If you’re an IU student, you probably received an email this week regarding a sexual assault awareness survey from the provost’s office.
This survey is apparently serving as a fact-finding tool for the provost’s office to gauge an understanding of sexual assault on campus.
This is a much-needed step toward rehabilitating the reactions and knowledge about sexual assault on this campus.
It’s no secret that sexual assault on this campus is a problem.
Just a week ago, three men broke into an apartment close to campus and attacked two women. This is just one of the more public attacks. Most don’t make the headlines, but you can still read about them with surprising frequency in the Indiana Daily Student.
IU is one of 55 college campuses under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for possibly violating federal laws on how to respond to sexual assaults, which is also terrifying for ?students.
This survey is much-needed, even overdue. It aligns with the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault.
This campaign called for colleges to administer fact-finding surveys in April.
The sponsors of the survey include the Office of the Provost, the IU Student Welfare Initiative and the IU Women’s Philanthropy Council.
The drafters include the Dean of Students Office and the Kinsey ?Institute.
This survey is just one of a few measures IU is trying to take in order to get a better handle on what the White House is calling an epidemic.
That’s good — they should be.
The Washington Post ranks IU-Bloomington among campuses with the highest rates of forcible sexual assault offenses in the country, with 54 reported cases from 2010 to 2012.
Those are our fellow students. Those are people we know, our classmates, our floormates, our friends.
That is our campus that is unsafe, our home or our home away from home. And it is our provost’s office that is under investigation for possibly not handling these cases according to federal laws.
Understanding the available information about sexual assault on campus and the definition of consent as well as the procedures for reporting sexual assault are the first steps the administration is taking to fix the climate on this campus.
However, the survey itself won’t actually serve the students.
It is only what the administration does with the information that will matter.
Hopefully it doesn’t stop with the survey, and we see some real change. Hopefully, this will lead to numbers dropping and a safer campus for ?everyone.
jordrile@indiana.edu
