College is supposedly the “best years of your life”, but this is not the reality for approximately twenty percent of college-aged women. The constant fear of becoming a victim of sexual assault is growing concern among young women on college campuses. Action needs to be taken immediately to protect the women at college and universities across America. Due to the high levels of sexual assault occurring on college campuses, college and university officials should be held responsible for educating young adults about sexual assault and taking measures to prevent it.
“The term ‘sexual assault’ refers to a range of sexually oriented criminal acts defined federally by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as well as by state statute” (Karjane, 1999, p. 2). Sexual assault extends beyond just rape and can be described as any unwanted, non-consensual sexual advances from another person. Victims are …show more content…
4). Due to the lack of official reporting of sexual assault cases, this number is likely even higher: Breitenbecher states that national survey data proves over 54% of women were sexually victimized in college. 20% of the women in this survey who were victimized experienced a rape attempt, and 10% were raped (Breitenbecher, 1999, p. 459). The actual percentages vary from source to source, but each source’s statistics suggest that sexual assault is certainly prevalent in every different study conducted, despite the specifics, such as size or location, of each college or university being researched. To put these figures into scale, it is estimated that “the women at a college that has 10,000 female students could experience more than 350 rapes a year” (Fisher, 2000, p.