Balt. Sun: An underreported crime [Editorial]

An underreported crime [Editorial]

According to a recent White House report, one out of every five young women is victimized by a sexual assault during her college years. Yet nearly half those crimes are never reported to school officials or to police. Only about 12 percent of students formally report a sexual assault on campus, investigators found, with the result that such acts have become one of the most underreported crimes against college women.
That is why Del. Jon S. Cardin, a Baltimore County Democrat and candidate for attorney general, has introduced legislation in this year's General Assembly that would require Maryland's colleges and universities to conduct anonymous surveys among women students in order to determine how commonly incidents of sexual assault actually occur on the state's campuses. The survey would give school and law enforcement officials a much more accurate picture of how frequently such attacks occur and allow them to target counseling and other services to sexual assault victims more effectively as well as hold the perpetrators of such crimes accountable.


Since 1990, when Congress passed the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or Clery Act, all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial aid programs have been required to collect and publish data on crimes that occur on or near their campuses. The act was named in honor of Jeanne Clery, a 19-year-old college freshman who was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm in 1986, a crime that focused national attention on the problem of sexual assaults against college women...