Sexual Assaults Reported to UWM Officials Doubles With Little Student Knowledge

With UWM Sexual Assault Awareness Week nearing, almost 100 sexual assaults were reported to on-campus authorities in 2016. Yet, less than half are directly communicated to students.

A 2016 UW System report on UWM sexual assault included the raw numbers of sexual assault reports on the UWM campus. On-campus crimes must be released and shared with students through the Clery Act. Meanwhile, the UW System numbers are only required to be sent to the state government, although they can be accessed online through 2016.

Thirty-three sexual assaults were included in the 2018 Clery report compared to nine sexual assaults in the 2017 Clery Report. While UWM released reports for 2017 and 2018, UW System hasn’t made its version available yet.

The UW System numbers include both on-campus and off-campus reports, but that’s not the report that gets shared with students. Only on-campus sexual assaults are sent to UWM students.

The Clery Act requires federally-funded colleges to publish crime statistics every year and make that information widely available to students. Relevant crimes include: murder, sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and arrest, according to federal laws.

Importantly, the Clery Act requires only on-campus statistics to be released. So over 80 off-campus reports of sexual assault in 2016 wouldn’t be openly communicated.

Meanwhile, the number of off-campus sexual assault reports continue to rise.

Faith Lemay, the vice president of Panthers Against Sexual Assault (PASA), noticed the rise of sexual assault reports and met with UWM Title IX representatives.

“We felt like our questions weren’t being answered directly and there was a lot of beating around the bush,” Lemay said. “Overall, not very helpful. It felt like they were only talking to us because if we didn’t they knew we wouldn’t stop asking about it.”

While the information contained in the UW System report has been shared online, students must search out that information. With the Clery Act, the information comes to them.

Following Jeanne Clery’s murder in her college dorm in 1986, her parents campaigned for universities to show more transparency about on-campus crime. If parents knew about high crime rates at a university, they could make more informed decisions, the Clery parents reasoned.

But the Clery Act doesn’t cover crimes just a couple blocks away from main campuses. While the on-campus crime rate could be low, the off-campus crime rate could be soaring. Those incoming students and their parents, who the Clery Act sought to inform, wouldn’t know about it.

“There hasn’t been much consideration to extend the Clery Act to off-campus crimes because the Clery Act thinks about on-campus violence, what that violence looks like, and how to combat that violence,” Laurie Egan, the Director of Programming at the Clery Center, said. “It’s about promoting transparency and visibility between employees, students, and institutions.”

While universities are only legally required to publish statistics that happen on-campus, but “on campus” isn’t easily defined.

There are four different ways to think about on-campus, according to Egan: property owned for educational purposes, on-campus student housing, public property owned in part by a university, and non-campus property not on the main campus, but still controlled by the university.

“What’s defined as non-campus geography has been an area of continued growth for everybody,” Egan said.

Federally-funded colleges must follow the Clery Act. Most higher education institutions in the US, both public and private, fall under Clery Act requirements, according to Egan.

The Department of Education monitors the Clery Act. While the information distributed by the Clery Act doesn’t impact funding, universities pay fines if they’re found to be non-compliant.

In 2016, the Department of Education fined Penn State over $2 million, the highest Clery Act fine to date. Penn State failed to notify students about the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal, according to the Department of Education.

The annual report published by institutions, called Annual Safety Reports (ASR), is like algebra, Egan said. ASRs demonstrate that universities are showing their work when dealing with on-campus crimes. The ASR isn’t the solution, but the required work that gets you there.

At UWM, the Dean of Students (DOS) office collects the numbers for Clery Crimes and produces the ASR, which is then sent to all UWM students.

DOS is one of the many on-campus organizations that investigates sexual assault reports.

DOS focuses on the student impact whereas EDS deals with employment matters. “Are they a safety threat? Did they harm another student? What do we do moving forward?” Freer said. Removal or expulsion are among possible sanctions once a party is found guilty.

“The intent of the rules is to be as student focused as we can while balancing the rights of everyone involved,” Dean of Students Adam Jussel said. “We know it’s important, and we know it’s happening.”

DOS investigations are opt-in. If a student reports a sexual assault with little information or they don’t want an investigation, the report dies there. DOS follows the entire investigation from reporting stage to delivering sanctions.

When a student does want an investigation, DOS starts with contacting the victim. “The first and foremost thing we do is provide victims with their rights and resources as well as connect them to a victim advocate to keep the investigation objective,” Associate Dean of Students Becky Freer said.

Following PASA’s meeting with UWM Title IX representatives, nothing changed, Lemay said. There were no new trainings, no new alerts, and no new rhetoric, according to Lemay.

“From this perspective, it seems like they don’t only care about people; they only care about statistics,” Lemay said. “I feel like they need to be a little more genuine and that people just aren’t a number they put on the report every year.”