For over 30 years, The Clery Act has mandated public and federally-funded private institutions across the United States to do three things: publicize their crime data and safety procedures, issue timely warnings if danger is still present and support victims of violence. The act was passed in 1990, four years after freshman Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her dorm room by a student she did not know. Following Jeanne Clery’s death, the Clery family began advocating for a bill that would require colleges to be transparent about the crime occurring on their campuses and the measures they have in place to keep their students safe. 

President of SAFE Campuses LLC and Clery Act expert, Daniel Carter, says the Clery Act makes college campuses safer in two key ways. 

 “In addition to empowering campus community members with information to make informed decisions to protect themselves,” Carter wrote to The Wire in an email, “the Clery Act spurs institutions to take actions to prevent and respond to crimes and other threats to safety more effectively.”

The Clery Act requires colleges to distribute an annual security report to students and faculty every Oct. 1. Colleges must report statistics on any murder, negligent manslaughter, rape, fondling, incest, statutory rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft or arson that has occurred on or near campus. Under the Biden Administration’s new Title IX rules, colleges are now obligated to report incidents if they occur during any college-related activity, whether it is abroad, within the US or online. 

“Community awareness of threats incentivizes both pre-emptive actions to address [safety threats] and responses to specific concerns raised about them… The Annual Security Report should serve as a ‘campus safety handbook’ with summaries of current safety and security policies,” Carter wrote. 

In 2021, community members noticed that Whitman’s Annual Security report was inaccurate. In an email sent to the student body on Nov. 3 of that year, former Whitman College President, Kathleen Murray, wrote, 

“Over the past few weeks staff have reviewed the different data sources that comprise the 2021 Annual Security Report to find out which numbers were missed resulting in errors in the previously filed final report. During that review of both the data and the reports, we discovered inaccuracies in the 2020 Annual Security Report as well.”

Emma Grasso Levine, a Title IX expert from the survivor and youth-led political advocacy group, Know Your IX, says that inaccurate reporting is an issue her organization sees often. 

“This has happened many times now, where we’ve been supporting a student at a school and they say, ‘my school’s reporting data says [an incident of sexual misconduct] only happened once in the last year,’ which we just know cannot be true,” Levine said. “If that is true, that’s actually not a good sign. We know that sexual harassment and violence is prevalent, unfortunately, in the society that we live in, and if there’s that low of a number of reporting that is happening, it likely means that the school’s not doing their job to message [their Title IX Office] accurately in a way that then makes folks feel safe reporting… and/or there could be a culture of retaliation or institutional betrayal to the extent that students feel scared to report because they feel like there’s going to be a lot of negative consequences.” 

Carter told The Wire that the federal government can fine colleges for every violation of the Clery Act that they have committed and rescind their funding.

“Institutions that violate the Clery Act face per violation fines that are increased annually for inflation… Fines are currently $69,733 per violation and will likely be indexed for inflation again in January or February,” Carter wrote.

The discrepancies in Whitman’s Annual Security Reports from both 2020 and 2021, which listed fewer incidences of sexual violence than were originally reported to the college, are part of what alerted the attention of the Washington Attorney General’s Office.  

In addition to issuing timely warnings and publishing an Annual Security Report every year, the Clery Act also requires colleges to provide student victims with a list of their rights in writing. On their website, The Clery Center writes,

“Under the Clery Act, institutions must provide victims of dating violence, domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking with information in writing about options for, available assistance in and how to request changes to academic, living, transportation and working accommodations, as well as other protective measures.” 

If student victims report to the Title IX office, they can file for a no-contact order from their assaulter, request to change classes, get accommodations and more. Title IX and the Clery Act work in tandem to shape the modern campus-safety landscape. It is often through the Title IX office that students are able to coordinate, learn about and receive accommodations after they have experienced sexual violence.

“We know that if folks don’t understand what their rights are, they can’t access the really crucial supports and protections that Title IX provides,” Levine said. 

The ways that these laws co-influence students and institutions shift by presidential administration. In 2020, colleges under the discretion of the Clery Act were operating under the Trump Administration’s Title IX rules. 

“The Trump rules encouraged and sometimes required schools to be complicit in harassment and violence by ignoring more sexual harassment and conducting fewer investigations. They also required schools to use uniquely unfair, burdensome procedures for investigating sexual harassment that were not required for any other type of student or staff misconduct in schools,” The National Women’s Law Center wrote.

The Biden administration expanded Title IX protections to more broadly include LGBTQIA+ students, especially trans students, and it afforded legally protected accommodations for pregnant students. Another example of the Biden Administration’s expansion of Title IX, according to Levine, is its protections for students who have received retaliation after reporting their assaults. 

During his incoming second term, it is likely that former president Trump will revise these rules. In his first term, Trump solicited the aid of men’s rights organizations to rewrite the Title IX rules. The incoming wave of Republican educational policy will upend the ways that higher education institutions protect their student victims, especially those belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community. 

“What I will say is that Title IX is the bare minimum. It’s the bare minimum of what schools are required to do… I saw schools in the last four years where we were under the Trump rule create, for example, separate sexual misconduct policies that functioned as a catch-all for all these things that were not covered under the Trump rule, for example, off-campus harassment,” Levine said. 

The Clery Act has revolutionized student safety on over 2,000 campuses across the United States. Though its scope shifts with the tradeoff of presidential administrations, it has been the backbone of collegiate transparency and survivor representation for over three decades.