The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act) requires postsecondary institutions that receive federal funding to disclose data regarding crimes that occur on campus. While the act is an important piece of legislation, its impact is severely hampered by the fact that schools fail to provide accurate numbers, likely because the incidents are never reported by the students, or because the schools are not honest in their reporting. The former occurs frequently, and there are numerous well-documented cases of the latter, which have resulted in noncompliance fines.

This issue is particularly problematic when it comes to rape, where underreporting is commonplace. Previous investigations have emphasized that Clery Act data are at odds with more realistic numbers:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/campus-crime-statistics-undercount-sexual-assaults

http://www.aauw.org/article/clery-act-data-analysis/

In this post, I’ve mapped the Clery Act data published in 2015, for incidents occurring during the 2014 calendar year. Overall, more than 90% of institutions reported zero alleged rapes, and less than 1% reported more than 10. I summed the number of reports of alleged rape on campuses by state, then calculated rates per 10,000 postsecondary students. The results are striking: rates of alleged rape are significantly higher in New England than anywhere else in the country. At the opposite end of the spectrum are states like Arizona, Texas, California, and Florida, which host some of the largest universities in the country.

So what is happening? Do Ivy League universities like Brown, Dartmouth, and Harvard (all of which are among the top six schools with the most individual reports) really have more incidents of rape and sexual assault? Or is it that students at those schools are more inclined to report the incidents? Or are the schools more honest in their reporting? Of course, I don’t have an answer for any of these questions, but I find it exceedingly hard to believe that there were fewer than ten rapes at schools with tens of thousands of students like Texas A&M, Arizona State University, Florida International University, and University of Florida.

On a final note, I find it somewhat ironic that the two schools with the highest rates of reported alleged rape are:

1. Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family: five reports among 64 students, for a rate of 781 per 10,000.

2. Brite Divinity School: nine reports among 196 students, for a rate of 459 per 10,000.

Data source: http://ope.ed.gov/security/