Investigating Transparency Policy as a Means of Increasing Sexual Violence Reporting Numbers at Universities

It is well known that sexual violence occurs on college campuses at alarming rates. Despite this, sexual violence remains grossly underreported to universities. In a study investigating why survivors choose to not report sexual violence, only half believed that a university would investigate an assault fairly (Ridolfi-Starr, 2015). This project focuses on investigations of sexual violence conducted by universities, and whether certain adjudication processes can increase overall reporting numbers. Specifically, I focus on different forms of transparency within the sexual violence policy, third-party oversight and outcome publication. By using information collected from Annual Security Reports (ASRs) published by universities, I code for the presence of these transparency policies, and compare them to sexual assaults reported to each school in a given year for fifty universities. While collecting data from May 2022 to August 2022, I found that thirteen universities did not have their ASRs published online at that point in time, almost a year and a half past the studied year, 2020. In the schools whose information was available, I found that no school chose to publish outcome reports in relation to sexual assault cases. Additionally, no significant correlation was found between third party oversight and reporting numbers