RESEARCH

​

• Sexual violence in schools has gone up significantly. According to the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, reports of sexual violence in public schools increased nearly 50% in just two years between 2015 and 2017. This number is even more troubling when we consider the United States Department of Justice estimate that shows only about a third to half of all sexual violence against children is reported. Unfortunately, hard numbers are difficult to come by, as the Department of Justice’s school supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey does not separately track instances of sexual violence in school. 

• Teacher-student sexual misconduct remains an on-going problem. An estimated in 1 in 10 children will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they finish the 12th grade. 

• Sexual Harassment is a large problem in the K-12 educational setting, with 4 in 5 girls reporting to have been sexually harassed at some point. Although more schools have implemented anti-harassment policies, the number of children reporting to be victimized has actually increased since the early 1990s. 

• Rates of bullying have remained constant but continue to be stubbornly high. Approximately 1 in 4 students have been bullied https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019054.pdf. Of this group, about half expected bullying to continue. For more bullying-related facts and statistics, visit this website https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp. 

• Despite a number of anti-bullying initiatives and a patchwork of policies, bullying numbers have actually increased slightly since the 1990s, when the government began tracking these statistics. Medical experts have called this lack of progress “stunning.” 

• Sex trafficking has emerged as a serious problem in K-12 schools. While exact numbers are hard to come by, there are hundreds of arrests every year for trafficking involving minors. Even in relatively affluent areas, like Northern Virginia, authorities report sex trafficking in every high school and many middle schools.  More research is desperately needed on this topic. 

• Reports of racial, ethnic, national origin, and religious discrimination are also very high. A 2014 report from the Office of Civil Rights shows that there were over 51,000 reported incidences of harassment and discrimination based on protected characteristics. The real number is likely much higher, as schools do not always report all incidences of discrimination to the federal government, and students only report a small fraction of overall abuse. 

• General school violence, such as crime, has dropped since the 1990s. However, acts of mass school violence, like school shootings, remain a problem.