College Students' Perceptions of Sexual Assault Reporting and Proceedings

Sexual assault among college students in the US has prompted debate about how to prevent and punish such crimes. Under Title IX and the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter from the Office for Civil Rights, universities are required to undertake the prevention, investigation, and punishment of sexually violent offenses on college campuses. However, the vast majority of victims do not report their assaults, whether on campus or to the police. The current study investigated the effect of victim reporting on perceptions of sexual assault. Two undergraduate samples, one from a small liberal arts college (n = 197) and another recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 56), were randomly assigned to read a vignette of an alleged sexual assault including one of four reporting conditions: no reporting, reporting to on-campus administrators, reporting to law enforcement, or reporting both on campus and to law enforcement. Outcome measures included whether the participant believed an assault had taken place, measures of victim and perpetrator culpability, and scales measuring the extent to which the participant accepts rape myths (RMA) and believes in a just world (JWB). Results failed to demonstrate an effect of victim reporting type, but did find a significant effect of gender such that males blamed the victim more and were less likely to believe an assault had taken place than females. RMA also mediated this relationship, such that the effect of gender on perceptions was accounted for by differences in RMA. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT REPORTING 3 College Students’ Perceptions of Sexual Assault Reporting and Proceedings In the past several years, sexual assault prevention and advocacy have become priorities nationwide, with President Barack Obama even convening a special task force in January of 2014 to tackle the issue. Research over the past 25 years has consistently revealed a high prevalence of sexual assault among college students, particularly towards women. Although self-reported rates of sexual assault vary, this research demonstrates that sexual assault is far from rare among female college students and often goes unreported to authorities. One of the most recent large-scale studies of college sexual violence, the “Campus Sexual Assault” (CSA) study, surveyed a random sample of 5,446 undergraduate women from two large public universities and found that about 1 in 5 women (19%) reported being the victim of an attempted or completed sexual assault during college (Krebs et. al., 2009). In addition, the study found that the victim was physically coerced in 5% and incapacitated by drugs or alcohol in 11% of reported cases. Despite the high rate of sexual assault on college campuses, a National College Women Sexual Victimization (NCWSV) survey of 4,446 female college students found that only 2.1% of college women who experienced sexual victimization (rape, sexual contact, sexual coercion, or threats) reported the incident to a police agency and only 4% reported to campus authorities (Fisher, Daigle, Cullen, & Turner, 2003). In a recent nationally representative survey, even when rape was narrowly defined as “penetration of the victim’s vagina, mouth, or rectum without consent,” only 11.5% of victims reported the rape to law enforcement officials (Wolitzky-Taylor et. al., 2011). However, in the NCWSV study, almost 70% revealed the incident to someone other than police or PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT REPORTING 4 campus authorities, indicating that most victims do report to someone about the assault (Fisher, Daigle, Cullen, & Turner, 2003). The alarming gap between rates of sexual assault and reporting rates demonstrates victims’ reluctance to tell officials about their victimization. Understanding the factors surrounding victims’ reporting decisions is especially important given that perpetrators often commit multiple assaults. One study found that of the 7% of college men who admitted to committing an assault, 63% reported committing multiple offenses, with an average of six each (Lisak & Miller, 2002). Unfortunately, research investigating the social impediments to reporting sexual assault and its possible effects on stopping repeat offenders has been limited. For example, Sable, Danis, Mauzy, and Gallagher (2006) investigated the perceived importance to college students of obstacles that prevent reporting for both female and male victims. Their study found that the most important obstacles included: 1) feelings of shame, guilt, and not wanting loved ones to know; 2) worries about confidentiality; and 3) fear of not being believed. Although these common barriers to reporting have been identified, research on sexual assault has largely failed to examine the actual social stigmatization and peer perceptions of victims who do report. Past research has investigated social and contextual determinants of perceptions of sexual assault victims and perpetrators (e.g., Bell, Kuriloff, & Lottes, 1994; Burczyk & Standing, 1989), yet no research has yet examined the effects of reporting on these perceptions. Therefore, the present study sought to examine the influence of different types of reporting on college students’ perceptions of sexual assault. PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT REPORTING 5 Legal Background: Title IX and On-Campus Proceedings Due to its unique status as both a criminal act and a civil rights violation, the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault cases on college campuses has a controversial history. Although defined as a criminal offense by the United States Code (10 U.S.C. § 920), sexual assault that occurs on a college campus can also be investigated by campus authorities under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (20 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq.). Normally thought of in the context of women’s sports, Title IX actually prohibits all “discrimination on the basis of sex” (p. 2), including sexual harassment and sexual violence, in educational institutions that receive federal aid (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). Because the anti-discrimination mandate of Title IX has been extended to include acts of sexual violence, universities receiving federal funding must address claims of sexual assault involving university students, whether occurring on or offcampus (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2011). The Title IX mandate to prohibit sexual discrimination is enforced by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the Department of Education. The OCR has historically been criticized for its vague guidelines on universities’ responsibilities regarding sexual harassment/sexual violence concerns. Schools have possessed broad discretion in interpreting the OCR’s guidelines and only the schools who blatantly failed to comply with the mandate were reviewed and sanctioned, often weakly (Walker, 2010). In 2011, the OCR attempted to address these complaints by issuing a so-called Dear Colleague Letter that more clearly outlined the guidelines schools must follow in preventing and addressing complaints of sexual discrimination. The new guidelines state three goals when a school “knows or reasonably should know” (p. 4) about the occurrence of PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT REPORTING 6 harassment/violence: 1) elimination of the harassment; 2) prevention of its recurrence; and 3) addressing its effects. In addition, schools must publish grievance procedures as well as a “notice of nondiscrimination” (p.4), and must designate an employee as a Title IX coordinator to oversee procedures and ensure legal compliance (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2011). The new OCR guidelines have generated debate over whether or not the OCR has overstepped its mandate in protecting victims at the expense of due process. For example, the Dear Colleague Letter specifies that the standard of proof in Title IX investigations must be a preponderance of the evidence standard. A preponderance of the evidence standard requires only that the incident is more likely than not to have occurred (i.e., has at least a 51% chance of having occurred). Given that the criminal justice system requires the more stringent standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, legal scholars argue that the due process rights of the accused might be violated by the much lower preponderance standard (Triplett, 2012). Another controversial guideline discourages schools from allowing cross-examination during the proceedings, a policy stemming from the potential for revictimization of the complainant. Despite this concern, many legal commentators argue that removing cross-examination inhibits due process by limiting the adversarial nature of the proceeding and the Sixth Amendment right to confront one’s accuser (Triplett, 2012). Most criticisms of the Dear Colleague Letter focus on the potential for false accusations and harm to the alleged perpetrator. Consequently, perceptions of victims may be shaped by perceptions of the credibility of Title IX proceedings as compared to traditional criminal proceedings. In other words, because students may perceive onPERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT REPORTING 7 campus Title IX proceedings to be less fair than criminal proceedings and/or biased in favor of the victim, they may view a victim of sexual assault more negatively or be less likely to believe her if she initiates an on-campus investigation than if she reports to law enforcement.