SCROLL DOWN TO READ SECTION ON KATY.The Reality of Crime On Campus
By TODD S. PURDUM
By TODD S. PURDUM
Todd S. Purdum is a reporter in the City Hall bureau of The Times.
Published: April 10, 1988
Published: April 10, 1988
A MAN ON A university campus walks up to a woman he has never met and bites her breast in a collegiate fad known as ''sharking.'' Racial brawls break out on campuses from Massachusetts to Maryland. Four university football players in California gang-rape a woman. A student rapes and strangles a 19-year-old college freshman in her Pennsylvania dormitory room. Another student murders two others in a Michigan dormitory with a sawed-off shotgun.
These and similar violent incidents at American colleges and universities in recent years have focused sharp attention on an issue many students, parents and administrators long considered a contradiction of a sort: crime on campus.
For years, college campuses had an image of being safe, bucolic havens, academic groves where the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of fellowship shut out many of the threats and fears of everyday life.
No longer. Several well-publicized crimes, a growing number of negligence lawsuits against colleges accused of lax security and a greater awareness of ''date rape,'' gang rape and other crimes against women have forced schools to confront the problem in an unprecedented way. Many have responded with seminars and forums on safety and sexual harassment, added lighting and increased security patrols.
''It's a new era on college campuses, where everybody - students, faculty, staff - is trying to pay greater attention to it,'' said William Schafer, director of the office of student conduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder. ''Whereas before, a lot of these issues weren't dealt with very openly, either because people didn't know it was occurring or they didn't want to admit it.''
Experts say no comprehensive statistics on campus crime are available. Only a little more than 300 of the nation's 2,100 four-year colleges and universities report data individually through the Federal Bureau of Investigation's voluntary Uniform Crime Reports system. Figures for most institutions, including many of the most prestigious private schools, are blended with local crime statistics - assuming that the schools report the crimes to begin with, and some critics contend many do not, for fear such information will damage their admissions and fund-raising efforts as well as their reputations.
A review of F.B.I. data from 1980 to 1986, the latest period for which statistics are available, shows a negligible increase in violent crimes reported, from about 2,300 on slightly more than 300 campuses in 1980 to about 2,400 crimes on 340 campuses in 1986. The number of crimes in general reported to the F.B.I. peaked in 1981, and the rate then declined until the last half of 1985, when a slight rise began.
''I'd be hard pressed to believe that there is any major increase statistically on campuses,'' said Daniel P. Keller, director of public safety for the 23,000-student University of Louisville. On the other hand, he said, ''There is an increased awareness of crime on campus.'' Yet he and other college officials are quick to acknowledge that the F.B.I. data are incomplete. ''Significant numbers of schools don't report, and the criteria are interpreted differently by different schools,'' said Mr. Keller, who is also a consultant to other schools. ''They're the best thing we have, but they're certainly not by any stretch or means accurate.''
Mr. Keller and other experts say many crimes, regardless of where they happen, go unreported, but in the closed environment of the college campus crimes of a sexual nature are under-reported. Victim and attacker often move in the same social circles, and there is a great disincentive to go to the police and press charges.
But officials at Towson State University in Maryland who have conducted surveys of crime on 1,100 campuses for the last two years, say they do detect a rise in violence.
''What we've been finding is there has been some increase in acts of violence, physical and sexual assault, rape and major vandalism in the last year,'' said Jan Sherrill, the school's assistant vice president of student affairs. ''What we don't know, because this is all self-reported, is just how extensive it is. What we do know is that most of the facts that are given to us are considered by the people who are reporting them to us to be lower than what's actually happening.''
Mr. Sherrill said assessments of violence varied widely, even among officials on the same campus. For example, he said, Towson's surveys found that while two-thirds of the deans of students who answered questionnaires said violence on their campus was under control, two-thirds of residence-hall directors said it was out of control.
