Our reseach found private colleges – such as Randolph-Macon College, Mary Baldwin University, University of Lynchburg – dominate the top ten most dangerous; VMI and CNU top list among publics
With the college football season underway and the fall party scene on campus heating up, Toscano Law Group announced the launch of a new resource, the Virginia Campus Sexual Assault Dashboard, to inform students and parents about the risks of campus sexual assault and spur important conversations about personal safety, campus culture and college policies.
The dataset compares sexual crimes reported separately by Virginia colleges and universities in their Clery reports, a requirement of federal law, against their enrollment.
According to the data, the top ten most dangerous campuses for sexual assault are:
- Randolph-Macon College
- Mary Baldwin University
- University of Lynchburg
- Roanoke College
- Bridgewater College
- Virginia Military Institute
- Christopher Newport University
- University of Richmond
- Radford University
- University of Mary Washington
The full dashboard can be found at ToscanoLawGroup.com/CampusSexualAssault
Named for Jeanne Clery, who was raped and murdered in her dorm room by a fellow student, the Clery Act is intended to warn students, parents and the public about campus crime. But the reports are little known because they are often buried in college websites far removed from the kind of promotional information used to recruit students. The federal government also collects and posts the information, but there are limitations on how easily users of their dataset can compare institutions.
The Virginia Campus Sexual Assault Dashboard filters the most important data available on the subject and gives visitors a snapshot of the extent of the problem across a wide range of Virginia colleges and universities.
Leading Virginia trial attorney Diane Toscano, whose law firm published the resource, said the data are surprising. “People tend to associate this problem with big party schools,” said Toscano, who handles Title IX cases. “But the data we found in Virginia challenges those perceptions,” she said.
Toscano said they wanted to verify the underlying data provided by the U.S. Department of Education by reviewing each institution's Clery report. She said seeing the overall data is a good reminder of the insufficiency of Clery reports to represent the magnitude of the problem, saying Clery data leaves students and parents with "a false sense of security.”
She pointed to the fact that there were only 168 sexual crimes combined in the Clery reports among almost a quarter million Virginia students; yet in surveys, students say campus sexual assault is far more prevalent. According to a 2019 University of Virginia report:
“…the incidence of sexual assault by physical force, threats of physical force or incapacitation reported by female undergraduate students was 13.4% compared to 4.2% for male undergraduate students, and 3.4% for female graduate students compared to 0.7% for graduate male students.”
Toscano Law Group is a team of experienced attorneys – and polished courtroom litigators – who are eager to take on the most complex cases and provide aggressive representation for our clients. We regularly appear in state and federal courts in southeast Virginia, and we practice Title IX law wherever it takes us.
