The majority of the Coordinators I spoke with worked at schools located in the northeastern (n=18) and mid-Atlantic (n=16) regions of the United States; a small number (n=3) were at institutions in the deep South. (These in-person interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed.)
deterrents to sexual violence reporting
The U.S. Department of Justice confirms that sexual assault is the most common form of violent crime at institutions of higher education. According to the 2019 American Association of Universities (AAU) Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct, 20.4% of women, 5.1% of men, and 20.3% of transgender, genderqueer, and nonbi-nary students report having experienced sexual assault in the form of "nonconsen-sual penetration, attempted penetration, sexual touching by force, or inability to consent" since beginning their time on campus. The same report indicates that risk of victimization is disproportionately higher, while reporting rates are disproportionately lower for minoritized student populations—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students, as well as students with disabilities. In addition, the American Psychological Association reports that skewed higher risk/lower reporting rate dynamics for sexual and interpersonal violence apply to international and undocumented students, as well as students of color.
It may sound as though we know quite a bit about campus sexual violence prevalence rates, right?
Well, in some ways, we do—but there is a catch. Remember that data from climate surveys involve students’ confidential, anonymous responses. They do not need to have filed a formal report with their college or university in order to indicate on a survey that they have experienced assault. Federally mandated Clery campus crime data, on the other hand, only reflects incidents that are reported to Campus Security Authorities (CSAs), such as campus law enforcement, student affairs administrators overseeing conduct issues, and others with significant responsibility for student and campus activities. This means there is a huge gap between how often students tell us that sexual violence occurs in anonymized surveys and what Clery reporting data can tell us about the very same problem.
For instance, the same 2019 AAU survey revealed that the majority of those who said they’d experienced on-campus sexual assault (70.5% of women, 82.2% of men, and 57.1% of transgender, gen-derqueer, and nonbinary students who reported such experiences) did not contact any campus resources for support. Of the few students who did, 46.8% contacted counseling, 11.2% contacted campus police, and 9.4% contacted local police. Because counseling is a confidential resource, and off-campus, local police may or may not share information with campus authorities, Clery report numbers for these students’ institutions might still miss some cases in which support resources were contacted.
Another "catch" in the data is that the already low reporting rates for sexual assault are further lowered when perpetrators are known to their victims. Sociologist Kristen Budd and colleagues find that this is the case for the vast majority of campus sexual assault instances. Policy scholars Tara Streng and relationship between these numbers. One participant at an Ivy League university bluntly approximated the vast discrepancy between disclosures of incidents and formal complaints counted in Clery report data, saying, "Last year, I think we had 15 or so formal investigations. Probably another, I can’t remember the number, 125-150 reports of some kind came in to me." At a mid-sized private research university, another Title IX Coordinator commented: "I will tell you… individuals who aren’t at the table probably don’t understand what the Clery numbers are. .I think individuals might think that a Clery report is this exact figure of incidents, versus just things that have been reported. I don’t think the general population knows that."
The understanding that Clery reports do not actually perform their intended (and commonly perceived) function was articulated in a number of ways. Seven interviewees, for instance, invoked Clery’s "consumer protection" aspect unprompted, cautioning that Akiko Kamimura add that anticipating ongoing social contact with one’s assailant—as is especially likely to be the case for students on college campuses—may make victims more reluctant to report their experiences, too.
There’s a huge gap between how often students tell us that sexual violence occurs and what Clery data can tell us about the very same problem.
title ix coordinators and the mismatch
My interviews with Title IX Coordinators revealed a shared critical awareness that Clery data is widely misinterpreted, taken to represent actual incident rates rather than just the scope of formally reported sexual violence. Participants repeatedly volunteered the belief that the general public misunderstands the Clery is well-intentioned but in this regard ineffective. As one respondent at a large community college put it: "I’ve heard it described as consumer protection law. Basically, you know, ‘try before you buy.’ Know the data on that school before you enroll, and here’s our effort to be transparent about that data…. It’s a consumer protection law. I get it. I don’t know how helpful it really is to consumers, though… is it really helping students and families feel informed about the campus? I don’t know. ‘Cause it’s also just the number of reports [of sexual violence]."
