Awareness
in dorms key to safety issues
By
Arlene Malabanan
On-line Forty-Niner
UCLA,
Cal State Long Beach, and San Diego State
University not only rank the top 3 largest
student bodies, respectively, within California's
universities, they also share reported numbers
of forcible rape, burglary, and aggravated
assault in 2001, according to each school's
campus police reports.
UCLA
and SDSU each reported 4 incidents of sexual
assault in 2001.
UCLA
also shared numbers with CSULB when both
schools reported 16 burglaries that year.
Crimes
of this magnitude are not considered common
threats in academic environments like CSULB.
But the daunting fact is that crime scenes
for all reported cases were not only on
university campuses, they all occurred within
dormitory walls.
This
gives new meaning to dorm room anxiety,
shared among many incoming, first-year dorm
residents.
Recent
interviews show that while anxiety is the
common air in approaching this fall's move-in,
matters students are mainly concerned with
include: the prospect of being paired with
a bad roommate, excessive noise, and lack
of privacy.
Jere
Cerdenio, a junior who will experience dormitory
life this year, admits that safety wasn't
his primary concern.
"I'm
still a little anxious because I know it
will take a while for me to adjust. But
I don't see any reason to feel less safe
than I would at home," said Cerdenio.
Cerdenio
was unaware that obtaining current crime
statistics for his school's campus housing
was made readily available for him.
A
federal law, enacted in 1990, and renamed
the Clery Act in 1998 in memory of Jeanne
Clery, a student murdered in her dorm room
on a university campus, requires that specified
crime statistics be disclosed to the public,
for all institutions of higher education.
Many
current and future residents are utterly
in the dark about the potential dangers
of dormitory living. And while there is
always a chance of being caught off guard,
awareness seems to be the best approach
in personal safety.
Senior,
Michelle Barrion admits to not being well
informed during her residence at the International
House, her freshman and sophomore years.
"Safety
was always an issue, but I never considered
violent crimes a problem in the dorms,"
said Barrion.
According
to their Web site, which focuses on college
campus safety, the parents of Jeanne Clery,
Howard and Connie say that crime awareness
can prevent campus victimization.
As
part of their advocacy for awareness, they
described their tragedy:
"During
the early morning hours of April 5, 1986,
our daughter, Jeanne Ann, was tortured,
raped, sodomized and murdered in her dormitory
room at Lehigh University . . . He gained
access to her room by proceeding, unopposed,
through three propped-open doors, each of
which should have been locked."
Today,
students and their parents can access campus
crime statistics for any university or college,
nationwide.
Each
of the Cal State and UC schools provide
links to campus police reports on their
official Web sites, and a wide range of
government and other information Web sites
provide links to Clery reports as well.
CSULB,
which houses just under 2,000 residents
in campus housing showed no reported cases
of rape, burglary, or robbery last year.
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