Prosecutors recently indicted Pennsylvania State University's ex-president, Graham Spanier, for allegedly covering up the Sandusky child abuse scandal. Perhaps college administrators across America can now anticipate, with relief, fading public attention to sex crimes at colleges. Sandusky rots in prison and his associates are indicted. Nothing more to see here.

Not so. American universities, public and private, Ivy League and McCollege, have a rape problem. College women have a 28% chance (pdf) of experiencing attempted or completed sexual assault – four times the average risk. Sexual violence also directly affects men, as 3% to 4% of college men – over 6 million American men – report experiencing rape. Where the American rape rate fell 60% in 20 years, the college rate remains the same.

Sociologists Patricia Martin and Marlene Powell termed the series of perverse responses that police, medical, legal personnel and even rape crisis centers offer survivors a "second assault". But American universities, too, exacerbate the problem: their responses to rape are also a second assault.

Survivors are starting a national conversation about this second assault, and this conversation could not come at a better time. Recent and ongoing federal reviews of university sexual misconduct grievance procedures by the US department of education's office for civil rights include such prestigious schools as Harvard, Yale and the University of Virginia.

Most survivors – particularly college survivors – do not report sexual assault. Administrators call non-reporting a problem, but non-reporting reflects survivors' wisdom in avoiding a second assault comprised of bad information, non-transparency and deficient empathy.

Universities maintain an information-poor decision environment that minimizes institutional litigation risks. Specifically, universities withhold three types of information from survivors. First, most universities do not inform survivors they can file civil complaints; rather, they strongly encourage police reporting and also offer an internal university reporting option. Neither of these options serves survivors' best interests. Instead, both set complainants up for failure and further trauma.

Second, universities deny survivors control over their own records in these investigations. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (Ferpa), most universities disclose, to complainant and defendant, their investigation outcome and not the investigation record. This non-transparency magnifies error and abuse potential. It means complainants are unable to evaluate the facts that determine findings, inhibiting complainants' ability to contest these facts and take further informed actions, such as filing civil suits. It also creates an environment in which survivors experience loss of control all over again – once over their bodies, and then over their reporting choices and narratives. More broadly, typical university interpretation of Ferpa effectively seals complaint records, impairing administrators' and survivors' ability to connect paper trails. Thus university rape investigations also fail to protect society from repeat sex-offenders.

Third, universities deny otherwise available legal counsel to students involved in disputes with other students. If you get arrested for drunk-driving, most American universities offer you legal assistance. Not so if you get raped by another student – as in the majority of college rape cases. This policy reinforces survivors' ignorance about civil complaints. Because criminal rape complaints usually fail, civil complaints give survivors an otherwise-absent fighting chance in court.

Civil complaints must meet a "preponderance of evidence" form of burden of proof; criminal complaints require stricter standard of proof because the stakes – life and liberty – are higher. This "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard reduces the likelihood to a single-digit percentage chance that a rapist will be convicted and sentenced to prison. So, encouraging police reporting of sexual assault can have the perverse effect of demonstrating to survivors that police do not believe, and thus will not protect, them.

American universities internally investigating complaints of sexual violence, misconduct and harassment apply a variety of standards of proof. Under pressure from the office for civil rights, Yale recently formalized the lower "preponderance of evidence" standard that is gradually becoming more common. What's also common is a lack of transparency about what this preponderance standard means in practice, the success rates of different types of complaints, how administrators classify complaints and possible outcomes.

Sometimes, survivors may suggest appropriate possible remedies or sanctions, but the criteria (pdf) for when university complaint processes offer that option are generally non-transparent. Uncertainty about possible outcomes contributes to the information-poor environment in which complainants operate.

If university rape complaint judgments may seem meaningless, given shifting standards of evidence and non-transparency about possible outcomes, it's because they are. Findings of sexual misconduct are the worst thing universities can determine, as non-criminal courts, in alleged rape cases. Yet, such findings do not have well-defined consequences: for instance, they do not affect background checks. This means that even if a university rape complaint investigation concludes that the alleged perpetrator did, in fact, violate a school's sexual misconduct policy, that would not affect that individual's ability to obtain a teaching license.

