How Safe Do College Students Feel?

On any given day, thousands of students, faculty, and workers walk a college campus. With so many different types of people in such a close area, it isn’t safe to assume everyone has good intentions. According to the Fall 2009 National College Health Assessment by the American College Health Association, college students reported about how safe they felt and what threatened that safety.

How safe students felt generally depended on where they were and at what time. A large majority of students, 83.4 percent, reported that they felt very safe on their college campus during day hours. There was a slight difference between males and females, with 85.8 percent of males reporting feeling very safe, compared to 82.7 percent of females. But when it came to night hours, many students changed their minds, with only 31.6 percent of students reporting that they felt very safe on their campus at night. Again, there was a difference between male and female students, as 50.3 percent of males reported feeling very safe compared to only 21.6 percent of females. It does seem that students tend to feel safer on campus than off of it. When it came to how safe students felt in the community surrounding their schools, 51.1 percent reported feeling very safe in the daylight, while only 17.5 percent felt safe at night. Of the 51.1 percent of students who felt safe during the day, 56.8 were male and 48.5 were female. But at night females tended not to feel as safe as males, of the 17.5 percent of students who reported feeling safe at night, only 11.4 percent were females compared to 28.8 percent of males.

In the past 12 months, students reported several things that threatened their safety. Physical and verbal altercations were common, with 8 percent of students reporting they had been in a physical fight, 4.8 percent in a physical assault, and 21.9 had been threatened verbally. Sexual encounters also threatening student safety, which in general effected more females than males. Of these sexual encounters, 6 percent of students reported experiencing sexual touching without their consent, 2.4 percent of students reported attempted sexual penetration without their consent, and 1.6 percent of students reported an incident where there was sexual penetration without their consent. Students’ safety can also be threatened by someone who is, or is trying to, get close to them, 6.9 percent of students reported that they had been stalked, 9.8 percent expererienced an emotionally abusive intimate relationship, 2.4 percent a physically abusive intimate relationship, and 1.7 a sexually abusive intimate relationship.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 9:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.