BOULDER, Colo. — As the new school year gets underway at CU Boulder, students are focused on a plethora of things.
Some leaders on campus are making sure their focus is on preventing crimes, which include sexual assaults.
In August, the university announced that it had created the "Sexual Misconduct Task Force," which is made up of campus leaders and experts.
It's primarily being led by the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC) and the Office of Victim Assistance (OVA).
"We need that kind of more comprehensive effort to start to chip away at this problem," said Teresa Wroe, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Prevention Education in the school's Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance.
The announcement comes at around the same time when Boulder Police announced an arrest in a string of cases where they said a teen broke into several homes and committed lewd acts near women who were asleep.
Last month, there was a reported sexual assault that occurred at a freshman residence hall. No arrest has been made connected to that particular case as of Sept. 9.
But campus leaders hope the task force moves beyond those cases, and has a focus to mitigate these types of crimes in the future.
Statistics provide guidance
This week, the university announced findings that came from a survey taken by more than 10,000 CU Boulder students.
The survey asked, "Undergraduate and graduate women and men whether they had experienced unwanted non-consensual behaviors including sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, intimate partner abuse -- including dating and domestic violence -- and stalking."
The survey found all forms of sexual misconduct decreased from 2015 to 2021. The exception to this was stalking, which the survey found that it remained "about the same."
In 2021, 15% of undergraduate women reported being sexually assaulted since coming to CU Boulder, compared to 28% in 2015.
Approximately 19% of undergraduate women reported sexual harassment, compared to 28% in 2015.
Graduate women, undergraduate men and graduate men reported lower prevalence of sexual misconduct than undergraduate women.
There are a few reasons that CU Boulder leaders say could be why the numbers are lower.
"We attribute that primarily to the pandemic. The pause, students not being together, students often living remotely from campus with families, guardians, students not having that much contact, being masked, worrying about infection," said Julie Volckens, the director of assessment at the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance. "All of those things reduced the opportunities for students to be with each other."
However, Volckens adds that she believes the #MeToo movement may have also contributed to the downturn in cases.
Overall, she believes the data set is pretty widespread by the year at which a student is, their race and ethnicity as well as other demographics.
"We have a really rich data set that we can have confidence in and that data set tells us that something changed," she said.
The survey will now happen every four years to keep up with the data.
Mission
The data as of now will help guide the task force for how to implement new policies having to do with the social environment on campus in the years going forward.
Wroe explained that the support for students extends beyond education.
"Education alone...the work that we do is super important, but that alone cannot solve this problem," she said. "So some of it may be education and more opportunities for education, particularly for our first year students, but also thinking about the academic timing, how we move students in, how we orient students."
Jessica Ladd-Webert, the director of the Office of Victim Assistance, said the issue of sexual assault on college campuses extends beyond CU Boulder.
"We know that sexual assault is a societal-wide problem impacting our community as well as others. And so we need a community response. You can't only have victim services, trauma counseling and investigative offices to address this problem," she said. "We need to have much more buy in, many more people at the table, to look at all the different ways we can be working to prevent this from happening, as well as, of course, supporting those that do."
Meetings with the task force are expected to start next week.
Later this month, on Sept. 26, there will be what's called a campus sexual misconduct town hall where the survey results are presented, and people can ask questions and comment on how to better address the issues on campus.
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