Three Questions on Campus Rape

Kristen Lombardi, staff writer for the Center for Public Integrity, answers three questions about the knowledge, methods and ethics needed to report sexual assault on college campuses.

On Dec. 4, 2009, Kristen Lombardi visited the Columbia Journalism School to talk about reporting sexual assault on college campuses. A nine-month investigation she led as a staff writer with the Center for Public Integrity had just been published, and its conclusions were troubling:

... roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But official data from the schools themselves doesn’t begin to reflect the scope of the problem. And student victims face a depressing litany of barriers that often either assure their silence or leave them feeling victimized a second time ...

Uncovering this story was a challenge of its own, as Lombardi, a 2003 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow, explained in answers to three questions about the knowledge, methods and ethics reporting on this topic requires.

Read Dart Center Executive Director Bruce Shapiro's longer interview with Lombardi.