When she was sexually assaulted in a UW-Madison dorm last year, there were three other students present.
Then a first-semester freshman at UW-Madison, she had come to visit her boyfriend who lived in the room where the assault took place. The perpetrator, a friend of her boyfriend, cornered her, touching her ""where he shouldn't have.""
The assault lasted about 20 minutes, she said, until one of the other students in the room intervened.
""It wasn't like things just happened quick,"" she said. ""There was time for everyone to react.""
The victim, who asked to remain anonymous, told her father and roommate three days after the initial incident. The two convinced her to report the assault to the UW Police Department that night.
Her story is not uncommon on college campuses.
According to a 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Justice titled ""The Sexual Victimization of College Women,"" on a campus with 10,000 female students, 350 of those women could experience a sexual assault each year. UW-Madison's student population hovers around 40,000 and women constitute slightly more than half of that number, according to UW-Madison's Data Digest.
But fewer than 5 percent of victimization incidents are reported to law enforcement, the study said.
Victims often do not report the crime for a number of reasons, according to the study. Some victims believe their assault is not serious enough. Other reasons include fears that the police will not believe their story, or will punish them for underage drinking, or that there will be repercussions from their assailant.
According to Tonya Schmidt, an assistant dean in the Division of Student Life, in practice, the UW and Madison Police Departments do not issue underage drinking tickets to sexual assault victims.
""If something like that happened, [the Division of Student Life] would be all over it, calling and saying that ‘you cannot do this. We highly advise you to take the ticket away, this person has been a victim of an assault,'"" she said. ""But we've never had to do that.""
However, even with a low number of reports relative to the frequency of the crime, the actual number of sexual assaults varies by source.
The federal Clery Act requires UW-Madison and all universities receiving any federal funding for student aid to report crime statistics—including the number of sexual assaults—each year. The UW Campus Safety Guide, published annually by the university, includes these statistics.
According to this source, there were 17 sexual assaults on the UW-Madison campus in 2009, the most recent data available.
However, according to Kathy Kruse, an assistant dean in the Division of Student Life, this number is not representative of how many assaults take place within the UW-Madison community.
""Sophomores, juniors and seniors live off campus, so [the Campus Safety Guide represents] such a small piece of the campus,"" Kruse said.
The University of Wisconsin System report lists the numbers from the Offices of the Dean of Students.
""The UW System report wants to know everything, wherever it happened and they have different categories to make sure everything is encompassed in that,"" Schmidt said.
The UW System report details sexual assaults according to ""acquaintances,"" ""not acquaintances"" and ""unknown"" categories.
Every report from the Offices from the Dean of Students—from those that happened on or around campus to the sexual assaults on a spring break vacation—are included, according to Schmidt. This accounts for part of the 112 reports of sexual assault the Dean of Students Office received in 2010. The number was 45 in 2009.
Schmidt attributes the increase primarily to efforts to increase awareness by End Violence on Campus, an initiative at UW-Madison sponsored by a three-year federal grant. Part of University Health Services, EVOC focuses on educating both students and faculty about the resources available for victims and about how to respond when a victim comes forward.
Because each of these reports takes different information into account, it is difficult to compare the numbers.
But ultimately, according to Schmidt, helping as many victims as possible is more important than the statistics.
""We are getting more people who are coming in and accessing resources and that is going to make them be able to heal a lot more effectively,"" she said. ""They're going to be heard. People are going to say they believe them and that's going to be way better for their healing process.""
