BPD rape reports up, IUPD rape reports down

With five months left until the end of the year, the 26 reported rapes in Bloomington already matches the same statistic for the whole of 2006, according to Bloomington Police Department statistics and Indiana AreaConnect.
While the number for the city increases, the number of reported rapes for campus has decreased somewhat, said IU Police Department Sgt. Leslie Slone, who suspects reports do not reflect the true statistics.
In 2006, nine cases were reported by students, and in 2007 only three cases of forcible rape were reported, according to IU Police Department crime reports.
Slone said she doesn’t think the number of actual rapes is decreasing – people are simply not reporting them.
“This last year these cases have been terribly under-reported, and of the incidents reported to us, 99.9 percent are located indoors, with someone who is known to the victim, and involves alcohol,” Slone said.
She said she also thinks people aren’t reporting “forceful sexual advances,” either.
Someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every two minutes, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network Web site. One in six women and one in 33 men will be sexually assaulted in his or her lifetime, and college-age women are four times more likely to be sexually assaulted, according to RAINN.
On campus, victims are offered three options when reporting a rape to the police, Slone said. The victim can choose to have no action taken and to have his or her report only used for statistical purposes. The second response option is to have the case investigated by the Office of Student Ethics and Anti-Harassment Programs. The third option is to have a criminal investigation initiated by the campus police.
“Maybe 60 to 65 percent of reports become criminal investigations,” she said.
Sixty percent of sexual assaults are not reported to the police, even though reporting has increased by one-third since 1993, according to the RAINN Web site.
When a victim wants to pursue a criminal investigation, they should remember to always be completely honest about the events, said BPD Sgt. Jeff Canada.
“False reports make our job very difficult,” he said.
In some situations the victim denies drinking and thus makes their case more difficult to take to court. The credibility of a victim is paramount to the legislative process that occurs after an investigation, Canada said. Many victims don’t report a rape because they want to begin the healing process, Slone said.
The credibility of a victim is seriously undermined when they falsify information about the event, Canada said. If a victim reported a rape, he added, he or she wouldn’t be held accountable for drinking.
“This type of crime is a very sensitive one, and we do take these (reports) very seriously,” Canada said.