“A college campus isn’t the first place that comes to mind in a discussion about violent crime.

But research funded by the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 1 out of 5 college women will be sexually assaulted. NPR’s investigative unit teamed up with journalists at the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) to look at the failure of schools — and the government agency that oversees them — to prevent these assaults and then to resolve these cases.”

Download an .mp3 of the NPR report

[Running time: 7:47 mins.]

• Privacy Laws Prevent Sex Assault Investigations
• Rape Prevention Fails when it’s Focused on the Wrong Rapist
• Video: Privacy vs Prosecution

Jordan Wirfs-Brock

Jordan Wirfs-Brock is a master’s degree candidate in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado whose interests include data visualization and map-making. She’s written stories about garbage, dairy farming,air pollution, and spider hunters. Before moving to Colorado, Jordan was a science teacher in South Korea. She loves to run and is currently training for her seventh marathon.

Lauren Seaton

Lauren Seaton is a second-year master’s degree candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to graduate school, she spent five years with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC, working as a Food and Beverage Manager in Avon, Colo. A New Hampshire native, she graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges with a Bachelor of Arts degree in writing and studio art. For the past seven years she has called Colorado home.

Andrea Sutherland

Andrea Sutherland is a master’s degree candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado. Sutherland has worked for Climbing magazine, the Climbing Wall Association and the University of Colorado in various media roles. When not working, Sutherland enjoys all that Boulder has to offer including rock climbing and snow boarding. Sutherland graduated from DePauw University in 2007.

Mike Koshmrl

Mike Koshmrl is a second year graduate student at CU, with a focus on environmental journalism. Born, raised and schooled as an undergraduate in Minnesota, he spent his lone year in the real world working as a tutor in a North Minneapolis-division of the AmeriCorps. Since embarking on his ill-timed journalism endeavor, he has written for newspapers in Summit County and Fort Collins, Colo., and Fairbanks, Alaska. In his spare time Mike can be found fly fishing, playing basketball, flailing around on skis, or prone in the cemetery near his house with a good book.

Elizabeth Miller

Jim Sheeler

Jim Sheeler is a “scholar in residence” at the University of Colorado and freelance reporter. He won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while reporting for the Rocky Mountain News. Sheeler is the author of “Final Salute” (The Penguin Press) and “Obit” (Penguin Group). He previously contributed to “Best Newspaper Writing 2006-2007” (CQ Press), and “Life on the Death Beat,” (Marion Press). Sheeler has won numerous national writing awards and served as a featured guest speaker for military and journalism organizations. He has a B.A. in journalism from Colorado State University and an M.A. in journalism from the University of Colorado.

Laura Frank

Laura Frank is director of I-News, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network. I-News delivers multimedia reports to news outlets across the Rocky Mountain region and is a founding member of the national nonprofit Investigative News Network. Frank, a Denver native, has nearly two decades experience at daily newspapers, radio and public television. She was an investigative reporter at the Rocky Mountain News until it closed in 2009. Her stories have won top awards in both print and broadcast, and helped release innocent people from prison, protect abused children, and win aid for sick nuclear weapons workers.

University of Colorado at Boulder

Officials at the University of Colorado know about a pattern of alleged date-rape drug use at a fraternity in Boulder, but say the law prevents them from naming the fraternity to police.

An investigation of sexual assault on college campuses found CU and others colleges across Colorado are withholding information about sexual assaults against students.

But the issue is more nuanced than first glance might suggest: Advocates say the secrecy is necessary to protect rape victims who wouldn’t come forward otherwise. Law enforcement officials say the secrecy may be allowing more people to fall victim.

This tension is emerging amid major changes in the way universities in Colorado try to prevent sexual assault, and how they publicly report crime on campus. And it matters to all of us because the effects of what some experts are calling an “epidemic” of assaults nationwide are long-lasting and costly to society.

“There was definitely a pattern of women being drugged at a particular fraternity,” said Davian Gagne, who leads gender violence prevention at the office.

But the school’s therapists said they are barred from telling police or anyone else any details about the alleged crimes – which have never been publicly acknowledged until now.
Neither the university nor the police could investigate “because we didn’t tell them” the name of the fraternity, said CU Victim Assistance director Mary Friedrichs. “And we can’t.”
Friedrichs said state law, and the therapists’ code of ethics, prevent her from giving police or the public the details of the alleged crimes. And the university has no jurisdiction over the fraternities because they are not officially part of the school.
The law and the ethics code say all licensed therapists must keep what clients tell them confidential, unless the client wants that information shared. If therapists had to disclose details of a sexual assault to police, Friedrichs said, then victims might never come forward.

