BY ZOE RUDERMAN
A survey conducted by the Chicago Tribune found that of the sex crimes reported on college campuses in the past six years, only seven percent resulted in arrests and less than three percent resulted in convictions. That is well below the national average; about 25 percent of reported rapes result in arrests and about two-thirds of those arrests turn into convictions, according to the Tribune.
The newspaper looked at 171 cases that took place at a variety of Midwestern schools. Some of the schools they investigated, like Northwestern, had over 20 reports of sexual assault, but not a single arrest or conviction. Other colleges, such as Notre Dame, didn't have much better stats: they had 34 sex crimes and just four arrests and zero convictions. And Indiana University had a whopping 69 allegations of sexual violence and only one conviction.
And according to Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, this isn't just happening in the midwest. She told the Tribune, "These kinds of data are illustrative of the disturbing and alarming trend we are seeing across this country."
This comes on the heels of another scary revelation that some campuses may be neglecting to correctly and completely report sex crime statistics. A few weeks ago Yale University was found to have omitted certain "forcible sex offenses in its report of annual crime statistics when the crimes occurred". The university claims that the mistake has been corrected, but they still stand to lose federal funding for student aid because of the violation.
Read more: Sexual Assault on College Campuses - Reporting Rape Leads to Few Arrests - Cosmopolitan
