I wonder if anyone can speak to the question of safety at Wesleyan. They seem to have a bad reputation for protecting female students from rape or investigating campus rapes. I was interested in this school until I found this out.
OMG 37 Rapes at Wesleyan in 2014. Thanks for sharing the site with data. I will NOT be going to Wesleyan.
This is a complicated question – some schools, the reported number of rapes is high because the campus has created a culture where students feel comfortable reporting it; other campuses may have similar numbers, or higher, but students face greater institutional resistance in reporting so the numbers of reported rapes appear lower. While I’m not familiar with the all the resources for digging deeper into this, one place might be the list of universities which are being investigated for Title 9 violations relating to handling rape investigation. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a research tool, http://projects.chronicle.com/titleix/ For what it’s worth, Wesleyan is not on that list.
Certainly 37 is a very high number for a small community. Perhaps read the student newspaper, and other sources to get some more detail about this issue at Wesleyan, if that is a school you had been seriously interested in. If you are able to visit campus, raise this question with an admissions rep and ask your tour guide about the issue.
Thanks for the suggestion, Midwestmomofboys. I took your advice and looked into the issue more deeply and am now even more shocked. The school is called a “rape factory”, or the frats were called rape factories. I discovered that Wesleyan integrated women into frats recently but the men have pushed back hard against allowing women into them. Seems that the problem may not be with the administration of the college but with the men who choose to go to Wesleyan. I see on the FBI website that rape is under reported by a factor of 10 to 1. If so, that means that 360 women were raped at Wesleyan in 2014, or about 2 per day (not including summer months and holiday breaks). Also, I see on the website that Erin’sDad sent showing crime data that Wesleyan is an outlier; no other college its size comes close to having the number of rapes Wesleyan has. I am not swayed by the suggestion that Wesleyan encourages women to report rape more than other colleges. I found no evidence of that. This is so upsetting.
@luvegan I would recommend researching this more carefully. I googled “rape factory” at Wes, and found that 2 years ago, Huff post reported that one fraternity’s off campus house was called a “rape factory” – not the entire school and not even all the fraternities. In the fall of 2014, the university required the remaining fraternities to admit women and, as at many schools where the administration requires changes from greek life, there was push back. The Common Data set shows that 10% of the undergrad males belong to fraternities, and 3-4% women belong to sororities. Compared to many schools with greek life on campus, that is a low percentage – Dickinson, for instance, has 25-30% participation in greek life, Kenyon has about the same percentage of greek life participation.
Wesleyan has the reputation of being one of the least preppie, least jock-y, and least traditionally fratty of the NESCAC schools, though there have been problems with drug use on campus. I would recommend reading the student newspaper and other sources before concluding that rape is underreported at Wes by a factor of 10, so that 2 women are being raped daily at Wes. If that were the case, no one would be applying and no one would be attending. See what the school is saying itself about this, spend some time on the Wesleyan board here and on other college info sites to research these controversies.
Good luck in your search.
Yea, if you look close, you’ll see that the number of reported rapes went from -0- in years 2012 and 2013 to 37 in 2014, just about around the time that “the rape factory” suit (which was sett!ed out of court, IIRC) was creating a lot of headlines and new reporting standards and procedures. Unless, you really want to believe that Wesleyan men just decided to wake up one day in 2014 and start raping people, the up tick is as others have suggested - the result of GREATER vigilance, not less.
The number of students participating in frats at Wesleyan is low single-digits. It’s a tiny part of the culture. There’s no reason you would ever need to attend a frat party unless you really wanted to – it’s not like some schools where the frats are the social center of gravity at those schools or where frat members have a disproportionate influence on student organizations.
As for it being the “men who chose to go to Wesleyan,” again I would point out that a vast majority of the men who chose to go there chose to have nothing to do with the frats, suggesting they also don’t share the same characteristics of the few who do, so probably best not to lump them all into one category.
something tells me @luvegan, and her/his 3 posts, may not really be concerned about rape, per se, but might, just maybe, have another agenda.
call me a cynic, but the day that Forbes throws Wes in the top 10 … well, you decide.
“Also, I see on the website that Erin’sDad sent showing crime data that Wesleyan is an outlier; no other college its size comes close to having the number of rapes Wesleyan has. I am not swayed by the suggestion that Wesleyan encourages women to report rape more than other colleges. I found no evidence of that. This is so upsetting.”
yeah, this came across as very genuine outrage.
Watch The Hunting Grounds. I think Wes is probably no worse than many other schools, and does have a culture that is supportive of reporting.
From my tours of that campus, what I know of the student body from reading about Wes (daughter is considering) and reports from a close family friend’s daughter who just finished her freshman year, I would say the idea that somehow Wes attracts a particularly “rapey” (for lack of a better word) male student body is a stretch. It also seems like the kind of thing someone would say when they’re trying to make a point and don’t want to come out and say it. As someone pointed out, though Wes has made strides in its athletic performances of late, it is hardly any kind of a jock school. And the frats there are on the fringe and represent a sliver of the student body.