Internal sexual misconduct investigations are also traumatic for survivors, because administrators fail to ensure survivor safety. Most university complaint hearings place the survivor and alleged assailant in the same room at the same time. This practice generates legitimate well-being concerns for some complainants: survivors who report may both rationally fear reprisal and experience traumatic stress in response to "triggers" such as the sound of an assailant's voice.

This second assault by universities on rape survivors privileges institutional over student interests. The motive for this protocol is purely material and reputational: colleges correctly perceive they stand to lose millions of dollars and garner bad press as a result of rape complaints. This calculation accounts for short-term interests holding sway, and institutional, rather than community, well-being being prioritised.

Withholding information from survivors protects universities from lawsuits in the near term. In Franklin v Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992), the US supreme court established that victims of sex discrimination, including sexual abuse, may be awarded compensatory and punitive monetary damages. But in complaints of a sexual nature, universities neuter Title IX of the education amendments of 1972 – the federal law forbidding sex discrimination in education – by not informing complainants about the civil option as a matter of policy.

Universities would also be vulnerable to class action lawsuits in cases of serial offenders if they did not effectively seal internal complaint records. As recently recounted in the Washington Post, psychologist David Lisak conducted a study of 2,000 college-age men in which 120 essentially self-reported committing an average of six rapes apiece. Disclosure of one college sexual misconduct complaint that could be linked to prior complaints would likely result in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the college. Colleges prevent identification of such cases by interpreting Ferpa in such a way as to render illegal formal disclosure of these patterns to complainants.

By disempowering survivors and refusing to police their students, colleges magnify their peril in the long run. Civil liability extends from individual offenders to institutions themselves. As survivors build better informal support networks, and as anonymous digital communication makes it easier for them to share information with relatively low costs, patterns of institutional misfeasance and malfeasance in response to sexual assault, misconduct and harassment become easier to identify. Institutional civil liability is a ticking time-bomb.

Universities can take the following steps to improve their rape response decreasing that liability.

First, provide survivors with enough information to make informed choices. This means informing students of their complete reporting options – criminal, civil and university – and providing enough legal counsel for survivors to understand the possible outcomes and likelihoods of those options. More civil complaints against individual rapists will mean higher costs for pattern offenders, lowering college rape rates.

Second, survivors deserve access to their own complaint records, including the investigation record justifying the outcome. Survivors also have a right to expect their complaint records will be shared across offices – for instance, student services and police departments – at their request, and only at their request. Lowering the difficulty for survivors of reporting across offices increases the likelihood that police can investigate and identify prosecutable criminal cases, again increasing penalties for offenders.

Third, universities need transparent policies that disclose what judgments produced by internal complaint investigations mean. This entails formalizing the "preponderance of evidence" standard in complaints of a sexual nature, and detailing how administrators apply that standard. It also means publishing policies on the range of possible outcomes of internal investigations, which should include letting complainants suggest possible remedies, as they would in civil complaints.

Fourth, university administrators investigating complaints of a sexual nature must offer the complainant an opportunity to opt out of being present at the same time and place as the alleged offender.

Fifth, universities should be required to disclose relevant offender patterns of sexual assault, misconduct and harassment to complainants. This requirement would generate a structural incentive for schools to address the problem of repeat offenders before their behavior escalates. But this reform will likely require a change in federal law, correcting rampant university misinterpretations of Ferpa.

As the rape prevention organization One in Four notes, rape is a global problem, with comparable incidence rates in other places, and institutions in many other countries treat survivors worse than do American institutions. Since Martin and Powell coined the term "second assault" in 1994, much has changed in American society, but not at universities. Typical university rape responses privilege institutional over student interests in ways that empower predators and disempower survivors.

Now reform is possible – because survivors are insisting that the second assault is as unacceptable as the first.