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College students who survive sexual assault rarely report it to their schools. And students at Syracuse University are no exception.

Data spanning multiple years shows that just 5% of students who are sexually assaulted while at SU report their assault to the university. Experts on campus sexual abuse and Title IX, a law prohibiting gender-based discrimination, said that while the problem isn’t unique to SU, it’s still cause for serious concern.

“No school is ever going to get 100%, but no school should be satisfied with 5%,” said Brett Sokolow, president of the Association of Title IX Administrators.

The statistics come from the Survey on Sexual and Relationship Violence, which SU conducts every two years in compliance with New York state’s Enough is Enough legislation. The most recent data, released in December, shows that about 19% of SU students who participated in the survey have experienced nonconsensual sexual contact at SU.

A 2015 report by the American Association of Universities found that rates of reporting to campus officials and law enforcement or others were low, ranging from 5% to 28%, depending on the specific type of behavior.

Of students who said they were sexually assaulted at SU, about 95% did not file a report. That percentage, which some experts have called unusually high for a school of SU’s size, hasn’t changed since the university’s previous 2018 report.

“If 95% of people who were affected by sex offenses aren’t reporting them, then we’re underserving 95% of the people we could be serving,” Sokolow said. “The real question for a school like Syracuse is what are the barriers? Are they studying this? Are they asking this?”

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SU tracks data and feedback about its services and resources to guide efforts to address sexual and relationship violence on campus, university officials have said. But it can be hard to know how survivors of assault who report actually feel about how SU handles their cases.

In its 2020 survey report, SU withheld data about questions that address fairness and the extent to which the university’s formal complaint resolution process helps students deal with their assault. Seth Ovadia, associate director in the Office of Institutional Research, said SU removed the data points because only a few students responded. Withholding those numbers protects the anonymity of the respondents and prevents conclusions being drawn based on insufficient data, Ovadia said.

But detailed and widely circulated data about the barriers to reporting sexual assault at colleges and universities is an important part of increasing the rate of reporting, Sokolow said.

“It’s not really rocket science,” he said. “You ask the people who are finding there are barriers and impediments, what are their barriers and impediments, and if enough people say the same thing, you look at how you can deconstruct that barrier or find a workaround.”

The Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities, which oversees conduct proceedings related to Title IX violations at SU, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment in time for publication.

Nellie Drew is the director of the Center for Advancement of Sport and a professor of practice in sports law at the University at Buffalo. Enforcing Title IX, she said, can be complicated, even with well-trained and compassionate officials at the helm.

“Even though we’ve come a long way, many people who’ve experienced this type of situation do not feel that they are adequately supported throughout the process, despite the best efforts of very good, very capable people at the institutions,” Drew said.

The emotional burden of the student conduct process, even when performed quickly and effectively, can be too much for many students to bear, she said.

“It’s mentally traumatizing, so you can appreciate why some people choose to try to put the incident behind them and move forward without addressing it using the framework that we have with the Title IX,” Drew said.

Trump-era Title IX updates have further complicated the already complex campus conduct ecosystem, Drew said. The prospect of a cross-examination — which became possible under new guidelines from former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — can have a “dampening effect” on reporting, since many survivors of assault worry about having to relive their trauma, even if their alleged abuser isn’t the one asking the questions or even in the same room, she said.

Though the DeVos regulations opened the door for some new options to resolve conflicts informally, Sokolow said the regulations also make the process of reporting sexual assault more adversarial than it needs to be, which can deter students from reporting.

“We’re colleges. We’re here to teach. We’re here to educate. We’re not here to be punitive,” Sokolow said. “We have to be on occasion, but that doesn’t mean that the process itself has to put two individuals who’ve been through a horrible conflict into further conflict with each other. That seems almost inhumane.”

Students, as well as lawyers handling lawsuits related to Title IX conduct cases, frequently argue that cross-examination is essential to a fair hearing.

As Obama-era guidance sought to make universities more hospitable places for survivors of assault to adjudicate their cases, there were incidents in which respondents weren’t given adequate opportunity to to present their side of the story, and there are dramatic examples of cases in which universities didn’t even afford those accused of assault rudimentary due process, Drew said.

Some colleges and universities have struggled to find the right balance of sensitivity for survivors and fairness for the accused, Drew and Sokolow said. That’s why transparent and effective communication about Title IX policies and reporting options are so important for schools, they said.

“The most proactive schools are collecting data, and then when they find that they have an issue with respect to reporting numbers or barriers to reporting, they are plugging away diligently at those barriers to see if they can bring the numbers up,” Sokolow said.

Those barriers can vary from school to school, but there tend to be common threads across college campuses, he said. Syracuse should be working to determine if students have lost confidence in its Title IX office or if the office and its resources are too hard to find. Perhaps the staff who make up the office need to be more racially representative of the student body. Perhaps the university needs to do more advertising about its amnesty policies or privacy protections for students who report assault.

Whatever the necessary changes might be to get more students to report, those changes often have to go above and beyond the obligations set forth by Title IX, Sokolow said.

“The regulations set a floor,” he said. “So schools will hopefully aim for a ceiling, but the ceiling is defined differently by different schools.”

Published on March 9, 2021 at 11:04 pm

Contact Michael: msessa@syr.edu | @MichaelSessa3