The University of Oregon is asking students to share their experiences with sexual assault, violence and harassment in a confidential survey, open until May 10, in an attempt to understand how often UO students face sexual assault and why they might not report it, said Darci Heroy, Title IX coordinator.
“It’s one of the only ways that we get to understand why folks aren’t reporting,” Heroy said of the survey. “We know that there are many experiences that students and employees aren’t reporting to us, but it’s hard to guess why sometimes. We can read a lot of the research out there but culture is always very specific to campus.”
UO is coordinating with the Association of American Universities, a collection of 62 research universities in North America, in conducting the research.
The survey asks students to respond to questions about their experiences with sexual assault or misconduct on campus: if they’ve experienced it, if they’ve reported it and how they felt about their experience.
In an effort to encourage student participation, UO is offering a few different incentives. Aside from gift cards for the first few hundred students who complete the survey, the university is donating a dollar per response to the Victim Assistance Fund and will donate $5,000 to the fund if 20 percent of students complete the survey.
The fund, Heroy said, runs through her office and provides services – like housing, clothes and medical care — for survivors of sexual violence, discrimination, harassment and bullying.
“It’s a discretionary fund that we can use to help our own students who are in crisis,” Heroy said.
She used medical care as an example: “Frequently students won’t want to use health services here at school because things will show up on insurance statements that their parents might have access to, so we can help with workarounds there to make sure they’re getting medical care that they need.”
The AAU survey builds on the same survey conducted in 2015 and will allow university administrators to see changes in responses over time. In 2015, according to the survey report, about a quarter of female undergraduates and 8 percent of male undergraduates experienced some kind of sexual assault while attending UO.
According to the same data, the vast majority of victims didn’t report their assaults to campus authorities like the UO Police Department or the Title IX office.
Heroy said the university has taken steps to improve students’ trust in university procedures, with the hope that more students will feel comfortable reporting their incidents of sexual assault, violence or harassment. The steps Heroy cited included changes to the university’s reporting policy and the requirement for students to live on campus and participate in prevention education their first year.
One of the biggest disparities in the 2015 data was among graduate students, who expressed less confidence in reporting their experiences to university authorities. For example, while 35 percent of female undergraduates felt it was “very or extremely likely that there would be a fair investigation,” only 17 percent of female graduate students said the same.
Heroy said that this disparity comes from the fact that graduate students tend to work in smaller departments and in closer contact with their peers than do undergraduates – meaning there’s more disruption to their academic careers when they make reports.
“There’s a lot of retaliation that we can’t protect against,” she said. “We try our best, but how do you protect against the retaliation that is the person that you’ve reported is now not introducing you to some of there their personal contacts that they might have otherwise have introduced you to that could be critical for networking? I don’t know how to protect against that.”
Since the 2015 survey, Heroy said the university’s main step for improving reporting rates among graduate students was changing GE reporting policies but that there’s still room to improve with GE training programs.
“I hate it that that’s what they’re faced with, but that’s one of the realities.”
The survey is open until May 10. More information about taking the survey is available on the university’s website here.
