Students yelled, “No means No,” towards the PIKE fraternity house at a protest against alleged sexual assault on Friday, Nov. 5, 2021. (Io Hartman/CU Independent)
The University of Colorado Boulder has announced the creation of a Sexual Misconduct Task Force, designed to investigate possible solutions and resources to confront the issue of sexual assault on campus.
“The task force will enable us to use our latest data to implement practices that help prevent sexual misconduct and mitigate its impacts in our community,” said Llen Pomeroy, the associate vice chancellor of the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC) and the CU Boulder Title IX coordinator, in a statement sent to university community members.
The creation of the task force follows the recent report of a sexual assault at Williams Village North, in which a female CU Boulder student was attacked by a college-aged white male, and protests that took place last November after allegations that a member of a Boulder fraternity sexual assaulted a woman swept across campus.
The task force is not designed to investigate sexual assault claims or act on them. According to the statement, the role of the group will be purely to investigate solutions that may help with sexual assault in the CU Boulder community. The university asks those seeking to report an active case of sexual assault or learn about resources available to CU students and staff to contact OIEC.
The task force will include input from staff and several relevant sources, including the departments of student and academic affairs, the CU Police Department, Strategic Resources and Support, OIEC and the Office of Victim Assistance.
“Bringing different campus units together is important because an integrated and comprehensive approach is essential to preventing misconduct,” Pomeroy said.
The task force was created in anticipation of a sexual misconduct town hall meeting on Sept. 26, in which results from the 2021 Sexual Misconduct Survey will be discussed and analyzed. The results themselves will become available to the general public on Sept. 6.
The last sexual misconduct survey by CU Boulder was performed in 2015 and released in 2016. The survey, conducted over the entire CU student population with a 41% (13,009) undergraduate student response rate included several statistics of note.
The survey found that 27% of straight women and 30% of LGBTQA+ women reported sexual assault at least once, while 5% of straight men and 10% of LGBTQA+ men reported they had been sexually assaulted at least once.
Additionally, the vast majority of sexual assaults happen during students’ first semester on the CU campus. Almost 90% of sexual assaults occurred during students’ first and second years on campus, while 71% of all sexual assault complaints were reported in the fall semester.
The sexual misconduct town hall is available for all community members to attend and will be held in the UMC in room 235. Those interested can register to attend in person or via Zoom.
Contact CU Independent Breaking News Editor Parker Lamb at parker.lamb@colorado.edu.
