Last year, 38 University of Virginia students reached out to Dean Nicole Eramo, head of UVA's Sexual Misconduct Board, about an alleged sexual assault, according to a recent Rolling Stone article on rape allegations at the school.
But only nine of these incidents led to official complaints - the rest "evaporated" - and only four resulted in Sexual Misconduct Board hearings, according to Rolling Stone.
UVA did not disclose the outcomes of these hearings, citing student privacy concerns.
One UVA student - identified as "Jackie" - went to Dean Eramo about her alleged gang rape at Phi Kappa Psi, a prominent campus fraternity. Jackie told Rolling Stone that when she asked the administrator why the university doesn't publish all of its sexual assault data, Eramo reportedly responded, "Because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school."
Several UVA students were allegedly the victims of gang rapes at the Phi Psi house, Rolling Stone reports. Brothers received light punishments from the university, if any at all, according to the Rolling Stone article.
UVA president Teresa Sullivan has asked the local Charlottesville police department to investigate a reported gang rape of a student that took place at the Phi Psi house in September 2012, according to a statement released Wednesday. The fraternity announced Thursday that they were voluntarily suspending all operations after its building was vandalized. The Cavalier Daily tweeted this image of that vandalism:
Graffiti outside Phi Psi this morning: pic.twitter.com/hNmdDCkbcO
- Cavalier Daily News (@CavDailyNews) November 20, 2014
In a statement Thursday, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said he was "deeply disturbed" by the sexual assault allegations in the Rolling Stone article and has "asked university officials to conduct a full review of all of their policies and procedures."
Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely notes that she had a difficult time getting even these limited statistics on sexual assaults at the school.
UVA President Teresa Sullivan insisted, however, that the administration is not "[sweeping] sexual assault under the rug," adding, "If we're trying to hide the issue, we're not doing a very good job of it." Sullivan highlighted a sexual-assault summit for college administrators held at UVA in February, the first of its kind.
To be fair, many other schools have been accused of secrecy when it comes to sexual assault. While colleges are legally required to report campus crime statistics under the Clery Act, there is no mechanism for tracking sexual assault reports that stay within the school.
Various Title IX lawsuits from students have revealed some of the major problems with how colleges handle sexual assault complaints outside of the legal system.
A lawsuit filed against Columbia University earlier this year alleged that "the University treats survivors and alleged perpetrators unequally, perpetrators are allowed to remain on campus, [and] students are discouraged from reporting sexual assault," according to student newspaper The Daily Spectator. Columbia now releases data on student sexual assault complaints over the course of an academic year, a rare example of a college publicizing these numbers.
We reached out to UVA for comment and will update this post if we hear back.