WSU being investigated over handling of sexual violence

Fifty-five colleges across the country are being investigated to see if they illegally mishandled sexual violence complaints. One college from our state is on that list: Washington State University.

We still don’t know what prompted the investigation as it is still happening, but the university has come out since to provide sexual assault numbers to quell the worried minds of students and parents.

The only problem is, if you do the math with the numbers the school released, some say it just doesn’t work out.

“In 2012, they reported 10 forcible sexual assaults on or around campus. If you just did the math, half of their students or so, they’re going to have around 11,000 women students, that’s less than .001 percent were raped,” says Shawn Vestal, with the Spokesman Review newspaper in Spokane. “Now if you look at the survey where researchers go out and ask women about their experiences, constantly you see much, much, much higher rates of women saying they’ve been raped.”

Vestal has been covering the education beat for more than a decade and remembers when, not too long ago, Washington State University was in trouble for violating the Cleary Act.

“Washington State got in trouble for this in 2011. What they got in trouble for was mis-categorizing two reports on their Cleary Reports. They initially were fined like $80,000, and that got dropped.”

The Cleary Act was developed in 1990 after a 19-year-old Lehigh University freshman, Jeanne Cleary, was raped and murdered on campus.

The Act requires all colleges to keep and disclose occurrences of crime on campus and issue reports annually.

The official White House report says 1 in 5 college women in the United States have been sexually assaulted.

Vestal says based on that comparison, WSU would be at the forefront of progress in reducing sexual assault. Unfortunately, that may be too unbelievable, which is why he’s calling out the college for expecting students and parents to believe their sexual assault numbers.

“We should be aware that we’re not in any way getting an accurate picture of this from these statistics,” says Vestal. “I don’t think Washington State would argue that we are, but if you’re a parent this is what the colleges put forth as meeting the Cleary Act – here is our report on the Cleary Act – these statistics are just clearly not reflecting the scope of the problem.”

Colleges might be motivated to under report sexual assault to keep college admissions numbers up, and because if they don’t issue a Cleary Act report, they can say goodbye to grant money from the U.S. Department of Education.

Vestal says it’s possible the university might not have done anything wrong in this case. But he thinks for all universities, getting an accurate picture of the crime occurring is an important part of better dealing with it.

“I think if universities are going to say alright we’re going to deal with this crime somehow, we’re going to have to own this in some way. There has to be a better accounting than this,” says Vestal. “I think we have a culture that minimizes rape.”