The most disheartening part of this past week wasn't preparing for finals or writing papers. It was reading in our school newspaper that in the past decade, not a single reported case of sexual assault on DePauw University's campus had been brought to court, including the eleven reported cases in this past year alone.
Dear DePauw, how are we supposed to feel safe going to school here? How are we supposed to believe that this institution cares about all of its students, yet fails to provide justice for every single sexual assault victim? This certainly isn't the first time that a university has failed its students; just this past week, the University of Portland put out an article about how a victim was told that her perpetrator was "not responsible", despite his disregard for her lack of consent. This lack of regard for victims seems to be a trend for many institutions across the country, such as the incident at Columbia University where a victim carried her mattress around campus to protest her attacker's actions being cleared by the university. In 2014, 55 universities in the United States were under investigation for mishandling cases of sexual assaults and violence, and this number has tripled since the initial list emerged. DePauw's situation is not an isolated incident. Universities everywhere are failing to look out for their students.
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As college students, we spend almost four years of our lives living on our campuses. We want a place that is safe, where we don't have to fear for our safety and where we know the university will take care of us. Unfortunately, I do not feel this way, nor have I ever. Finding out about DePauw's sexual assault statistics justifies my feelings even more, and these facts are frankly an embarrassment to the school and to us as students. How can universities expect to provide a decent learning environment when they can't even provide justice for even one sexual assault victim? The ways that schools handle these kinds of cases are often ineffective and favor the welfare of the perpetrator since there are so few instances of judicial punishment. What kind of message do universities send when people can violate others and get away with it? And we wonder why sexual assault keeps happening.
