Earlier this week, Saint Francis University students protested about the handling of a reported off-campus rape case.
After their complaints, 6 News looked at reported rapes on its campus and compared it to similar sized colleges in our 10-county coverage area.
Crime stats are available on the U.S. Department of Education’s website, as well as each college’s website on the security and safety sections. For the data below, we looked at numbers from both sources and covered the last four years available, 2018-2021.
For Saint Francis University, 12 on-campus rapes were reported for the four year span.
Saint Francis University’s Chief of Police, Eric Allen said those reports are made to the Department of Education and follow the rules and regulations of the Clery Act. He said these assaults happened on the university’s property, whether it was in a dorm or at an on-campus apartment.
Allen said there needs to be more awareness about sexual assault on college campuses.
Since the report of the rape and arrests of two university football players off campus, the dean from the School of Health Sciences of Education said they have had more students reach out to their counseling services.
“We coordinate between the student health center and the counseling center and try to address the physical as well as the emotional psychological needs” Dr. Don Walkovich said.
Allen said under the Clery rules and regulations, the Department of Education says schools must post crimes from the previous three years because it acts like a consumer report for potential students and their families.
The numbers of reported on-campus rapes at Juniata College in Huntingdon County are much higher than Saint Francis in that 4-year period. The college has 24 total, with 17 of those being in 2018 alone.
We tried contacting the college’s communications department and president on Thursday but did not get any responses about the high numbers of on-campus rape reports. Juniata College reported an enrollment of just of 1,300 students enrolled in 2022 on the DOE website.
