3% of College Women in Survey Are Sex-Crime Victims

Three percent of female college students are victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault each school year, according to a study released Friday by the U.S. Justice Department.

“You start looking at these numbers and you say to yourself, ‘Wow,’ in terms of what college women are experiencing,” said Bonnie Fisher, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati. “Hopefully campus administrators will take this issue a little more seriously.”

Nearly 60% of rapes took place in victims’ residences, and fewer than 5% of rapes and attempted rapes were reported to police.

The report, “The Sexual Victimization of College Women,” estimated that, on a campus where there are at least 10,000 women enrolled, 350 rapes occur each school year.

The National Institute of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics sponsored the study, which was based on telephone surveys of a randomly selected national sample of women enrolled in college at the start of the 1996 fall semester.