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The newly released��2024 Sexual Assault and Related Harms Survey results show students reporting a slight increase in sexual assault compared to 2021, though the rate remained substantially lower than in 2015 when �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder first conducted the survey. The latest survey shows a slight decrease in stalking and no statistically significant changes in sexual exploitation from 2021 to 2024, with rates for each of those metrics also remaining lower than in 2015.��

�鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder’s��Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC) administered the survey during the fall 2024 semester to gather data about the prevalence of misconduct experienced by students on and off campus during their time at the university. It focused on sexual assault, harassment, exploitation, stalking and intimate partner abuse.��

While a few of the main categories saw rates increase slightly from 2021 to 2024, the rates for four of the five remained significantly lower than in 2015. The slight increases from 2021 were not unexpected given that multiple factors—particularly COVID-19 pandemic-related influences such as campuses going remote, stay-at-home orders and general trends toward less socialization—contributed significantly to the large decreases in rates seen in the 2021 survey.��

�鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder first surveyed in 2015 and then again in 2021. The university plans to administer the survey every four years going forward.��

“While we’re encouraged that the results for most categories continue to trend lower than in 2015 and indicate that our campus prevention efforts since then have made a positive impact, we recognize that there is still much work to be done,” said Llen Pomeroy, vice chancellor for OIEC and the campus’s Title IX coordinator. “The data gathered in the latest survey will enable our campus experts to better understand current trends affecting our students so we can enhance and expand existing prevention practices and student support services.”��

OIEC will continue to analyze the 2024 data throughout the coming months. OIEC will collaborate with the��Office of Victim Assistance and the��Sexual Misconduct Task Force, a representative advisory group, to identify opportunities for strengthening campus prevention and response efforts.

About the survey

A total of 9,119 undergraduate and 2,383 graduate students completed the 2024 Sexual Assault and Related Harms Survey, with respective response rates of 28% and 29%. OIEC leads the survey design and implementation and is responsible for educating the �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder community about, and addressing incidents of, discrimination, harassment and sexual misconduct. OIEC also monitors prevalence by administering smaller-scale surveys��focused on first-year undergraduate students, who are impacted the most, between the years when the full student body is surveyed.

Survey participants were asked whether they had experienced sexual assault and related harms since becoming a student at �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder. The survey respondents were demographically representative of the student population, including in terms of participants’ race and ethnicity and their school or college.

The��findings compiled in the new report compare prevalence rates from previous surveys in 2015 and 2021 to the 2024 results.

“Our goal has been to track where the campus has improved and where problems persist,” Pomeroy said. “Unfortunately, sexual assault and other gender-based harm are deeply entrenched social ills that disproportionately impact young people in the United States, making it difficult to eradicate these issues in the college environment. This underscores why tracking this data is so important in directing the strategies we deploy to prevent sexual misconduct.”

Survey data

The 2024 survey data indicates that 18% of undergraduate women reported being sexually assaulted since coming to �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder, up from 15% in the 2021 data but still down from the 28% reported in 2015. Similar to 2015 and 2021, undergraduate men, graduate women and graduate men reported lower rates of sexual misconduct than undergraduate women for all categories.

Rates of sexual exploitation saw no statistically significant changes from 2021 to 2024 and remained lower in 2024 than in 2015 for all groups.��

Stalking, which had stayed largely flat from 2015 to 2021, decreased in 2024 for undergraduate women by 5 percentage points, along with slight decreases for other groups.

OIEC will continue analyzing the data to understand how these issues impact our many university communities, including gender identity beyond the categories of women and men, sexual orientation and other key demographics like race and disability status.��

New questions, new findings

The 2024 survey incorporated additional behaviors into the definitions of sexual harassment and intimate partner abuse based on new research and student feedback following the 2021 survey.

“We are constantly evolving the survey to capture a broad range of harms based on students’ lived experience,” said Julie Volckens, senior director of assessment and prevention for OIEC. “This included adding public behaviors such as catcalling to the sexual harassment section and expanding intimate partner violence to include academic, economic and technology-based abuse.”��

Except for graduate men, compared to both 2015 and 2021 results, in 2024 there was a meaningful increase in reports of sexual harassment, especially among undergraduate women. Intimate partner abuse, meanwhile, saw increases from 2021 to 2024 but remained lower than in 2015 for all groups.

“Expanding the questions increased our ability to capture problematic behaviors that may have been occurring previously but weren’t detected in past surveys,” Volckens said.

Key trends

For those who indicated they experienced sexual assault, the survey asked questions about when the incident occurred, where it occurred, the characteristics of the perpetrator, whether the survey participant officially reported the incident, as well as personal consequences they may have experienced as a result of the incident.

Timing/characteristics

• For undergraduates, the majority of assaults occurred in the fall semester.
• For the majority of undergraduate and graduate students, the perpetrator(s) of sexual assault was someone they knew (a friend, casual dating partner or hookup, acquaintance or someone they just met, current or former dating partner).
• As compared to 2021, there was an increase in the prevalence of a casual dating partner or hookup being indicated as the sexual assault perpetrator for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Location

For both undergraduate women and men, the majority of sexual assaults occurred in the same three locations in 2024 as compared to 2021: a Greek chapter house, someone else’s off-campus residence, and the student’s campus residence.

Although a Greek chapter house remained the most common location in 2024 (18% of sexual assault incidents among undergraduate women), this represents a substantial drop from the 2021 rate of 30%.

Consequences

Among undergraduate women, the majority indicated that they had experienced negative consequences from the sexual assault in addition to the incident itself. This included impact to their mental health (76%), intimate relationships (66%), feelings about their body (66%) and confidence in their abilities (52%). Almost half (46%) also reported that the sexual assault had made them less productive in their academic work.

Compared to 2021, a meaningfully smaller percentage of the 2024 survey participants reported experiencing negative outcomes from a sexual assault across all types of consequences measured in the survey: health, social, college and career, and academic. One reason for this could be that rates of students disclosing their experiences to another person—be it a roommate, friend or family member—remained high. Research has shown that receiving support can reduce the negative consequences experienced by survivors of sexual and interpersonal harm.��

Peer institutions

Compared to AAU peer institutions that collected data pre- and post-pandemic, �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder saw lower rates of sexual assault and a larger decrease since before the pandemic. AAU peer institutions saw pre-pandemic rates of sexual assault for women decrease from 32% before the pandemic to 24% in 2024, compared to �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder’s decline from 28% pre-pandemic to 18% in 2024.

Looking forward, using the data

The Sexual Misconduct Task Force was formed after the 2021 survey was administered to thoroughly review and understand campus data and peer-reviewed research and help develop broad-based practices for reducing sexual harm against students.

The task force, guided by OIEC prevention staff,��developed promising prevention strategies for students, faculty and staff to improve protective factors for the campus community and reduce harm.��

The task force will continue its work in response to the survey analyses to support the implementation of comprehensive prevention practices.��