Another problem is that a substantial portion of ''campus-related'' crimes actually occur off school property, although they involve students, fraternities and other student organizations. ''It's real difficult to get an accurate portrayal of exactly what is happening,'' Mr. Keller said. Two Crime Categories
What actually is happening falls into two major categories: crimes against students by outsiders and student-on-student crime.
Crimes committed against students by outsiders who come on campus range from those committed by thieves tempted by stereos, computers and bicycles to sex offenders drawn by the presence of large numbers of young women. Urban campuses have long faced such realities. Increasingly, suburban and even rural schools have had to recognize that their campuses are no longer the isolated, protected outposts of a generation ago.
The area around Princeton University in central New Jersey has grown greatly in the last decade. Businesses, attracted by the region's rich academic atmosphere and historic charm, have built office parks and shopping centers along the Route 1 corridor, a few miles from the campus in Princeton.
''Any direction you go, you see great, rapid growth,'' said Jerrold L. Witsil, the school's director of public safety. ''That has to mean there are going to be a lot of new people in the area, and with that kind of growth and exposure, things are going to change in the way of crime.''
At the same time, Mr. Witsil, former president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, says Princeton is determined to remain ''an open environment,'' without gates locking it off from the surrounding communities and with entrances to dormitories and class buildings kept open. ''We'll keep a lid on those who'd want to come on campus for illegal purposes by strengthening patrols and our preventive and awareness activities,'' he said.
Sometimes, awareness comes too late. A year and a half ago, Katherine M. Hawelka, a 19-year-old sophomore, was raped and murdered at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., a quiet town near the Canadian border. Two campus security guards drove by and saw Ms. Hawelka on the ground with a man about 3:30 A.M., yet did nothing because they thought the couple were engaged in consensual sex. They returned later to find Ms. Hawelka unconscious and beaten. She died three days later. The man convicted of murdering her, Brian M. McCarthy, 23, a Potsdam resident, was sentenced to 23 years to life in prison. He was not a Clarkson student and did not know Ms. Hawelka.
MS. HAWELKA'S family is suing Clarkson for $550 million, arguing that its guards were negligent. Ms. Hawelka grew up in Syracuse, and her family said they were well aware of the potential dangers in an urban area like that of Syracuse University. ''So when Katie went up to Potsdam, I don't think we even saw it in terms of anything like that being possible,'' said her mother, Terry Connelly. ''Even a lot of her friends asked, 'How could it happen?' ''
Clarkson officials have defended the guards' actions. Potsdam's police chief, Clinton Mattot, agreed, saying the men could not have known a rape was occurring. He said their attitude toward seeing people have sex in public seemed casual, but added: ''Mommies and daddies don't stop sex and neither does a college.'' Others perhaps would argue that the guards' attitude merely reflected society's updated, blase sexual mores.
AT THE HEART of the second major category - crimes committed by students against other students - is the question of what behavior a college can legitimately be expected to prevent. In the late 1960's and early 70's, most colleges eliminated the rigid codes of conduct that had governed student life for generations, substituting more general, perhaps permissive standards.
As the nation's mood retreated to conservatism in the 1980's, many states reinstated 21 as the legal drinking age. Schools reacted by getting tougher. Many stopped serving liquor at campus events. In sexual matters, some schools decided that rape was grounds for expulsion.
Students, concerned about sexual harassment and other incidents of sexism, also encouraged administrators to take a more active role in student life. ''The idea that a college stands in for parents, in loco parentis, is today a faded memory,'' said Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, in his book ''College,'' published last year. ''But on many campuses, there is great uncertainty about what should replace it.''
Howard and Constance Clery, whose 19-year-old daughter, Jeanne Ann, was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm room in 1986, advocate a return to greater supervision of student life by college officials. The Clerys are suing the school for $25 million, arguing that inadequate campus security led to their daughter's death. Although Miss Clery's dormitory had locking doors, students had propped them open.
