Recent violence statistics aren’t reassuring

A recent article on the slight drop in sexual assaults on UK’s campus emphasized that the amount of women who feel safe on the campus has jumped from 16.4 percent to 31.7 percent. In the following paragraph, it says that the amount of sexual assaults has fallen slightly, but that the drop was not statistically significant enough to get excited about the changes taking place.

My question is this: If women feel safer at our parties, in our dorm rooms and walking around the campus, but they essentially have the same probability of being assaulted, is that really hitting the mark? I want to go to a school where perception is not seen as reality.

Also in the article was a quote by Carol Jordan, the director of the UK Center for Research on Violence Against Women, who said, “Too often it is another student committing the assault, which signifies that we need to do education about what is appropriate and what is not.” To the contrary, we know that a very small number of men are committing this violence against women, and that, according to the Department of Justice, nine out of 10 of them are repeat offenders.

Knowing this, I do not think that telling them what they should and should not be doing will be sufficient to convince them to stop abusing and stalking women.

Rather, it is up to us — the men and women who are not perpetrating the violence but witness it in covert and overt forms every day — to step up and make sure that this campus actually becomes safer.

Shea Leibfreid