According to last week’s story in The Tennessean, Vanderbilt had the most reported on-campus rapes in the state of Tennessean during the calendar year of 2007, with 13 of the 21 rapes occurring on the Vanderbilt campus; these numbers, however, must undergo some critical assessment before any hysteria arises.

In the past year, the university implemented an anonymous reporting system, in which anonymous reports were directly relayed to the police. Anonymous reporting accounted for eight of the 13 reported rapes on campus; self-reported rapes saw a small increase over the previous year — there were three self-reported rapes in 2006 and five in 2007.

The university’s anonymous reporting system is the only one in the schools surveyed by The Tennessean that reports directly to the police. Memphis University, the University of Tennessee and Middle Tennessee State University have no such direct communication between anonymous reporters and the police, which should account for some of the disparity.

At the same time, the University of Tennessee only reported one rape on campus during the entire year; while the editorial board hates to be cynical about something as serious as rape, it seems somewhat unlikely that merely one rape occurred on a campus of more than 20,000 undergrads.

Vanderbilt also serves as a primarily residential university, as opposed to some of the larger universities, which would mean that, logically, the majority of rapes involving Vanderbilt students would occur on Vanderbilt’s campus.

The editorial board is in no way trying to minimize the impact of the number of rapes on campus; in fact, as Project Safe has argued, the increased numbers should be seen as an encouraging rise in reported rape. Rape exists as an inexcusable violation of a person’s liberty; the increase in reports therein should be taken as a step toward increasing awareness.