Lehigh denies negligence, but the school has since undertaken several major improvements in security, including increasing its security force from 12 to 19; establishing a foot patrol; installing better lighting; locking dorms around the clock instead of only at night, and starting a campus shuttle-bus system during evening hours.
Jeanne Ann Clery was killed by a Lehigh student who had had earlier scrapes with the law. Her parents, besides suing the university, have launched a campaign for legislation, now pending in the Pennsylvania legislature, to require all colleges in the state to disclose to applicants not only their crime statistics for the previous three years but also their policies on student drug and alcohol abusers and admitting convicted felons.
Some administrators see such measures as misguided. ''It's real difficult to lock up a university, so to speak,'' said Mr. Keller of Louisville. ''It's an atypical society. It's not like a K-Mart that you can lock up at 9 at night and not expect anyone to be in there till 9 in the morning. It's a very, very live and vibrant environment that it's very difficult to put an umbrella over.''
SEXUAL assaults by students on students are perhaps the most difficult for schools to confront. They are also the ones most often ignored or hushed up. A 1985 survey of 7,000 American students on 32 campuses by Mary Koss, a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, found that one in eight women had been raped (date rape included). Morever, one in every 12 men admitted to having used physical coercion to force, or try to force, a woman to have intercourse.
While experts estimate that up to 90 percent of all rapes in the nation go unreported, they say women are especially reluctant to report rapes by dates or acquaintances. ''Schools don't like to air their dirty linen in public, and I think that's understandable,'' said Dr. Bernice Sandler, executive director of the Association of American Colleges' Project on the Status and Education of Women, in Washington, D.C. ''But some don't know the linen is dirty. Often, women are embarrassed. When these things happen, they don't report it.''
In a recent study, eight of the nine campus rape-prevention centers in the University of California system said they annually saw a total of about 240 rape victims who had failed to report the assaults to police. In 1986, according to a report by the Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy, as many as 20 acquaintance-rape victims sought help from the rape-prevention center on the Berkeley campus alone.
On college-related gang rape. Dr. Sandler's office has documented at least 70 such incidents, often occurring in athletic or fraternity settings. The office has also received reports from several campuses of men publicly biting women's breasts or buttocks, sometimes as part of fraternity initiation rituals, Dr. Sandler said.
Administrators say such violence is often linked to alcohol abuse, an increasing concern since several recent alcohol-related deaths on campuses. ''I would say 100 percent of our sexual-assault cases are alcohol-related,'' said Mr. Schafer of the University of Colorado.
OFFICIALS say schools are coping with such problems in varying degrees.
After a series of incidents in which women students were either verbally or physically harassed by male students at Princeton last year, the university hired a full-time sexual-harassment counselor, something a number of other schools have already done. All Princeton's campus security officers have undergone training with the new counselor.
Dr. Sandler, of the Project on the Status and Education of Women, says it is difficult to know whether sexual assaults are more frequent than a generation ago. However, in the past such acts were often written off as youthful rambunctiousness; today, at a time of heightened awareness of sexism, they are seen as violent crimes.
In California last year, Assemblyman Tom Hayden sponsored a resolution calling on state schools to establish policies for dealing with sexual assaults and to provide students with statistics on crime. Although the resolution lacks the force of law, Curtis Richards, an aide to Mr. Hayden, said it would have ''a very strong impact'' because of the Assembly's power over the budget of the state university system. Mr. Hayden heads the Assembly's subcommittee on education.
Whether the solution lies in legislation, stricter disciplinary policies, tighter security or some combination of them, the Clerys and other parents say they are encouraged by educators and students displaying greater awareness of campus crime.
A recent editorial in the Lehigh student newspaper on the Clery case concluded with these words: ''There is no such thing as a safe, idyllic campus. A college campus, composed of adults from many different backgrounds, is an extension of the real world. A world that has good and bad.''
