Campus Sexual Assault

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As I have spent my first couple weeks at college I have realized how vulnerable one can be. As an undergraduate girl my safety is at more risk than anyone else on campus. I decided to research how safe UIUC campus is against sexual assault. When sexual assault occurs, the victim is not the only one that is hurt. The families and friends of victims and the community in which the assault occurs is impacted by any attack. The safety of somebody’s sister, daughter, or son is at risk anytime another assault arises. This essay is a work to analyze the safety of all college campuses including UIUC and what actions institutions are enforcing to keep their students safe. The Daily Illini’s article “Students Knew Their Attacker in University Sexual …show more content…

They emphasize how this case on our campus is the standard kind of assault situation. This case occurred within the first two months of classes beginning and both victims knew their attacker. This article cites not only that over half of college assaults occur in the first four months of the school year. Their interview with the Director of the Women’s Resource Center also included data that has been collected by the National Institute of Justice on sexual assaults that shows, “between 85 and 90 percent of female survivors of sexual assault knew the person that assaulted them.” Collectively, the authors are responding to the conversation and research on sexual assaults across college campuses while providing their readers with information about how these statistics are prominent in our own community. They are agreeing with and providing evidence for this research, while raising awareness about how close to home this threat is for students. One strong characteristic of this article is the amount of other statistics reported about sexual assault for both men and women. Compared to other articles, by including an interview with the head of an on-campus resource and a direct case from this year, this article is the closest I have come to direct information about UIUC campus specifically. Therefore, this article is vital to understanding how my topic relates directly to our …show more content…

The research done by Backes, Fedina, and Holmes concluded that, “Findings among studies measuring unwanted sexual contact…ranged from 1.8% to 34% of college women,” “studies measuring incapacitated rape…ranged from 1.8% to 14.2%,” and “studies measuring sexual coercion…ranged from 1.7% to 32% of women” (11). Research such as this proves that although results from school to school may be varied, there is still a predominant issue of sexual assault that affects about a quarter of the women population on campus. These findings contribute to the claims of the previous article, by providing more data on the frequency of assaults. A good portion of this article agrees with the conversation of campus safety being a problem, however part of this article adds more to the conversation by pointing out the fact that most research done on this topic is mainly sampling white, heterosexual, women in four-year universities. Since there is not much data on minority and nontraditional colleges, the rates of assault could essentially be even higher than what has been calculated so

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