California Colleges Underreported Sexual Assault Claims

Violation of federal law

Amid federal investigations of their handling of campus sexual assaults, USC and Occidental College have disclosed that they underreported the number of cases in recent years, a potential violation of federal law.

At USC, officials indicated that they had not reported 13 accounts of sexual assaults to federal officials for 2010 and 2011, bringing the total for those years to 39. Occidental acknowledged that it had failed to include 24 reports during that period, bringing the total to 36.

The disclosures could lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties for each school under the federal Clery Act, the 1990 law that requires schools to report campus crime statistics to the Department of Education.