As parents get ready to take their kids to college, here’s something no one told you on the college tour: If you have a daughter, the chance she will be sexually assaulted by graduation is about 1 in 3. This is a heartbreakingly terrible problem. The good news is there are lessons out there about how to solve it, which come from a surprising source: so-called “street crime.”
The first time I heard the 1-in-3 figure, I didn’t realize how shocking this is because I didn’t realize exactly how serious these events are that the campus survey data is capturing. Half are what used to be called rape. The rest involve force and coercion and everything right up to rape. Many women simply aren’t the same afterward. Fully a third consider suicide. This is not what parents hoped for when they heard that college would be a life-changing experience for their daughter.
This is the most important problem in higher education that no one is talking about, one that’s rampant at some of the biggest-name schools.
The problem is so big one might worry it’s too big to fix. But that’s what lots of people thought about street crime in the early 1990s, too, at the peak of the nationwide crack cocaine epidemic. Yet 30 years later, homicide rates in the U.S. plummeted by fully 40%. How did we do that?
There are three lessons to take away.
The first lesson is to find exemplars. For street crime, the exemplars everyone points to are Los Angeles and New York City. They were early and rapid adopters of data-driven policing and investing in community violence intervention groups. Mayors across the country sent their people out there to get new ideas.
For campus sexual assault, the exemplars include places such as Rice University. One thing Rice did was to ban fraternities. The survey data shows that in general, schools without fraternity systems tend to have lower rates of sexual assault. We also see that men who do and don’t join fraternities behave similarly before college, but once in college, the men in fraternities commit sexual assault three times as often. This suggests fraternities don’t just happen to be home to people who would behave horribly no matter what; the fraternities seem to be cultivating horrible behavior.
A second lesson is to pay attention to data and do things that actually work. Universities currently do countless trainings that have no evidence whatsoever of effectiveness. At the same time, few of the trainings that have been proved to work are widely used.
For example, while most training programs are fairly short, the research-based Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act (EAAA) training program engages people for fully 12 hours. It covers, among other things, risk cues in the situation and in the man’s behavior, overcoming the emotional obstacles to prioritizing the woman’s own safety over the man’s entreaties (given most offenders are acquaintances), and practical verbal and physical strategies to get out of a situation. A randomized controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed the program cut sexual assaults in half. Why isn’t every college doing that training?
A third lesson is to think outside the box. With street crime, the numbers seemed overwhelming. In Chicago, for example, we reportedly have more than 100,000 gang members in more than 700 gang factions. The few thousand officers that the city has out on patrol at any given time can’t be everywhere. A key innovation was to prioritize the police department’s limited resources on the small number of gangs that were most violent. The hope was that the threat of police crackdown would reorient the gang’s internal norms from supporting to discouraging violence. The evidence suggests this so-called “focused deterrence” strategy reduces crime.
If fraternities are the campus version of street gangs that university presidents just can’t get rid of altogether, why not think out of the box and apply focused deterrence to the fraternities? Tell them that the next time the victim of a sexual assault mentions your fraternity in any capacity — even if she was “just” served alcohol there earlier in the night — the campus police will make sure every future party that fraternity throws receives hyperenforcement, and every noise complaint leads to a police visit that (while inside) includes carding everyone who’s drinking.
For a long time in America, we thought high rates of street crime and gun violence were inevitable. By being more thoughtful and data-driven, that pessimistic view of things was proved wrong. Too many people today think of campus sexual assault as similarly inevitable. It’s time — perhaps long past time — to prove that pessimistic view wrong, too.
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He also serves on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academy of Sciences.
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