Title IX Coordinators also noted the difficulties of clearly communicating— within their campus communities and beyond—that higher Clery report numbers for sexual violence should be interpreted as markers of success. Increased reporting, they maintained, reflects successful institutional investments in sexual assault awareness, prevention, and victim support programs and resources. Lower numbers, on the other hand, may indicate institutional failures when it comes to engendering awareness of and trust in reporting and adjudication processes.
Respondents were aware that this may seem counterintuitive for laypersons lacking deep familiarity with issues of sexual violence or who might expect Clery data to function as consumer reports. A participant at one private university lamented the stigmatization that comes with increasing Clery report numbers: "The analogy I use is—say you have a really bad neighborhood, and the people just get to the point where they don’t trust the cops. And then you have a new police chief who comes in and says, ‘We’re gonna try new community policing methods and really build bridges with the people.’ And [the people] start to come to the cops, and they start to tell them about all the crimes that you knew were happening there, but didn’t have data on. .. .So, the crime rate’s gonna go up, okay? So, schools that do a good job with Clery should not be penalized." They continued, "And, so, then the [major newspaper] did a piece [about how there are all of] these schools that are reporting zero, and that’s who, really, we should be focusing on. Because they are telling us something that we know is not accurate."
Notably, not a single respondent suggested that higher reported sexual harassment and assault numbers indicated a "less safe" campus. Instead, I heard over and over again how desirable these numerical increases are across institutional contexts. Rejecting the "rising crime" interpretation, another participant at a private four-year university was emphatic: "I want my numbers to go up. Right? I think you want your numbers go up. our numbers are high because we know about things that happen. I’m happy to have that. That means we’ve given people more support, right?" They added that there’s a sort of snowball effect: "When someone gets that support, if something happens to somebody and it’s somebody else on campus who did this to the other person, they’ll know where to go, and someone will be like, ‘You should go and talk to them. They will help you.’ You know? Yeah! I want the numbers to go up!"
Along these lines, another private school’s Title IX Coordinator commented, "I have friends who have kids here going to college, and they’re like, ‘What should I look at?’" when it comes to learning about the campus. "I’m like, ‘Did you ever look at the Clery numbers?’ . They’re like, ‘What does this really tell me?’ I’m like, ’Well, it will tell you, if there are higher [reported sexual assault] numbers, that they actually do report it, and they think it’s important.’"
This "takeaway" seems diametrically opposed to the mainstream perception of how to interpret the significance of Clery Act report data on sexual violence, given the law’s purpose. And it’s why some Title IX Coordinators described making preemptive attempts to educate families and prospective students about how to interpret Clery reports. Said a small private university participant: "During the parent orientation, we give them numbers and we explain that context…. When they see numbers going up, we explain that that is more an issue of people responding, or reporting, as opposed to greater numbers of incidences." Approaches to providing the crucial context for Clery Act data varied, but the dilemma faced by Title IX Coordinators was remarkably consistent. They understood their role as having to demonstrate that it is lower, rather than higher, numbers of reported sexual assault cases that should be viewed with concern.
looking forward
Contrary to the law’s intended purpose, Clery Act reports significantly misrepresent the prevalence of campus sexual violence. Successful Title IX Coordinators’ education and training efforts may create exactly the opposite effect on incident report numbers than what would yield the widespread perception of a safer campus. Qualitative data demonstrate that the mismatch between the goals of resource accessibility promotion in the interest of equity and crime rate transparency may, at times, put the work of Title IX Coordinators and the mandates of the Clery Act at cross-purposes. Title IX Coordinators’ insights indicate that effective institutional intervention and prevention efforts ideally yield hard-won increases, rather than decreases, in formal reporting of sexual violence—and subsequently higher recorded incidence numbers in Clery Act ASRs.
Publishing disclosures and trends in reported numbers over time might be better understood, then, as good-faith efforts by institutions to address a well-known if often hidden social problem on their campuses. But in even the best of circumstances, these numbers are unlikely to capture more than a small fraction of incidents. So, when institutions of higher education are found responsible for systematically underreporting, we can only imagine how little is actually known about prevalence rates on those campuses.
We know, too, that quantitative data is an insufficient tool for understanding the nuanced complexity of campus sexual violence prevalence, response, and prevention. As sociologists and social policy scholars endeavor to assess which mechanisms of campus reporting are most effective in accounting for (and, thereby, presumably combating) sexual violence, they will have to confront the unintended ways that reliance upon the decontex-tualized use of Clery ASRs to facilitate institutional transparency may obscure precisely what it is intended to illuminate.