"One in four college women report surviving rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime."

I have two windows open on my laptop; on the left, the above quote heads a list of statistics; on the right, the empty text box where my article is supposed to be.

As I sit cross-legged on the small twin-sized bed of my college dorm room, the blank screen of my word document stares blankly back at me. Usually writing comes naturally to me, especially when I'm writing about a topic I feel strongly about. But on this Friday night, what I can only describe as a pseudo writer's block plagues me. I know what I want to write about, I've done all of my research, and I know why I want to write about it. Yet, I don't know where to start. Why? There are so many thoughts racing through my head that I can't sort through any of them. I'm upset. No, upset is an understatement. I'm so angry that I'm shaking, actually.

I'm not a naive person, and I understood that college was going to be very different from what I was used to back home as a high schooler in a small, rural town in Maine. I knew I was going to have to grow up and be my own person. I thought this was just going to entail normal tasks like forcing myself to study when I'd rather be hanging out with friends, or being smarter about money. I knew that I would have to be more careful, as I was on my own for the first time.

As a young woman in a college town, the realization that things were going to be different, and that I had to take precautions to ensure I was always safe, wasn't a surprise to me. There are countless articles and campaigns out there advising young people about sexual assault on college campuses. Of course I listened, but the sexual assault rates for my campus were so low that I honestly didn't think anything bad would ever happen while I was enrolled. The numbers on my screen were just that — numbers. They were just anonymous numbers in charts on the Internet. Halfway through my freshman year, those anonymous numbers on charts weren't anonymous anymore — one of my friends had been raped.

When I found out what had happened, I was furious. I wanted to help, but there was nothing that I could do other than be there as a supportive friend — the damage had already been done. What scared me even more was that my friend had done everything women are told to do to avoid getting raped, yet it still happened. The reality of the situation was that no matter what she was wearing or what she said, she couldn't have changed the events that occurred.

If you search "rape statistics on college campuses" on Google, in 0.58 seconds you will get about 317,000 results. "Study has more disturbing findings about campus rape of freshmen women," was a story featured on CNN, stating that at one New York university, 18.6 percent of female college freshmen reported being sexually assaulted. On US News, "Incapacitated Rape Is a Big Problem" talked about the phenomena that victims of incapacitated rape usually have reported being previously assaulted. After combing through a myriad of articles with numerous statistics about sexual assault on college campuses, what I started to notice was that the numbers weren't improving throughout the years. Then, I came across a new article, even more infuriating than the rest.

"Here's What's Missing From the Stats on Campus Rape." The headline on "Mother Jones" instantly drew me in. The Association of American Universities (AAU) revealed that schools are undercounting the reports of rape that they received, meaning the number of official rape reports from the Clery Act data is usually wrong. If you look at the Clery Act data compared to the data from an AAU survey asking women about sexual assault in the "Mother Jones" article, the discrepancies between the Clery and AAU data is terrifying. Basically, the number of rapes on campuses across the country is much higher than one is led to believe. If a victim goes to a counselor at the school instead of their campus police, for example, the school does not have to report this under the Clery Act. Sometimes, the actual number of women who reported being raped to the AAU was up to 12 times higher than the data that the Clery Act gave.

I know that the awareness about rape on college campuses is growing every day, and I know that there are always new programs popping up on campuses across the country. Yet, I don't get a lot of comfort from this. The educational programs about sexual assault are usually geared toward females, as the majority of reported rapes have female victims. Yet for female survivors of rape, 98.1 percent of the perpetrators were male. For male survivors of rape, 93 percent of the perpetrators were male. Why then are we mainly just teaching females not to get raped? Wouldn't it make sense to instead teach both genders, with the emphasis on teaching not to rape?

I'm 1,000 words into this article, and I still feel like I haven't been able to say what I wanted. I'm frustrated, I'm confused, I'm sad, I'm scared and I'm angry. At 11 p.m. on this Friday night, when most of my friends are off at parties, I'm wary. I have my phone volume on loud just in case they need me to pick them up, just in case something happens. When I walk across campus alone after a late night of studying, I pretend to be talking on my phone, while walking more quickly than I usually do. It's not even that I feel particularly unsafe, but I also don't feel completely safe at the same time. This is the reality of a female college student. I'm not being paranoid. I'm being realistic.

"One in four college women report surviving rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime." This quote terrifies me, and I can't shake this uneasy feeling. As I look around my room, I realize why, and the reality of this number sets in. I live in a quad, so there are four of us girls living together. Based on statistics, one of the four of us will either be raped or go through an attempted rape in our four years here at school. There aren't any more words, or analogies, or phrases that I could use to describe how helpless this realization makes me feel. As I write, more and more questions pop into my head. Why can't I just feel safe? Why aren't more people talking about the issue of sexual assault on college campuses, or just the issue of sexual assault in general, when the statistics are this serious? Are we embarrassed by the fact that humans are capable of doing this to one another, so instead we decide to sweep it under the rug, until someone brave enough decides to drag this ugly affair back out into the light? Are we too scared to pull back the cover and look deeper? While we sit around as a society doing nothing, countless lives are being irreversibly damaged.

We need to improve our education system about sexual assault. Plain and simple, what we have now just isn't going to cut it. At my school, I honestly couldn't tell you the name of the sexual assault prevention group on my campus. These organizations need to be highlighted and integrated into the community of our schools. Most effectively, sexual assault prevention programs geared towards both genders should be installed at college campuses across the country. Statistically, women are more often the victims of reported sexual assault, and men are more often the perpetrators. It doesn't make sense then to have everyone go through the same cookie-cutter programs, as women and men don't generally have the same experience or influence when it comes to sexual assault, whether they are involved or if they are bystanders. These programs can't just teach people how to not get raped, because in reality that's not under the victim's control. They need to teach people not to be passive bystanders, as proactive bystander intervention heavily decreases the rate at which sexual assault occurs. Most importantly, we have to teach people not to victim blame. Victim blaming only helps normalize rape, rather than place blame on the perpetrator.

The facts about sexual assault on college campuses are there. We just can't ignore them any longer. College is an opportunity to better oneself and grow as a person, but this can't be done to the fullest potential in an unsafe environment. As a society, we need to make a change, and it needs to happen now.