On What Makes a School “Dangerous”

The Daily Beast has released it’s second annual list of the “50 Most Dangerous Colleges,” using reported incidents of crime on campus from 2006-2008 (the most recent numbers they had access to). Last year when they did this list, they got very specific about their methodology, and I was really put off by a couple of their decisions. For one thing, this:

[B]ecause the most recent Department of Education data cuts off at the end of 2007, we adjusted each school’s number for the violent crime rate increase or decrease in the local area, as determined by the FBI, between then and the end of 2008, so that they would better reflect the current environment.

Whoa, what? You adjusted using local crime data? Since when is campus crime reflective of local crime rates? So that immediately made me suspicious. They don’t address it in this year’s version, so I don’t know if they did it again. But here’s what they had to say about weighting crimes and sexual assault, last year:

Second, since not all crimes are alike, we more heavily weighted the most violent offenses. We considered burglary and motor vehicle theft the most pedestrian. Robbery, which differs from burglary in that it generally involves taking property off a person, was weighted three times as high as those two categories. Aggravated assault and arson, five times. Manslaughter, ten times. Murder, 20 times. The trickiest category was rape. Acquaintance rape is not broken out, and many schools that do the most to support and encourage victims to report the crime—and are thus in many ways the safest environments—also had the most incidents. We wound up giving it standard weighting, in an attempt to balance the crime’s severity without overpenalizing schools that report the most because they offer more support.

While I appreciate the recognition that schools with high rates of reported rape may in fact be “safer” because they have created an atmosphere where students feel comfortable reporting, the whole “consequently we gave it standard weighing” seems arbitrary and flawed. More than that however, I am bothered by their point that “acquaintance rape wasn’t broken out.” So? Would acquaintance rape have been weighted “less” than “stranger rape?” This year they don’t even mention rape in their explanation of weighting, making me wonder how they did it.

Another difference between this year’s list and last year’s list is that last year, for a given school, they didn’t list the exact number of each kind of incident for each school. Each school was accompanied with a general paragraph about campus safety. This year the Daily Beast steps it up and lists, for each school, the number of murders; negligent homicides; forcible rape; non-forcible rape; robberies; aggravated assaults; burglaries; car thefts; and arson. What immediately sticks out to me is the lack of any mention of sexual assault (specifically, sexual violations that don’t include vaginal or anal penetration). Granted, the FBI does not have a particularly nuanced set of categories for sex crimes, but they do include “forcible rape, forcible sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling.” Clery statistics are meant to include data on all “sex offenses,” which one assumes includes incidents that would not be categorized as rape. But the Daily Beast makes no mention of other sexual misconduct. They also don’t define their terms, which might leave a lot of folks wondering what “non-forcible” rape is. (Answer: it refers to statutory rape and incest, that’s why there are so few incidents listed).

Looking through the numbers, I have mixed feelings. For one thing, when I see that 128 rapes were reported at Harvard from 2006-2008, I’m more comforted than I am by the fact that zero rapes at Indiana Wesleyan University, one of the schools on the 50 Safest Colleges list. And we’ve talked before about why that is. But mostly I am left wondering about how the Daily Beast’s conception of “what counts” in terms of sexual violence and campus safety. Based on the little they’ve told us over the past couple of years, I’m pretty unsettled by what it might be.