Sexual Assault Disclosure by College Women at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Predominantly White Institutions

Abstract

Due to the Title IX law, administrators at institutions of higher education (IHE) in the United States must promptly investigate reports of sexual assault. In addition, the Clery Act requires IHEs to publicly disclose annual sexual assault statistics. However, it is unknown whether—or how—sexual assault disclosure differs by type of IHE. This study, a secondary analysis of data collected from students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and predominantly White institutions (PWIs), examines the role of incident, offender, and victim characteristics in whether women disclosed experiencing unwanted sexual contact (due to force or incapacitation) and to whom they disclosed, by type of IHE. Significant differences in the characteristics of their experiences and factors associated with sexual assault disclosure were found between samples of women attending HBCUs (n = 327) and PWIs (n = 760). However, as expected, the multivariate analyses indicate that factors associated with the culturally reinforced stereotype of “real rape”—that is, the use of force, presence of injuries, and perpetrators who were not an intimate partner, friend, or acquaintance—were positively associated with disclosure for both samples. Overall, the probability of disclosure was higher for sexual assault due to force than incapacitation. In addition, White students had a higher probability of disclosure than Black students for both forms of sexual assault regardless of type of IHE.

Notes

¹ For the purposes of this article, the term sexual assault includes several forms of unwanted sexual contact such as “forced touching of a sexual nature, oral sex, sexual intercourse or sexual penetration with a finger or object” (Krebs et al., 2007, p. 11; 2011a).

² Although the current study’s authors recognize and value that the respondents in this survey may identify as victims, survivors, or neither, for simplicity sake, the women in this study will be referred to as victims in this article.

³ In 2013, the Clery Act was amended and reauthorized as the Campus SaVE Act (see Duncan, 2014 for details).

⁴ The HBCU study used the same instrument as the CSA study, with some minor exceptions. The study’s authors added some questions for the HBCU study that were not included in the CSA study. However, the questions used in the current study were the same for both studies.

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⁶ Results for the combined samples are not shown but are available from the first author upon request.