Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.
Every year, around the beginning of October, we get the “Security and Fire Safety” report from the Indiana University Police Department, with data about reported crimes safely tucked somewhere among hundreds of pages of boilerplate text. If you scroll to page 144, as I did last week, you’ll find out how well our campus authorities have taken care of students’ safety over the past three years.
You can also go back and do the math for another decade or so of data, but don’t ask the IUPD or anyone else in the Chancellor or Provost’s offices to provide that basic info. Parents wanting to send their daughters and sons to IU will likely have no clue about these numbers, probably some of the most revealing information about the kind of college culture you’re about to launch your kid into.
This year’s data is not good news. Long term, we are failing to bring down the numbers of interpersonal violence taking place on this campus. Burglaries and car thefts are also going up. But I want to focus solely on the numbers that speak to the incidence of sexual harassment of varying kinds. The categories reported are: rape or statutory rape, fondling, incest, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking and hate crime, specifically related to gender.
Here are the numbers, provided to you for a range of nine years for a better long-term view:
| Year | 2017 | '18 | '19 | '20 | '21 | '22 | '23 | '24 | '25 |
| Type of crime | |||||||||
| Rape or statutory rape | 26 | 22 | 21 | 25 | 31 | 44 | 31 | 43 | 43 |
| Fondling | 7 | 11 | 5 | 7 | 18 | 37 | 19 | 29 | 17 |
| Incest |
0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Domestic violence | 5 | 4 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 21 | 17 | 15 | 32 |
| Dating violence | 20 | 12 | 14 | 1 | 5 | 33 | 24 | 18 | 0 |
| Stalking | 27 | 32 | 33 | 33 | 27 | 75 | 171 | 164 | 153 |
| Hate crime | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Total | 86 | 83 | 79 | 66 | 83 | 211 | 263 | 270 | 246 |
The year of confinement and isolation due to COVID-19, 2020, offers a dip that suggests both anomalies due to most students being mostly off campus, as well as possible under reporting — zero incidents of domestic violence stands out in relation to every other year.
But there is clear evidence that from an average of just under 83 reports per year until 2022, excluding 2020, we jumped to an average of just under 248 reports per year in the next four years. That is a growth of nearly 200%. This happened under the watchful eye of “students are the center of the universe” Pamela Whitten, Rahul Shrivistav and the IUPD. Safety has been a word these people used liberally during this interval, for instance to invite brutal police action against peaceful protesters in Dunn Meadow.
When, if ever, have you seen a discussion about these numbers conducted by the Provost, Chancellor or Vice President for Student Life? I have been on this campus for 30 years, and I have never seen that conversation take place, even when I tried to force it through a public petition intended to engage the Provost — then Lauren Robel — and the Bloomington Faculty Council.
That was more than a decade ago. And it went nowhere. The only serious publicity to this problem was brought about by audacious reporting from the IDS. The relatively new regular log about sexual violence reports on campus also does a good job of making this issue visible to those who want to check.
We are currently in the midst of searching for a new Provost. We have strong leadership in both the BFC and IU Student Government. These bodies and the administrators charged with picking the new campus leader have the opportunity and responsibility to ask what the new Provost will do to address this major problem regarding safety on campus.
I am hopeful that looking at this data will help us join what is becoming a renewed national conversation about the nature of sexual violence on college campuses. We need to identify the core problems and generate mechanisms and resources to address them structurally. We need to do more than place the same set of greek houses on cease and desist one semester, only to return to the pattern of putting up with violent behavior the next semester. This rinse and repeat “solution” is endangering the student body.
Two years ago, the university shut down a major cultural event that it was putting lots of money into because of “security concerns.” It’s time to start thinking about the large numbers of reported rapes, incidents of domestic violence and other forms of sexual harassment as major “security concerns” for our students as well.
I look forward to hearing from the Chancellor and Interim Provost about their solutions.
Maria Bucur is the John W. Hill Professor of History at Indiana University.