As circuit rider pointed out, the incidents of reported rape numbers are hardly a smooth average. A lot of loud protests lately, but when isn’t Wesleyan loud … about anything? Combine a very vocal and protest willing student population with fraternities and incidents of rape, and you’re going to get some incendiary commentary that may paint a picture of a problem that is a bit out of proportion to reality. Just a thought.
Bottom line is that they’ve just about put a bullet in the last of the frats at Wesleyan … admittedly way overdue for Wes … and that’s that. Sadly, the real point here, is that there is no adequately safe campus for young women. It should never happen anywhere, of course, and the numbers are too high everywhere.
I do appreciate the constructive replies to my concerns.
What upsets me is that many remarks seem to indicate that the people willing to talk about this issue don’t understand that girls my age are much more aware of the issue of college campus rape than girls were in the past. We hear about the danger of being raped all the time. Our friends have been raped and talk about it. The posts above imply that the problem really isn’t so bad (“may paint a picture of a problem that is a bit out of proportion to reality”) or that this is just the way the world is (“there is no adequately safe campus for young women”); or that somehow my motives for inquiring about Wesleyan’s rape problem are suspect (“this came across as very genuine outrage.”) Don’t each of you see that you are all trivializing the problem you see as real? And so you are belittling me?
My concern is genuine. I am putting together my list of schools to apply to…Bowdoin, Wellesley, Haverford, Swarthmore, Grinnell, etc. I am going over each school’s reputation, funding, research budget, quality of food (#1 Bowdoin), study abroad, ethnic diversity, gender ratio, and every other indicator you can imagine. I’ve been working on this for months. When I posted my question I was doing my safety research and saw a post about frats and rape on Wesleyan campus. Hence, my desire to learn more. What I have learned is that college rape culture is alive and well across the board, promoted in part by people who see themselves as truth seekers.
@luvegan - You asked a question and then sort of stopped the conversation at post #2. Sorry you’re upset; this is an upsetting topic. Have you thought about turning it into an essay?
We responded to your initial posts by pointing out other sources for data as well as context for recent attention to rapes on campus, including, for instance the 2014 jump in reporting from 0 to 37. If you conclude Wes is not the place for you, so be it. Grinnell, Bates, Haverford as well as women’s colleges and formerly women’s colleges, such as Vassar and Conn Coll, have no Greek life, if you conclude that is a priority for you.
You should check out the same stats for those other schools you list, many are not dissimilar especially when you factor in proportionate populations. Unfortunately a lot of the elite LAC’s are high on the list of campuses with the highest ratio of reported rapes. There is a lot of discussion on whether that is reflection of a cultural issue or, as you note, some people are now far more attuned to what constitutes rape and how to report it. Many of these LAC’s do extensive mandatory training for all Freshman students. So when you see a school that goes above-and-beyond to sensitize students to rape get high rape stats, you may be seeing a much higher rate of reporting versus incidents. Which is cold comfort, I realize, since the better stats would be to see less rape, period. But the point is I wouldn’t take comfort in a school have less reported rapes than another unless you have taken the time to develop an informed opinion on whether that reflects the true different in incidents or the sensitivity of the reporting. The last thing you want to have happen is to get a false sense of security from low rape report numbers at a particular school only to discover its due to a culture of non-reporting.
BTW, you mentioned Bowdoin several times – an amazing school and one that requires extensive mandatory training and testing of all incoming students on rape and sexual behavior. But it had a number of disturbing rape incidents in the recent past involving strangers breaking into dorm rooms. It turns out there was – not sure if there still is or if they got it moved – a halfway house for convicted sex offenders in the small town of Brunswick near the campus. If this is an important issue for you, you might want to research and find out if that is still the case or what they have done to mitigate it if not.
Loooongtime lurker, first time poster for this account. I do not think anyone is trying to belittle the OP’s concerns. The extrapolation based on the FBI stat was a bit hyperbolic.
I am chiming in for the first time in about five years to correct some misinformation in this thread. The Clery Report fields (Where the DOE cutting tool info originates) were updated for the October 2015 collection to include rape for the first time from a 2013 amendment to the Violence Against Women Act. Before the change, all sexual assault offenses were rolled up as either forcible or non forcible. The VAWA also added fields for domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. All these offenses are defined by the FBI standard as per the VAWA.
So no schools will have listed stats under these categories prior to the most recent report for 2014. There is a great article on Vox addressing the issue of using these numbers as hard and fast determinations due to an assortment of factors. http://www.vox.com/2016/6/8/11879626/colleges-most-rapes-ranked
This is a cultural issue on every campus and as a recent alum, I think Wesleyan has a lot of work to do on campus. I hope the OP is correct that these incoming classes are able to speak about and deal with these crimes and the underlying issues in a way my peers weren’t equipped to as recently as 2012.
Citivas did a good job highlighting the orientation and continuing education programs many schools are implementing and improving surrounding these issues.
In follow-up on my comment about Bowdoin, it looks like it wasn’t a halfway house but a church providing support group meeting space for sex offenders and they did terminate the arrangement at the request of Bowdoin following the incidents.
As long as both Bowdoin and Wesleyan are being compared, it might interest folks that when controlled for size of student body, their rape and “fondling” statistics for 2014 (that would be after the Clery Report fields were updated) are exactly equal.
Exactly – that was one of the points I was trying to make in my first post.