A report released yesterday on The Daily Beast listed Harvard University as the most dangerous campus in the Ivy League. In the past three years, there were one murder, 151 robberies and 170 aggravated assaults on or near Harvard’s campuses.
The most glaring stat is 128 forced rapes during that span, 101 more than the second-most dangerous school on the list, the University of Pennsylvania, which also witnessed four murders.
Peggy Barrett of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center thinks the stats might be misleading.
“Most people don’t report sexual violence,” she said. “If you do good outreach on campuses and have good services, people tend to come forward more. It means, to me, Harvard is doing a good job. They have a whole staffed office who are responsive to issues of sexual violence on campus and most other schools don’t have that.
“If you’re a parent and know how to read the numbers, you’d be more likely to think Harvard is a safer campus than the other schools because they’re dealing with the issue.”
Barrett used to work for Tufts University, which The Daily Beast recently called the most dangerous college in America. Tufts disputes the study.
