Schools Across The Country Struggle To Prevent Sexual Assault: AP

Untold numbers of students across the country are victims of sexual violence every year, a threat which schools are frequently ill-equipped and insufficiently motivated to prevent or address, according to a report out Monday from the Associated Press. Reporters working on the yearlong story found around 17,000 cases of sexual assaults in state education records and federal crime data at the United States' K-12 schools, though they note that the actual number is much greater given the chronic underreporting of such violations.

The story focuses on Chaz Wing, a 17-year-old in Maine who says he was brutally raped by classmates on school grounds after enduring years of bullying and cruelty. Wing came forward only a year after the assault and eventually sued the school, which he says did not do enough to protect him.

Though he eventually won a $50,000 settlement in the case, he never received an apology from school administrators; it appears they doubt the veracity of his account, despite the consistency of his accounts and the report of a childhood trauma expert who believes the incident likely happened.

As the AP tells it, this type of story is all too common. Though children are most likely to experience sexual assault in the home, the second place they're most likely to be victimized is at school. And while assaults against students by adults are widely discussed and rightly acknowledged as a serious problem, the AP found that peer-to-peer assaults happen far more frequently and receive far less attention. School officials may even have incentives to ignore the problem entirely for fear that they could be held liable if it is publicly acknowledged.

Indeed, the report found that some educators and officials engaged in cover-ups or played down troubling evidence to avoid sullying the school's reputation.

In a separate story, the AP reported the differences between state policies for tracking and responding to sexual assaults. Even though there are federal regulations on colleges and universities that require administrators to track reports of sexual assaults, there are no such national requirements for K-12 schools. The AP found that some schools tried to skirt around the lax requirements and and "mask" the true number of assaults. Schools often have wide discretion about how to characterize a certain act is recorded, whether as a sexual assault or another more minor type of incident, which allows for the data to be easily manipulated.

Eighteen states have no reporting requirements at all; the AP says that in many of these regions cases of sexual assault can go unnoticed. Read the full list of reporting requirements state-by-state.

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