Risk of sexual assault higher for college women while living on campus, WSU study finds

College women who live on a campus are at a significantly higher risk of sexual violence than those who live off campus or don’t attend at all, a new Washington State University study found.

Researchers analyzed decades of national crime data and found a stark change over the years when factoring victims’ college enrollment. From 2015 to 2022, the risk for sexual violence was 74% higher for college women aged 18 to 24 than young women not enrolled. From 2007 to 2014, that risk was similar, regardless of college enrollment.

The results surprised report author Amelie Pedneault, a WSU professor of criminal justice and criminology.

“In previous times, we would always conclude that it was either equal, or women that were at college were actually less likely to be victimized,” Pedneault said. “Suddenly it seems like the pattern has changed.”

Young women who live on campus reported sexual violence at a rate three times that of commuter students. In each six-month spell from 2015 to 2022, an average 1 in 100 women reported sexual violence.

Pedneault and lead author Kathryn DuBois analyzed nearly 62,000 surveys from women in the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2007 to 2022. These surveys include unreported instances of sexual assault and rape.

Though “difficult to pinpoint,” researchers addressed several cultural phenomena that could explain their findings. Researchers’ speculations surround effects of the nationwide proliferation of campus anti-rape initiatives in 2014 and 2017 virality of the #MeToo movement. These movements heightened awareness of the widespread nature of sexual assault, the study considered. Researchers found that during the mid-2010s, years in which these prevention and awareness efforts gained speed, the risk of sexual violence for college-enrolled women began to grow.

Researchers considered whether their findings don’t necessarily represent an increased risk, but rather a boost in college women’s desire to report sexual violence or awareness of their victimization. If that were the case, Pedneault said she’d expect to see a rise in “lower-severity” offenses, like groping, but figures show an increase in sexual violence across the board.

The team speculated about another social phenomenon that emerged in tandem with anti-rape initiatives and general young women’s empowerment: the popularity of online “manosphere” content that brews misogynistic attitudes.

“College-attending women are a primary source of disdain for the manosphere’s misogynists,” the study reads. “Over time, this violent resentment has spilled into mainstream social media and the broader culture.”

The study references the “backlash hypothesis” in which growing vocal resistance to sexual violence among women may inspire increased perpetration.

“When a social movement happens and there’s great strides made towards equality, sometimes this is kind of resisted with some pushback, which might be what we’re seeing on college campuses now,” Pedneault said.

• The findings didn’t come as a surprise to Amy Sharp, director of the Women*s Center at WSU. The center has been open since 1974, offering resources and educating students around sexual assault. Sharp is a mandatory reporter of sexual violence, and sometimes takes reports from students if they’ve been victimized or refers students to confidential sources if they just need a listening ear, like Alternatives to Violence of the Palouse.

College is a vulnerable time in a young woman’s life, Sharp said. Enrolling and leaving home provides an atmosphere of independence while students are still teenagers. Add the allure of partying and underage drinking, Sharp said it’s important for women to know their boundaries and be empowered to enforce them.

“You’ve got to come at it being very knowledgeable about yourself, your body, what you want, what you don’t want,” she said.

• Sharp said the findings about heightened on-campus risk illustrate the need of nearby resources for college women, like on-campus the Women*s Center at WSU, a stone’s throw from where young women are living. Education efforts are also essential in prevention, she said, with the Women*s Center often hosting talks on understanding consent, among other topics.

Originally opened in 1980 as a domestic violence crisis center, Alternatives to Violence of the Palouse offers similar prevention, education efforts and advocacy for survivors of sexual violence.

Britt Brown, a crime victim advocate with Alternatives to Violence, said education surrounding giving and receiving consent should start sooner.

“Just having so many, really kids, coming together and coming into this situation where they’re told ‘OK, you get to make all the choices,’ but not having the information to make these choices, I think would contribute to what’s going on in general across all college campuses,” Brown said.

Researchers eyed several factors that may make campus living riskier, like the proximity of potential offenders and victims, the prevalence of “hook-up culture” and drinking. Despite the stark findings, Pendeault didn’t want to discourage women from attending college or living on campus. She hopes the study can help tailor specific, effective prevention efforts.

“The more we can get information about this, the more likely we are to be able to then design kind of situational crime prevention measures that are going to be impacting that risk, that are not just feel-good measures like rape whistles,” she said.

While she didn’t yet have insights on what effective measures could be, Pendeault said a good start is to shift the attention away from focus on what the victim could have done differently.

• While the support and advocacy found in the Women*s Center and Alternatives to Violence of the Palouse is critical for victims of sexual violence, Pedneault’s typical area of study focuses on a different person in the equation: the perpetrator.

Perhaps studying social changes and their behaviors could lead to better insights on how to prevent sexual assault, Pedneault said.

“We need to start thinking more about how they’re thinking about those situations in order to be able to change how they’re thinking about those situations,” Pedneault said of perpetrators. “It is not on victims to prevent their victimization at all, and it shouldn’t be. There is one person in a sexual assault, that if they make different decisions it changes the outcomes, and it’s the perpetrator.”