Photo of student on campus at night (NYT/Vic DeLucia)
SO THE CAMPUS POLICE SAW 2 PEOPLE HAVING SEX OUTSIDE BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT IT WAS CONSENSUAL??????????? ON WHAT CAMPUS DO THE CAMPUS POLICE JUST ALLOW STUDENTS/KIDS TO HAVE SEX..........IN THE OPEN???
These and similar violent incidents at American colleges and universities in recent years have focused sharp attention on an issue many students, parents and administrators long considered a contradiction of a sort: crime on campus.
For years, college campuses had an image of being safe, bucolic havens, academic groves where the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of fellowship shut out many of the threats and fears of everyday life.
No longer. Several well-publicized crimes, a growing number of negligence lawsuits against colleges accused of lax security and a greater awareness of ''date rape,'' gang rape and other crimes against women have forced schools to confront the problem in an unprecedented way. Many have responded with seminars and forums on safety and sexual harassment, added lighting and increased security patrols.
''It's a new era on college campuses, where everybody - students, faculty, staff - is trying to pay greater attention to it,'' said William Schafer, director of the office of student conduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder. ''Whereas before, a lot of these issues weren't dealt with very openly, either because people didn't know it was occurring or they didn't want to admit it.''
Experts say no comprehensive statistics on campus crime are available. Only a little more than 300 of the nation's 2,100 four-year colleges and universities report data individually through the Federal Bureau of Investigation's voluntary Uniform Crime Reports system. Figures for most institutions, including many of the most prestigious private schools, are blended with local crime statistics - assuming that the schools report the crimes to begin with, and some critics contend many do not, for fear such information will damage their admissions and fund-raising efforts as well as their reputations.
A review of F.B.I. data from 1980 to 1986, the latest period for which statistics are available, shows a negligible increase in violent crimes reported, from about 2,300 on slightly more than 300 campuses in 1980 to about 2,400 crimes on 340 campuses in 1986. The number of crimes in general reported to the F.B.I. peaked in 1981, and the rate then declined until the last half of 1985, when a slight rise began.
''I'd be hard pressed to believe that there is any major increase statistically on campuses,'' said Daniel P. Keller, director of public safety for the 23,000-student University of Louisville. On the other hand, he said, ''There is an increased awareness of crime on campus.'' Yet he and other college officials are quick to acknowledge that the F.B.I. data are incomplete. ''Significant numbers of schools don't report, and the criteria are interpreted differently by different schools,'' said Mr. Keller, who is also a consultant to other schools. ''They're the best thing we have, but they're certainly not by any stretch or means accurate.''
Mr. Keller and other experts say many crimes, regardless of where they happen, go unreported, but in the closed environment of the college campus crimes of a sexual nature are under-reported. Victim and attacker often move in the same social circles, and there is a great disincentive to go to the police and press charges.
But officials at Towson State University in Maryland who have conducted surveys of crime on 1,100 campuses for the last two years, say they do detect a rise in violence.
''What we've been finding is there has been some increase in acts of violence, physical and sexual assault, rape and major vandalism in the last year,'' said Jan Sherrill, the school's assistant vice president of student affairs. ''What we don't know, because this is all self-reported, is just how extensive it is. What we do know is that most of the facts that are given to us are considered by the people who are reporting them to us to be lower than what's actually happening.''
Mr. Sherrill said assessments of violence varied widely, even among officials on the same campus. For example, he said, Towson's surveys found that while two-thirds of the deans of students who answered questionnaires said violence on their campus was under control, two-thirds of residence-hall directors said it was out of control.
Another problem is that a substantial portion of ''campus-related'' crimes actually occur off school property, although they involve students, fraternities and other student organizations. ''It's real difficult to get an accurate portrayal of exactly what is happening,'' Mr. Keller said. Two Crime Categories
What actually is happening falls into two major categories: crimes against students by outsiders and student-on-student crime.