Mary Friedrichs

“It’s not that we want perpetrators to get away with it,” Friedrichs said.
But law enforcement officials say that’s exactly what could happen if CU and other schools across the state – and the nation – don’t find a way to both protect victims and prosecute criminals.
“That becomes a real problem,” said Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett. “It’s frankly up in the air how we will resolve this.”

***

Across Colorado – and nationwide – counselors and police officials are conflicted over how to both protect the victims of sexual assault and prevent more people from becoming victims. The tension is emerging amid major changes in the way universities in Colorado and elsewhere try to prevent sexual assault and how they publicly report crime on campus.
All this is happening in the context of what some experts call an “epidemic” of sexual assault on campus. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that one in 28 college women is the target of rape each school year, and that eventually, one in five women is the victim of a sexual assault or attempted sexual assault during her college years.

Only one in 20 ever reports the crime.
An investigation of sexual assault on college campuses in Colorado found that across the state, the number of assaults that colleges reveal to the public is often just a fraction of those that are known to campus officials.
Federal law requires each college that receives federal aid to report to the public the number of sexual assaults and other serious crimes on campus. This is called the Clery Report.
But at three of Colorado’s largest universities, counselors report neither details nor the aggregated number of alleged sexual assaults they learn about from clients.
The most recent data show:

• The University of Northern Colorado in Greeley reported four sexual assaults, but school officials knew of more than twice that many.
• Colorado State University in Fort Collins reported two sexual assaults, but knew of at least three times more than that.
• CU reported 9 sexual assaults, but officials there say about two dozen more students reported sexual assaults to school therapists. It is not clear how many of those assaults may have occurred off-campus, and thus not be part of the Clery Report.

So because the majority of victims go to counselors instead of police, the crimes against those students remain hidden – unless the victims themselves tell police.
This is not true at all colleges. For example, at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, the number of sexual assaults listed each year in its public report includes both those seeking assistance from counselors and reporting directly to police.
At other schools, there is often confusion over who is supposed to report what.
“We operate in terms of confidentiality in Colorado like therapists, but we are not therapists,” said Lisa Ingarfield of the Phoenix Center of Auraria, which serves students from the University of Colorado at Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver and the Community College of Denver. “And so that, I think, is where the confusion comes in about whether or not we have to report.”

***

The CU case highlights the potential consequences when suspected crimes go unreported, and suggests that more attention is needed, said Joanne Belknap, a CU sociology professor who studies sexual violence.
For Belknap, the conflict over reporting is a personal one.
In the late summer of 1980, when Belknap was a senior at CU, she stood in front of the iconic Old Main building on campus, staring down at the outline of a body drawn on the sidewalk. Next to the outline were these words: “A woman was raped here.”

Joanne Belknap

That woman was Belknap.
And though she had fought off her attacker before he could rape her, the sexual assault left her beaten and fearful. She had been hesitant to contact police. But her father did call police, and Belknap said a women’s rights group had apparently noticed the police report and drawn the outline to mark the scene of the crime.
“It made me feel validated in this way that nothing else had,” Belknap said. “I felt like, oh, somewhere this counted for something.”
So while the idea of making a police report might discourage some victims from coming forward, Belknap has found that the reports of others also sometimes help victims decide to make a report themselves – holding the same power as that outline she saw on the sidewalk.

Heather Horton also has seen the strength behind the numbers. As director of the Sexual Assault Response and Prevention office at Colorado College, she produces a public report each year on the number and nature of all sexual assaults involving students.
“I have had a few times where somebody saw the report and that’s part of what prompted them to come in and talk with me about their own experience,” Horton said.
Erin Jemison, director of the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, agreed.
“One of the most healing things I’ve seen with a victim of sexual assault is when they realize that they are one of many,” she said, adding that victims then realize: “If this is happening to this many people, it’s not some specific thing that I did to make this happen.”

The U.S. Justice Department is about to launch a training program for college victim assistance officials. Already, at least one college in Colorado – the University of Northern Colorado – has decided its victim assistance office will begin adding its tally of sexual assault cases to what’s reported publicly, which is known as the Clery Report.
“Any time this crime remains hidden, then everyone else has no idea it happened – and then it can happen again,” said Sally Miller, Deputy Chief of Police at Sonoma State University near San Francisco, who is helping develop the curriculum.
The training will recommend that victim assistance officials use an anonymous form to report details of an alleged crime to police officials.

