Editor’s note • This story discusses sexual violence. If you need assistance or resources, Utah’s 24-hour sexual violence crisis and information hotline is available at 801-736-4356.
Stalking cases reported at the University of Utah increased last year by nearly 70%, according to newly released crime data.
For the first time, that means the number of stalking reports either on or near the campus reached triple digits, landing at 117 total for 2023. That’s up from 69 reported stalking cases in 2022, according to previous annual crime totals for the school that has faced scrutiny in recent years for how it has responded to cases of interpersonal violence.
The U. says that jump is likely a result of 2023 marking the full return of students and faculty to campus after the COVID-19 pandemic kept many away or attending virtually. And similar increases showed in all interpersonal violence categories, including fondling and both dating and domestic violence.
The statistics also show a significant jump in the number of reported rape cases at the state’s flagship university. Most of those were due to “a single relationship plagued by a history of coercion and interpersonal violence,” the U. wrote in an early morning message sent out to students Thursday.
The “elevated numbers” for rape will likely and understandably cause concern on campus, said Kimberly Barnett, the U.’s deputy chief safety officer. The U. released the data early — it is required that colleges accepting public funding post the previous year’s crime statistics by Oct. 1 — in order to explain the increase and provide context, officials said.
The school is advising students to be more aware of “the complexity of unhealthy relationships” as they see the heightened statistics.
For 2023, the number of reported rapes was 175. Of those, 150 were reported from the single “dangerous relationship,” according to the school.
Those reports aside, there were an additional 25 rapes reported on or near campus; that’s comparable to revised 2022 figures, for which the school counted 30 rapes in its annual report.
Colleges and universities are required to annually compile what’s known as a Clery Report, which is where the data released Thursday comes from. How numbers are counted is governed by the U.S. Department of Education, which the U. said it contacted for guidance on how to report the rape count for 2023.
The department advised that each of the 150 instances reported by the same alleged victim be counted separately, said the U.’s Clery Officer Todd Justesen. Similar cases have been counted that way, too, at other colleges in the country, Barnett added.
What was reported
The person who reported those alleged rapes did so to the campus police department in January 2023, nearly a year after they reportedly occurred while the individual was a U. student.
According to information released by the school, the student had been in a seven-month relationship that spanned over 2021 and 2022. But data in Clery reports shows up in the year it is reported, not the year it occurred.
The U. did not use gender-specific pronouns for the victim to protect their identity. The school also declined to say if the individual is still currently a student. The individual was, though, informed that the data was going to be released and how their reported assaults would be counted as part of that.
The school noted that the alleged perpetrator is “not a member of the campus community.”
The student initially told police that they had been stalked by their ex-partner, which included him following the student into on-campus dorms, according to the email sent to students Thursday.
As the student spoke with a detective and victim advocate, Justesen said, university staff came to understand the case involved rape and dating violence.
The student spoke about “an almost-daily pattern of nonconsensual sex” with the now-former partner, the university-wide email states, and told police it happened in their dorm room. Their partner, the student said, threatened the student physically and with a gun. The student gave police the estimated figure of 150 alleged rapes.
The school also reported that count under the Clery category for dating violence. In total, there were 158 reported cases of dating violence for the U. in 2023; the other eight were not related to this relationship. That’s still up from the four cases of dating violence reported at the school in 2022.
The instances the individual reported however were not counted in other interpersonal violence figures for fondling, domestic violence or stalking, which all separately increased at the U.’s campus last year, too.
The student chose not to pursue criminal charges, the school said. Barnett added that is “not uncommon,” and it is up to each person reporting to decide how they want to proceed with their case in the way they feel is best for them.
“For some survivors, they report that going through the criminal justice process is just as traumatizing as the assault because they have to relive it consistently,” said Sonya Martinez-Ortiz, the executive director of Utah’s Rape Recovery Center, in the email to students.
It’s also common for people to report alleged assaults months or even years after they say they happened. Sometimes that’s a response to trauma, said U. police Major Heather Sturzenegger, and the effects of that on the brain. Sometimes, someone waits until they feel they have the support they may need to report, she added.
The U. has worked in recent years to overhaul its approach to working with victims to be more trauma-informed, Sturzenegger said, including having “soft interview rooms” at the department’s newly designed building that are more comfortable, asking open-ended questions and providing victim advocates.
‘A different level of nuance’
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) University of Utah interim Police Chief Jason Hinojosa gives a tour of the processing area of the new Public Safety Building, Oct. 26, 2022. The facility included a private room for interviews and victim advocacy work.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) A private room for interviews and victim advocacy work at the new University of Utah Public Safety Building, Oct. 26, 2022. The facility includes a dispatch call center, a conference room, a processing area and holding cells and storage for evidence.
Chris Linder, the director of the U.’s McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention, said the case that officials chose to contextualize shows how complicated and dangerous relationship violence can be. And no one, she said, should be questioning the student for why they stayed in the relationship or why they didn’t report sooner.
“The absolute most dangerous time for a survivor in leaving a relationship is when they actually do leave it,” she said, noting that’s often when a perpetrator will become more volatile, violent and threatening.
Linder’s center took on its current name in 2021 as part of a high-profile settlement the school agreed to following the on-campus murder of student-athlete Lauren McCluskey in October 2018.
Campus officers at the U. did little to investigate McCluskey’s report when she first tried to tell them that she was being extorted by a man she briefly dated, according to an independent review. She called several times, but detectives didn’t look into her concerns enough to discover that the man she was reporting was on parole for a sex offense. One officer also showed off personal photos McCluskey had sent him as evidence to other staff, a state audit later confirmed.