Crimes committed against students by outsiders who come on campus range from those committed by thieves tempted by stereos, computers and bicycles to sex offenders drawn by the presence of large numbers of young women. Urban campuses have long faced such realities. Increasingly, suburban and even rural schools have had to recognize that their campuses are no longer the isolated, protected outposts of a generation ago.
The area around Princeton University in central New Jersey has grown greatly in the last decade. Businesses, attracted by the region's rich academic atmosphere and historic charm, have built office parks and shopping centers along the Route 1 corridor, a few miles from the campus in Princeton.
''Any direction you go, you see great, rapid growth,'' said Jerrold L. Witsil, the school's director of public safety. ''That has to mean there are going to be a lot of new people in the area, and with that kind of growth and exposure, things are going to change in the way of crime.''
At the same time, Mr. Witsil, former president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, says Princeton is determined to remain ''an open environment,'' without gates locking it off from the surrounding communities and with entrances to dormitories and class buildings kept open. ''We'll keep a lid on those who'd want to come on campus for illegal purposes by strengthening patrols and our preventive and awareness activities,'' he said.
Sometimes, awareness comes too late. A year and a half ago, Katherine M. Hawelka, a 19-year-old sophomore, was raped and murdered at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., a quiet town near the Canadian border. Two campus security guards drove by and saw Ms. Hawelka on the ground with a man about 3:30 A.M., yet did nothing because they thought the couple were engaged in consensual sex. They returned later to find Ms. Hawelka unconscious and beaten. She died three days later. The man convicted of murdering her, Brian M. McCarthy, 23, a Potsdam resident, was sentenced to 23 years to life in prison. He was not a Clarkson student and did not know Ms. Hawelka.
MS. HAWELKA'S family is suing Clarkson for $550 million, arguing that its guards were negligent. Ms. Hawelka grew up in Syracuse, and her family said they were well aware of the potential dangers in an urban area like that of Syracuse University. ''So when Katie went up to Potsdam, I don't think we even saw it in terms of anything like that being possible,'' said her mother, Terry Connelly. ''Even a lot of her friends asked, 'How could it happen?' ''
Clarkson officials have defended the guards' actions. Potsdam's police chief, Clinton Mattot, agreed, saying the men could not have known a rape was occurring. He said their attitude toward seeing people have sex in public seemed casual, but added: ''Mommies and daddies don't stop sex and neither does a college.'' Others perhaps would argue that the guards' attitude merely reflected society's updated, blase sexual mores.
AT THE HEART of the second major category - crimes committed by students against other students - is the question of what behavior a college can legitimately be expected to prevent. In the late 1960's and early 70's, most colleges eliminated the rigid codes of conduct that had governed student life for generations, substituting more general, perhaps permissive standards.
As the nation's mood retreated to conservatism in the 1980's, many states reinstated 21 as the legal drinking age. Schools reacted by getting tougher. Many stopped serving liquor at campus events. In sexual matters, some schools decided that rape was grounds for expulsion.
Students, concerned about sexual harassment and other incidents of sexism, also encouraged administrators to take a more active role in student life. ''The idea that a college stands in for parents, in loco parentis, is today a faded memory,'' said Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, in his book ''College,'' published last year. ''But on many campuses, there is great uncertainty about what should replace it.''
Howard and Constance Clery, whose 19-year-old daughter, Jeanne Ann, was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm room in 1986, advocate a return to greater supervision of student life by college officials. The Clerys are suing the school for $25 million, arguing that inadequate campus security led to their daughter's death. Although Miss Clery's dormitory had locking doors, students had propped them open.
Lehigh denies negligence, but the school has since undertaken several major improvements in security, including increasing its security force from 12 to 19; establishing a foot patrol; installing better lighting; locking dorms around the clock instead of only at night, and starting a campus shuttle-bus system during evening hours.