CU has such a form. It can be found on the campus police Web site. But campus police spokesman and commander, Tim McGraw, said no one has ever used it.
“We’ve had it up for five or six or seven years,” McGraw said, adding that officials across campus know about the form because the campus police do training and distribute information about it. Campus police have another form for anonymously reporting crime on campus, which has been used by victims.
Friedrichs says even if she encouraged her clients to fill out the anonymous form, it wouldn’t be helpful to police because they would still not have a witness to the crime.
Garnett, the district attorney, said law enforcement officials would, indeed, want to find any witnesses to the crime. But some information – even anonymous information – is better than none at all, he said.
“It could be a start,” Garnett said, adding that law enforcement could approach the case in the same way they might begin to investigate a drug ring or a gang.

***

For now, Friedrichs said she can’t reveal the name of the fraternity in question, or even say how many students reported they were victims of date-rape drug use there, though she says it was a small number. She said she has not reviewed her records to check how many reports have involved the unnamed fraternity, nor does she plan to.
That leaves law enforcement frustrated.
“If it’s confidential, law enforcement doesn’t know the extent of the problem,” Garnett said. “If we have a situation where there’s a belief that a particular fraternity or group of people may be engaging in a pattern of criminal behavior, that would be something we very much would be interested in investigating.”

Both sides are keenly aware of the stakes.
“This is a public health issue,” Friedrichs said. “It touches us all. Sexual assault is a very harmful thing. The trauma is deep and long – life-long. And it can be transmitted to future generations. The culture spends so much money on the impacts. All of us are impacted.”
After learning about the alleged predatory drugging, Garnett said he would bring up the issue in ongoing discussions with university officials about confidentiality.
Miller, the Justice Department trainer, says colleges and law enforcement must find a way to protect victims and prosecute criminals.
“Too many times, it’s just extremes,” Miller said. “One side says: You’ve got to report everything so no one else has to go through it. The other side says: Nothing should ever be reported unless the victim wants it. I tell people you have to have a balance. Come to the middle. How can we get the most information out to help the most people?”

In almost all sexual assaults – 90 percent, according to the U.S. Justice Department – the attacker is someone the victim knows.

And that means the rape prevention programs of the past 30 years – rape whistles, walking in pairs, staying out of dark alleys – haven’t really made a dent in the number of assaults on campus.

That’s because efforts haven’t focused on how most rapes happen, says Davian Gagne, gender violence prevention coordinator for the University of Colorado at Boulder.

“If somebody is blowing a whistle, it’s probably going to be in somebody’s residence in a bedroom, and the likelihood of somebody intervening in that situation is pretty slim,” Gagne said. She was hired in 2008 as part of the university’s response to the high-profile sexual assault case involving Lisa Simpson and the university football recruiting program.

Gagne has been focused on a new prevention tactic being introduced at schools around the nation. It’s called “bystander intervention.”

The idea is to teach people to be aware of a bad situation as it develops and to intervene. For example, it might be stopping a friend who’s had too much to drink from leaving a party with a potential attacker.

Studies have shown if roughly a third of the population becomes aware of something, that becomes a tipping point for changing attitudes and behaviors in a culture.

Studies have shown if roughly a third of the population becomes aware of something, that becomes a tipping point for changing attitudes and behaviors in a culture.So Gagne has been working to reach that point, and begin shifting attitudes and actions long before any whistle could be blown.

It hasn’t been easy. Fully funding the program, which would train everyone from the Chancellor, to faculty, staff and students, would cost about $260,000 — money the university doesn’t have. And not everyone on campus sees the need, she adds.

But Gary Pawlas does.

Pawlas, an instructor of mechanical engineering, worked with Gagne and others to develop a sexual assault and sexual harassment prevention program for engineering students.

“I wanted to make sure it was a safe environment for everybody that we had,” Pawlas said.

He was halfway through the workshops when he ran into a former student who told him the kind of story that reinforced his view. She had just quit her job because she said she was being sexually harassed at work.

Pawlas said he’s surveyed workshop participants and found a third said the sessions were helpful, which is around the 30 percent tipping point Gagne cited as necessary for changes in a culture.

“I’m hoping that out of this we can get some awareness at least going, so somewhere in the back of their brain they’re going to say, wait, this isn’t right,” Pawlas said.

That kind of awareness might mean a bystander steps in next time one of his former students encounters harassment at work.

“Part of this,” said Pawlas, “is trying to change the attitudes and protect people one tiny step at a time.”

Would you like to replay the video or share the link to it with your friends?

Mary Friedrichs, who directs the Office of Victim Assistance at the University of Colorado, the District Attorney for Boulder County Stan Garnett and Joanne Belknap, who survived a sexual assault as a student at CU in 1980 and now researchers sexual violence as a professor at CU, discuss the tangle of conflicting priorities between preserving confidentiality of victims and law enforcement’s ability to identify and prosecute attackers.

[Running time: 4:59]

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