The case drew nationwide attention on the U. for its failings. The school faced scrutiny again after international student Zhifan Dong was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 2022. Dong had told U. housing staff that the man had hit her after she broke up with him and reported that she was scared about what he would do next. Housing staff didn’t escalate Dong’s report or involve police until after she was reported missing, according to records later released by the university.
Linder said there’s an ongoing misunderstanding that sexual violence is perpetrated by a stranger jumping out of the bushes or during a “one-time hookup.” But that’s not the case. More often, she said, it’s with someone a victim knows — someone they are or were in an intimate relationship with.
So there is some lack of awareness or education, she said, that a partner can be a perpetrator of violence.
Behavior within a toxic relationship also tends to become “normalized over time,” she added. It may start with something like jealousy, or wanting to share locations on your phone, which may seem relatively innocent. But it can escalate to dangerous levels of control and violence.
Perpetrators also tend to cut victims off from their family, friends or other communities of support, so they feel like they have nowhere to go, Linder said. Or a perpetrator will control both partners’ finances.
It’s not often that a victim didn’t understand that what happened was rape or didn’t understand consent, Linder added; it’s that they felt scared to leave for fear that something worse would happen or they felt stuck without resources.
Brittany Kiyoko-Badger, the director for the U.’s Center for Campus Wellness, added in the email to students: “Even when people know that they’re in a really dangerous relationship, sometimes it can feel lethal if you try to leave.”
Linder also urged people to understand the difference between consent and coercion. Consent, she said, should be a clear “yes.” It can also be revoked at any time. And saying “yes” to something at the start of a relationship is not blanket consent for anything to come in the future. Coercion, she noted, is forcing someone to do something; saying “yes” under coercion is not consent.
“There’s a different level of nuance,” she said.
Linder said when she talks to students on campus, almost every one of them can recite the definition of consent. But there isn’t enough conversation, she said, about specific examples of dating violence, what coercion looks like, and how to interrupt the cycle. Those are better suited to smaller group chats, she said, than awareness campaigns.
“For basically 60 years, we’ve been telling women how to avoid harm,” she added. But more work could be done, she feels, to educate students, too, about harmful behavior and the people who cause harm — so students can recognize such harm and begin to understand how to escape it.
Linder said: “It’s about figuring out how to intervene much earlier so it doesn’t escalate to this situation.”
Chris Linder is the director of the U.’s McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention.
What’s next?
The numbers in a Clery Report are what’s reported to a university within their geographical boundaries; a case doesn’t require an investigation or a finding to be counted. Still, the statistics are generally considered an undercount of interpersonal violence crimes on or near a campus.
At the same time, when numbers like stalking reports increase, it’s typically seen as a positive thing — not that more crime has occurred but that more victims are willing to come forward.
At the U., cases of fondling went up to 55, from 51 in 2022. And cases of domestic violence went up to 30, from 20 in 2022.
U. Chief Safety Officer Keith Squires acknowledged that the numbers across the board this year “will definitely stand out” — particularly to parents who look at the annual reports. And he hopes the apparent surges are considered with context.
The department, he said, has worked hard to improve since McCluskey and Dong’s deaths.
“We’ve continued to progress,” he said, “but we’ve come so far.”
On the same day the U. released the numbers, it also sent out a safety alert to the campus community about an individual accused of stalking. That will be tallied in the school’s 2024 Clery Report.
The suspect, according to the alert, has been following women, including into the dorms. He has also allegedly threatened women at the University of Utah Hospital. The first report at the U. came on Saturday, Sept. 14. He was removed and banned from campus at that time.
Campus police were again called about the man and arrested him on Tuesday for trespassing; he was later released from Salt Lake County jail on Wednesday. The U. says his current whereabouts are unknown and he appears to be unhoused; officials circulated his description and a photo of him and asked people to call university police if they see him on campus.
A spokesperson for the university said the man was also charged with trespassing on Sept. 4 by Salt Lake City police after following someone to their apartment.
Squires said, moving forward, the school plans to launch a “pilot project” where one police officer will take on a permanent position around student dorms. Squires said the hope is to build trust with students there, showing them that they have someone they can report to if needed.
Squires also hopes the position will create “more opportunities to intervene” in cases like the relationship that increased the numbers in this year’s Clery Report.
“We recognize that intimate partner violence can be a singular event or a pattern of behavior that occurs over multiple years,” he said. “We believe our community members.”
The campus police department, Squires said, also reviews data weekly to try to pick up on crime patterns early.
Where to find resources
In the email to students, the U. provided a list of common questions and answers about dating violence, as well as resources for anyone on campus or in the community who may be experiencing or know someone experiencing interpersonal violence.
Those include:
• The U.’s Center for Campus Wellness offers confidential victim-advocacy services. It is reachable by calling 801-581-7776 or emailing advocate@sa.utah.edu.
• The University Counseling Center also provides confidential support for students. The center’s phone number is 801-581-6826.
• The U.’s Office for Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Title IX can be contacted at 801-581-8365.
• The Huntsman Mental Health Institute runs a crisis line, available 24/7, at 801-587-3000.
• The Utah Domestic Violence Coalition, which can be reached at a 24-hour line, is 1-800-897-LINK(5465).
• Students can also arrange a lift on campus from the U.’s SafeRide program or with a courtesy escort by calling 801-585-2677 for main campus and 801-581-2294 at the University Hospital.
• The school says students can also call University Police at 801-585-2677.
More crime data is expected to be released from the state’s other public and private colleges and universities early next month.