Jeanne Ann Clery was killed by a Lehigh student who had had earlier scrapes with the law. Her parents, besides suing the university, have launched a campaign for legislation, now pending in the Pennsylvania legislature, to require all colleges in the state to disclose to applicants not only their crime statistics for the previous three years but also their policies on student drug and alcohol abusers and admitting convicted felons.
Some administrators see such measures as misguided. ''It's real difficult to lock up a university, so to speak,'' said Mr. Keller of Louisville. ''It's an atypical society. It's not like a K-Mart that you can lock up at 9 at night and not expect anyone to be in there till 9 in the morning. It's a very, very live and vibrant environment that it's very difficult to put an umbrella over.''
SEXUAL assaults by students on students are perhaps the most difficult for schools to confront. They are also the ones most often ignored or hushed up. A 1985 survey of 7,000 American students on 32 campuses by Mary Koss, a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, found that one in eight women had been raped (date rape included). Morever, one in every 12 men admitted to having used physical coercion to force, or try to force, a woman to have intercourse.
While experts estimate that up to 90 percent of all rapes in the nation go unreported, they say women are especially reluctant to report rapes by dates or acquaintances. ''Schools don't like to air their dirty linen in public, and I think that's understandable,'' said Dr. Bernice Sandler, executive director of the Association of American Colleges' Project on the Status and Education of Women, in Washington, D.C. ''But some don't know the linen is dirty. Often, women are embarrassed. When these things happen, they don't report it.''
In a recent study, eight of the nine campus rape-prevention centers in the University of California system said they annually saw a total of about 240 rape victims who had failed to report the assaults to police. In 1986, according to a report by the Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy, as many as 20 acquaintance-rape victims sought help from the rape-prevention center on the Berkeley campus alone.
On college-related gang rape. Dr. Sandler's office has documented at least 70 such incidents, often occurring in athletic or fraternity settings. The office has also received reports from several campuses of men publicly biting women's breasts or buttocks, sometimes as part of fraternity initiation rituals, Dr. Sandler said.
Administrators say such violence is often linked to alcohol abuse, an increasing concern since several recent alcohol-related deaths on campuses. ''I would say 100 percent of our sexual-assault cases are alcohol-related,'' said Mr. Schafer of the University of Colorado.
OFFICIALS say schools are coping with such problems in varying degrees.
After a series of incidents in which women students were either verbally or physically harassed by male students at Princeton last year, the university hired a full-time sexual-harassment counselor, something a number of other schools have already done. All Princeton's campus security officers have undergone training with the new counselor.
Dr. Sandler, of the Project on the Status and Education of Women, says it is difficult to know whether sexual assaults are more frequent than a generation ago. However, in the past such acts were often written off as youthful rambunctiousness; today, at a time of heightened awareness of sexism, they are seen as violent crimes.
In California last year, Assemblyman Tom Hayden sponsored a resolution calling on state schools to establish policies for dealing with sexual assaults and to provide students with statistics on crime. Although the resolution lacks the force of law, Curtis Richards, an aide to Mr. Hayden, said it would have ''a very strong impact'' because of the Assembly's power over the budget of the state university system. Mr. Hayden heads the Assembly's subcommittee on education.
Whether the solution lies in legislation, stricter disciplinary policies, tighter security or some combination of them, the Clerys and other parents say they are encouraged by educators and students displaying greater awareness of campus crime.
A recent editorial in the Lehigh student newspaper on the Clery case concluded with these words: ''There is no such thing as a safe, idyllic campus. A college campus, composed of adults from many different backgrounds, is an extension of the real world. A world that has good and bad.''
Photo of student on campus at night (NYT/Vic DeLucia)
SO THE CAMPUS POLICE SAW 2 PEOPLE HAVING SEX OUTSIDE BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT IT WAS CONSENSUAL??????????? ON WHAT CAMPUS DO THE CAMPUS POLICE JUST ALLOW STUDENTS/KIDS TO HAVE SEX..........IN THE OPEN???
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