You’ve heard the statistics. One out of four women in U.S. colleges and universities will be sexually assaulted. Or one out of five, depending on who you ask.
You may have even heard that since before you got to college. When President Barack Obama established the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault in January, the numbers were front and center.
Yet University administrators are confident in their reports stating only 22 assaults occurred here at the flagship campus between 2009 and 2013.
That’s the message LSU President F. King Alexander sent along with a report in response to state Sen. J.P. Morrell’s request for information on sexual assault policies from all the public universities in Louisiana.
“While noting that even a single assault is one too many, LSU campuses from New Orleans to Shreveport provide safe environments for our students, and we are committed to continued improvement in this area,” Alexander wrote in a letter prefacing the University’s report.
It should be obvious to anyone familiar with the University — students, faculty and administrators alike — that the actual number of sexual assaults that happened here during that time is far higher than 22. Sadly, we all have friends with stories of this kind of abuse.
For the University’s administration to point to the unrealistically small number of assaults reported over that time period and congratulate themselves for providing “safe environments for our students” is disingenuous at best.
Victims of sexual assault often fear shunning, further abuse and other repercussions if they report their assault, so it is up to the University to create a safe, welcoming atmosphere for victims to come forward.
Despite a new national push to fight sexual assaults at colleges and the obvious underreporting problem, the University has taken only token action on this front.
The Daily Reveille Editorial Board has previously written that, while the resources in place to help victims of sexual assault such as the Lighthouse Program are well-intentioned, they are too poorly trained, staffed and funded to combat a problem of this scale.
Most recently, Alexander published a memorandum updating University policy on sexual misconduct to be in line with the most recent federal guidelines, but no real policy changes were implemented.
The University’s shallow entry in the report to Morrell reflects the apparently low priority the administration gives to this issue. The 19-page report, purported to outline the policy of every campus in the LSU System, contains little more information about University procedure than the Student Handbook. The latter 11 pages of the University’s report are simply a reprinting of the memorandum.
Compare that with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a school with half the number of students enrolled, whose report totals more than 100 pages and includes details about the school’s community outreach programs and employee training procedures.
It’s clear, seeing the effort put into compiling the report, that the administration either truly believes the sexual assault problem on this campus has already been solved or simply isn’t taking the issue seriously enough.
The University must do more than pay lip service to the problem of sexual assault. It must acknowledge that most sexual assaults on this campus go unreported, and it must act to change that fact.
You can reach The Daily
Reveille Editorial Board at
[email protected].