The Sexual-Violence Reporting Gap Has Flipped

For years, researchers studying sexual violence among young women found something consistent: female college students were not at a higher risk of experiencing sexual violence than women their age who never enrolled. Some studies even found nonstudents faced slightly more risk. The baseline data simply didn’t show that going to college made a woman more likely to experience assault.

So when a new study using National Crime Victimization Survey data came out in the Journal of American College Health, its findings were surprising. Because somewhere after 2014, that pattern broke.

More specifically, the study used a sample of 61,869 women aged 18 to 24 between 2007 and 2022. For the first chunk of that window, 2007 to 2014, the two groups tracked closely together, exactly like older research predicted. The rates were basically identical. But between 2015 and 2022, college women reported sexual violence at rates roughly 74% higher than nonstudents the same age. That seems like a complete one-eighty. 

But the picture may not be so straightforward. One reason this study stands out is how it counts the data. It looks at “prevalence,” meaning the actual percentage of individual women victimized, instead of just totaling up raw incidents. That matters because older crime stats were often skewed by repeat victimizations, where a small number of people experienced multiple incidents. By tracking individual prevalence, the researchers caught a real shift between the two populations rather than just a few isolated statistical spikes.

The numbers get even more specific when one looks at where students live. Women living on campus reported a six-month prevalence rate of about 1.05% compared to 0.46% for college women overall, and just 0.26% for nonstudents. For college students specifically, living on campus tripled the risk compared to commuter students, who sat at 0.33%.

While the data can’t tell us exactly why this happened, the timing gives us some insight. The split happened right when the campus anti-rape movement hit the mainstream, heavily driven by federal actions like the Obama administration’s 2014 White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.

That task force changed how universities operate. Universities across the country introduced mandatory compliance training, peer-led awareness campaigns, and expanded reporting systems.  This may have reduced the stigma surrounding sexual-assault reporting and changed how female students view and report bad experiences.

Another possible explanation for the changing data is reporting behavior. This hyper-aware campus environment likely changed how female students thought about and reported their experiences. A student exposed to constant campus definitions and campaigns might recognize and report an experience to a surveyor that a nonstudent of the same age might classify differently.

The authors also point out another possibility: the data might reflect differences in risk stemming from the cramped social life of so many young adults tasting freedom for the first time. Excess alcohol consumption and co-ed dorms could also play a role in creating higher-risk environments, as these environments create more social interaction while also lowering inhibitions.

So what can be done?

If college environments have actually become physically more dangerous due to campus density or social scenes, then universities have a problem on their hands. But if what really changed is a complex mix of how college women name these experiences, then the old consensus is out of date. 

Higher education has spent a decade building an apparatus around sexual violence awareness, and while these numbers show the apparatus has clearly done something, the question of whether campuses are actually any safer remains open.

Reagan Allen is the North Carolina reporter for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.