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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

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EDITORIAL: In the dark

Illo

Imagine you’re doing your typical Tuesday night routine: avoiding homework and watching Netflix.

You hear your phone buzz, and your heart leaps in your throat at the thought of your friends or, even better, your crush texting you. But when you look at that screen, hope flees and panic fills ?its place.

“IU Bloomington Alert” reads the top of the text. In the message, you read details about a sexual assault that includes a description of the suspect and the typical warnings that accompany all crime alerts. But there’s just one thing missing: a location.

The above scenario seems rather ridiculous when you think about it. How in the world are students supposed to stay safe and avoid the area in question without being given a location?

The University is making a change to its procedures that will prevent revealing locations of sexual assaults reported to the IU Police Department. Information on locations will be described using generic details, like whether an assault occurred in on-campus housing or in on-campus student organization housing.

These new changes came into place after feedback from students who’ve experienced sexual assault was brought to the attention of the University. Fears of losing anonymity have fueled victims into asking locations be eliminated in the crime alerts.

We on the Editorial Board sympathize with victims. Such a heinous act committed against another human being can seem even more monstrous when the entire student population knows details about it. But not revealing a location of sexual assault would be doing more harm than good.

Unfortunately, no one is really surprised when we hear there’s a rape. Sexual assault on campuses across this country is an epidemic we’re all too familiar with. Receiving an alert that does nothing but notify an assault occurred somewhere on campus only validates what we already know.

What’s the point of informing students if you don’t reveal information that could potentially be helpful?

Giving a description of a suspect that matches a large percentage of the population doesn’t assist in reporting tips when you don’t add context clues. How is anyone supposed to report suspicious activity they may have seen if they aren’t told where a crime was committed?

Also, alerts tell students when to be on their guard. Yes, we know at this point that rapists come in all types of personalities and they aren’t just scary shadows hiding in bushes but people we know, trust and love.

But when there are repeated crime alerts for sexual assault for a single location, say, a fraternity house, it lets students know there could potentially be a problem at this location.

The Editorial Board doesn’t want to make victims uncomfortable, and we certainly don’t want to aid in their pain during an invasive process of reporting. We understand why they would feel giving a location is violating their anonymity. But giving a building name is informative for the students, yet vague enough for the victim that both parties will receive some form of benefit.

In the long run, these changes won’t help victims of sexual assault. It will only aid in the destructive manner this school has dealt with sexual assault.

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