During the 1980s there were several high profile examples of sexual assault and other violent crimes on college campuses that caused communities and leaders to pay attention to crime on campus (New York Times, 1988). These crimes shattered the public ideal that colleges were safe havens without any threats. Prior to these violent and well-publicized acts, statistics on campus crime weren’t even available. Many schools wouldn’t report statistics because they feared it would hurt their admissions and reputation. Without data, officials didn’t know if crime rates were increasing on college campuses, how prevalent it was, were the crimes committed by outsiders or students? There was no real way to know. Without that knowledge schools were unprepared and did not know the problems they were up against. Another problem was that a substantial portion of the crime was happening just off campuses in apartment buildings and fraternity houses. The University of Princeton decided to hire a sexual assault counselor after reports of female students being verbally and physically harassed on campus. They also hired new security guards and every member of their security team had to meet with the sexual harassment counselor(Purdum, 1988).
Flash-forward to today and crime on campus is still a problem. Reporting of the data can be still skewed because if a crime occurs in an apartment building off campus, it will be reported to the local police department and not fully counted as a crime on campus. Penn State is a good example of this. Thousands of students attend University Park and many live off campus either in an apartment, a house or in a fraternity. But even if you compile every reported rape, you still don’t know how many rapes actually occurred because the percent that are reported can vary year over year. Generally, only fifteen out of one hundred incidents are reported. Nationally, one in five women, one in sixteen men and one in four LGBTQ students will experience sexual assault(Aiken & Vasile, 2018).
“The more people who report, the more convictions we get and the better the system will get,” she said. “People need to report and people are only going to report when they trust the system. It’s like a ‘chicken and egg’ thing.”
For this project, I analyzed the crime rates per 100,000 at the five largest universities in West Virginia. Specifically, I looked at the rate of burglary, larceny and rape that occurs on these campuses. Larceny is defined as the taking of another person’s property while burglary is entering a building with the intent to commit a crime inside. Larceny is often a lesser crime that goes along with burglary. Rape is defined as unlawful sexual activity and usually, sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person’s will or with a person. The universities were selected as the five largest based on enrollment size that had data for at least four of the five years analyzed.
The national crime rate for burglary is 61.7 per 100,000, the national rate for larceny is 296 per 100,000 and for rape it is 7.2 per 100,000 (FBI, 2018). Marshall, Shepherd University and West Virginia University (WVU) each had significantly lower rates of burglary than the national average. Potomac State College and West Virginia State University each had roughly triple the burglary rate of the national average. For larceny Potomac and Shepherd each had a slightly lower rate compared to the national average. West Virginia State University had a rate of larceny more than double the national average. Finally, Potomac State College had no reported rapes in the five years analyzed and Marshall had a rate about half the national average as well. WVU was about even with the national average and then Shepherd and West Virginia State University were outliers. Respectively, rape per 100,000 was five times the national average and three times the national average. In the five years I analyzed, Shepherd had 3 less total rapes than WVU despite having one student enrolled for every seven students enrolled at WVU. Converting to a similar rate gives an easy way to compare between schools that are vastly different in size. Also, in 2013 the UCR changed the reporting measure for how rapes are recorded, this did not appear to affect my data and likely had no effect on my data visualizations.
West Virginia State University published an article describing some of their efforts to lower crime on their campus (West Virginia State, 2011). They provide educational programs that teach students about sexual assault, drug abuse prevention, alcohol abuse prevention and domestic violence. There are also emergency phones located around campus that will allow you to directly call campus police. They also provide counseling services to victims of any traumatic crimes.
References
Aiken, M., & Vasile, S. (2018, April 26). Penn State is no exception to the national sexual assault statistic. Retrieved from https://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/crime_courts/article_c472d106-48ff-11e8-ad51-7be6cc98d357.html
Purdum, T. S. (1988, April 10). The Reality of Crime On Campus. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/10/education/the-reality-of-crime-on-campus.html
West Virginia State University (2011) Crime Awareness Report 2011. Retrieved from http://wvstateu.edu/wvsu/media/About/cs4.pdf
FBI National Press Office (2018, 24 September ) FBI Releases 2017 Crime Statistics Retrieved from https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2017-crime- statistics
