One in five women on American college campuses will experience sexual assault before they graduate. That number, drawn from a landmark 2024 federal survey of more than 180,000 students across ten universities, has been cited repeatedly in policy debates, campus orientation sessions, and congressional testimony. Yet the figure that deserves equal attention sits quietly beside it: only 16% of victims ever report what happened to their school.
A new study from researchers at a large U.S. university helps explain that gap — and the explanation isn't apathy or ignorance. It's something more corrosive: a calculated, experience-informed distrust of the institutions students depend on.
What the Research Actually Found
The study, which combined a 2022 survey of roughly 2,500 students with earlier interviews and focus groups involving 67 students, faculty, and staff, wasn't designed simply to count victims. The researchers — a sociologist, a psychologist, and a doctoral student who collectively study sexual harm — wanted to understand how campus community members expected their university to behave if someone came forward.
The results were striking. Widespread skepticism extended well beyond students who had experienced sexual misconduct personally. Many participants had formed their views by watching how their university handled other incidents entirely — racist incidents, anti-LGBTQ+ harassment, discrimination complaints. One commonly cited example involved a student group that used terms like "degeneracy" and "deviant" to publicly shame LGBTQ+ peers, with no meaningful institutional response. Participants drew a direct line from that inaction to their expectations around sexual violence: if the university wouldn't defend students against visible, documented harassment, why would it do better in cases of sexual assault, where evidence is often harder to establish and reputational stakes are higher?
"If the university isn't going to socially advocate for these students in terms of injustice and discrimination, what makes us think that they would trust us and validate us in situations of sexual violence?" one student said during the interviews.
The Institutional Betrayal Framework
Researchers studying campus sexual violence have developed a formal concept to describe this dynamic: institutional betrayal. It refers to situations where people feel their school failed either to prevent harm or to respond adequately afterward. Studies estimate that between 50% and 90% of college students who experience sexual assault also report some degree of institutional betrayal — a staggeringly wide range that reflects how differently individual students interpret administrative inaction.
What's newer, and arguably more troubling, is the concept of secondary institutional betrayal — the phenomenon the current study documents in detail. This occurs when students who haven't personally experienced misconduct develop a sense of betrayal based on what they observe happening to others. It functions like a community-wide trust deficit, spreading doubt about reporting through social networks long before any individual student has to make a decision about coming forward.
Both forms of betrayal carry documented mental health consequences. Anxiety, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and depression have all been linked not just to sexual misconduct itself, but to the experience of institutional failure afterward. A university that handles a report poorly can, in a measurable sense, compound the harm.
Why Administrators Fail Students — And Why They Know It
The study's qualitative findings offer a blunt assessment of how students perceive administrative decision-making. Participants consistently described their university as prioritizing reputation management over student welfare — staying out of the news, avoiding litigation, keeping uncomfortable incidents from reaching the board of trustees. The word that came up repeatedly in interviews was "damage control."
This perception isn't entirely unfair, and campus administrators privately acknowledge the pressure. Title IX compliance requirements, Department of Education investigations, high-profile civil lawsuits, and the reputational fallout from public misconduct scandals have created an environment where universities have strong institutional incentives to minimize, delay, or quietly resolve reports rather than respond in ways that might draw scrutiny. Risk-averse bureaucracies produce risk-averse outcomes.
The result is a deeply counterproductive cycle. The less students trust the institution to respond well, the fewer reports get filed. Fewer reports mean administrators can claim lower incident rates, which reduces urgency around reform. Meanwhile, actual rates of misconduct remain stubbornly high.
When Unrelated Harms Shape Sexual Misconduct Policy
Perhaps the study's most practically significant finding is the connection students draw between different categories of harm. Sexual misconduct doesn't exist in isolation in students' minds — it's part of a broader picture of how the institution treats vulnerable people. When a campus fails to address racism or homophobia visibly and decisively, it erodes trust in institutional responses to sexual violence, even among students who have no direct experience of either.
This aligns with existing research showing that sexual misconduct is statistically more prevalent on campuses where students also report higher rates of discrimination based on marginalized identities. The two aren't parallel problems with separate solution sets — they're intertwined, and campus climate around one shapes outcomes in the other.
Some scholars have argued for integrated intervention strategies that address sexual misconduct and identity-based discrimination simultaneously. That approach faces serious headwinds following a January 2025 executive order from the Trump administration banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across federally funded institutions. Universities have responded by shuttering women's centers, multicultural resource offices, and similar programs — precisely the infrastructure that often served as the first point of contact for students processing harm. Fewer entry points for reporting discrimination means fewer entry points for reporting sexual misconduct, and less visibility into campus climate overall.
What Meaningful Reform Would Actually Require
The researchers offer starting points rather than finished prescriptions, which is intellectually honest given that their recommendations haven't been formally tested at scale. Their suggestions center on genuine community engagement: holding open forums to understand how students experience harm, actively soliciting improvement ideas from campus members, and treating the trust problem as a substantive policy challenge rather than a communications one.
That last distinction matters. Many universities have responded to sexual misconduct crises with improved messaging — updated websites, clearer reporting instructions, awareness campaigns with checkmarks and consent slogans. These efforts address the information gap but not the trust gap. A student who believes administrators will prioritize the institution's reputation over their wellbeing won't file a report because she now knows the name of the Title IX coordinator. She'll stay silent because she's already concluded the outcome isn't worth the exposure.
Real reform likely requires something more structural: independent oversight of Title IX processes, survivor-facing transparency about case outcomes (within privacy constraints), visible accountability when institutional responses fall short, and consistent follow-through on non-sexual misconduct incidents that students use as proxies for institutional values. Universities that handle a homophobic harassment incident decisively aren't just doing right by LGBTQ+ students — they're communicating to the entire campus that the institution will act when students are harmed.
The 84% of sexual misconduct victims who never come forward aren't a policy failure waiting to be fixed with a better website. They're a rational response to institutions that have, repeatedly, given them reasons not to. Reversing that calculation will require universities to change what they actually do — starting with incidents that have nothing to do with sexual violence at all.
