A student was raped twice in one night in East Thomson Hall on Homecoming weekend, November 2017, according to a police report filed in Jan. 2018. This was one of six rapes to be reported in 2018. Five occurred in residence halls and one occurred in another location on-campus, according to the Winthrop University Annual Security Report released in September.
“This report includes statistics for the previous three years concerning reported crimes that occurred on campus; in certain off-campus buildings or property owned or controlled by Winthrop University; and on public property within, or immediately adjacent to and accessible from, the campus,” Winthrop University Police Department Police Chief Ken Scoggins said in an email. “This report also includes institutional policies concerning campus security, such as policies concerning alcohol and drug use, crime prevention, the reporting of crimes, sexual assault and other matters.”
Under the Clery Act, campus police departments must report certain criminal offenses, which includes murder and rape, hate crimes, domestic violence, to the public. The goal of the Clery Act is transparency about campus crime. The law requires that campus police release an annual report that compiles those certain criminal offenses.
“Any time that we have a report for one of the Clery-reportable crimes, we take that, we notate it, and we keep a running log of all of those cases for the particular year we’re looking at,” WUPD Lt. Charles Yearta said.
The Winthrop ASR includes statistics collected from WUPD, Rock Hill Police Department and campus security authorities. Campus security authorities include deans, provosts, health and counseling officials, the Dean of Students and coaches.
“What we like to do is have everything out by the end of September…About a month to two months out, what we will do is we’ll get those running lists…of property [non-campus areas such as Greek housing] we will then [send] Clery letters to Rock Hill Police and York County Sheriff’s office,” Yearta said.
If a victim reports a rape to one of these campus security authorities, the first step is to send the victim to the office of victims assistance to get the necessary resources, such as health care or counseling. From there, the victim chooses whether or not to report the assault to the police.
If they choose to report it, WUPD is made aware, a report is filed and WUPD adds the assault to their running log of incident reports. This log is updated consistently throughout the year and is used in mid-August when they begin to construct ASR.
If the victim chooses not to report, the case is dropped and WUPD does not know about the incident until they send out their Clery letters in August. These letters, sent via email, are sent to RHPD, York County Sheriff’s office and these campus security authorities. That means it is possible for a rape that happens in Feb. 2017, that was reported to a campus security authority but not to campus police, goes unknown to WUPD until mid-August of the following year.
Of the six reported rapes to occur in 2018, WUPD knew of only one. The rest, four of which were in residence halls, were not discovered until August when they begin preparing the ASR.
