MU sexual and intimate partner violence task force releases recommendations
A new report finds that the rate of sexual assaults on the University of Missouri campus is “too high for its population size.”
Vice Chancellor Garnett Stokes, now interim chancellor, established the University of Missouri’s Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence Task Force in the fall of 2015.
Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence Task Force Report
The task force was in charge of reviewing the results of a 2015 Association of American Universities campus climate survey on sexual assault and misconduct.
The report found that 52 percent of students had experienced sexual harassment, a substantial percentage of graduate students reported sexual harassment by an MU faculty member and fewer than half knew where to find help at MU.
The task force identified three primary areas for focus: education, prevention and response, noting the rate of sexual assault and misconduct was too high for all populations at MU and particularly high for undergraduate women and higher than the average of all institutions that participated in the AAU study.
The Office for Civil Rights & Title IX told ABC 17 News the university is fully invested in educating the campus on prevention.
2015-2016 Office for Civil Rights and Title IX Annual Report
The 2015-2016 annual report described 674 alleged incidents of race, color, sex, disability, religion or age discrimination.
Among the 674 reports, 549 were sex/gender discrimination reports, 176 were race/discrimination reports and 23 were religious discrimination.
In comparison, the 2014 to 2015 annual report found that 342 sex/gender discrimination incidents were reported involved students.
The report covers the fall of 2015, when students protested and spoke out publicly against race and discrimination and hate-motivated incidents on campus.
“We hope that this report will provide you with a sense of the campus climate and demonstrate our efforts to identify, stop, and prevent discrimination and sexual violence. Let there be no doubt- our team and other stakeholders in the MU community are working tirelessly to stop discrimination on campus,” said Ellen Eardley, assistant vice chancellor for civil rights and Title IX.
While there have been an increase in reports, the University said it’s because more students are reporting these type of incidents.
“Reporting has gone up, we don’t think it means necessarily the prevalence rate has gone up,” Eardley said. “Those numbers reflect increase reporting to our office, increase in awareness about services that we offer.”
The University said they will participate in another AAU survey in 2019 to see what progress they made.
The full report can be seen below:
2015-2016 Office for Civil Rights & Title IX Annual Report
M-U Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence Task Force 2017 Recommendations
