Study: Campus rape reaches ‘epidemic levels’

During their first year of college, nearly one in seven women had been the victim of at least one sexual assault characterized by excessive alcohol or drug use and nearly one in 10 women will have experienced forcible assault or rape, according to a study led by a Brown University psychologist.

The study led by Kate Carey, Ph.D., professor of behavioral and social sciences in Brown’s School of Public Health and its Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, proclaimed rape on college campuses to be at “epidemic levels.”

The findings emerged from responses to a 2010 survey of 483 female first-year students at an upstate New York private college. The study, published online last May in the Journal of Adolescent Health, is considered the first to closely examine risk of sexual assault during the traditional freshman year.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which provided grant support for the study, has called the first six weeks of college an especially vulnerable time for heavy drinking and alcohol-related consequences.

“For many students, it’s the first time that they’ve lived away from the family home – at least for students like we’ve studied who live on a residential campus – and so that brings with it more freedom and more opportunities to socialize in a peer-intensive environment,” Carey said.

“We also know that there is an uptick of drinking around the transition from high school to college.

College bound students in high school tend to drink less than non-college bound students, Carey said. But that changes by the time they get into college: They end up drinking more than their non-college attending peers.

“There is this environmental risk factor that comes into play that, on average, a group of students are going to be drinking more in their first semester of college than they were beforehand,” Carey explained.

Study participants completed questionnaires asking them about a wide range of health-related behaviors, including sexual behavior and relationship issues, substance use, eating and exercise, emotional adjustment to college and other topics.

The students were surveyed when they arrived on campus, after the fall semester, after the spring semester and at the end of the summer before their sophomore year.

The sample represented 26 percent of women in the university’s incoming class with 94 percent being 18 years old. Two-thirds were white. Carey said there was no statistical difference in the experiences of sexual assault reported by respondents based on ethnic or racial demographics.

Before entering college, 18 percent of respondents reported they had experienced an attempted or completed rape involving drugs or alcohol or what Carey’s study termed “incapacitated rape.”

During the first year of college, 15 percent reported experiencing an attempted or completed incapacitated rape and nine percent reported experiencing a forcible rape. By the start of their sophomore year, 26 percent and 22 percent had experienced incapacitated rape and forcible rape, respectively.

New students who arrived on campus having already experienced a rape involving drugs or alcohol in high school were six times more likely to experience incapacitated rape again and more than four times more likely to be forcibly raped than women who had not experienced  an incapacitated rape before college.

The findings are consistent with other research on high school experiences. The 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System found that 20.9 percent of female high school students and 10.4 percent of male high schoolers experienced physical or sexual dating violence in the previous 12 months.

Carey said the study serves as a reminder that these experiences are starting early, demonstrating a need for trauma-informed prevention strategies.

“We shouldn’t assume that people arrive on campus and are blank slates,” she said. “There are certain individuals who are coming already vulnerable to re-experiencing (sexual assault) and therefore having more negative consequences that we know come with a pattern of re-victimization.”

Brown recently completed a yearlong review of its sexual assault and violence prevention strategies, updated policies to make it easier for students to report concerns and hired staff to raise awareness and help students develop skills and prevention attitudes.

But other schools may not be giving the issue the attention it deserves, Carey said.

“There is a growing but not definitive literature about what works with sexual violence prevention on college campuses. There aren’t any best practices that are out there that have a lot of empirical support,” Carey said.

Carey called for engaging the whole campus community to promote bystander intervention and reduce the likelihood of attitudes and behaviors that encourage perpetration.

“We also need to pay attention to raising awareness among women and raising their ability to protect themselves and make decisions that will keep them safe,” she added.

Parent-based interventions to cultivate communication about alcohol use and the risk of alcohol-related sexual assault once their children get to college are also important, Carey said.

Research has shown that students who choose not to drink often do so because of discussions with their parents about alcohol use and its adverse consequences.