page_title: White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault
section_title: Background and history
hierarchical_section_title: White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault / Background and history
caption_attribution_description: Official portrait of Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement Valerie Jarrett.
context_page_description: The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault was formed on January 22, 2014, after President Barack Obama directed the Office of the Vice President of the United States and the White House Council on Women and Girls to "strengthen and address compliance issues and provide institutions with additional tools to respond to and address rape and sexual assault". The Task Force is part of a wider federal move to bring awareness to sexual violence on American campuses, which also included the Office for Civil Rights release of a list of American higher education institutions with open Title IX sexual violence investigations and the It's On Us public awareness campaign. The co-chairs of the Task Force are Vice President Joe Biden and Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett.
context_section_description: While formed through an official government memorandum on January 22, 2014, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault exists as part of a lineage of government interventions against sexual violence, notably the White House Council on Women and Girls formed in 2009 and the Violence Against Women Act first drafted by Biden when he was a senator in 1994. Simultaneously, activists within The New Campus Anti-Rape Movement have pushed for legislative changes in the ways the U.S. government enforces regulations, as demonstrated in the collaborations between nationally recognized activists and U.S. senators.
  Data published in a 2014 government report on sexual assault in American colleges and universities reflects the numbers and backgrounds of college students who have experienced sexual assault.
  In the January 2014 report, "Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action," an overview of findings about sexual assault of college and university students was provided, as follows:
  1) Women and girls are the vast majority of victims: nearly 1 in 5 women – or nearly 22 million – have been raped in their lifetimes.
  2) Men and boys, however, are also at risk: 1 in 71 men – or almost 1.6 million – have been raped during their lives.
  3) Women of all races are targeted, but some are more vulnerable than others: 33.5% of multiracial women have been raped, as have 27% of American Indian and Alaska Native women, compared to 15% of Hispanic, 22% of Black, and 19% of White women.
  4) Most victims know their assailants.
  5) The vast majority (nearly 98%) of perpetrators are male.
  6) Young people are especially at risk: nearly half of female survivors were raped before they were 18, and over one-quarter of male survivors were raped before they were 10.  College students may be particularly vulnerable — one study found that 1 in 5 undergraduate women has been sexually assaulted while in college.
  7) Undergraduate women are at greatest risk of being sexually assaulted during the freshman and sophomore years.
  8) Repeat victimization is common: over a third of women who were raped as minors were also raped as adults.
  9) Other populations are also at higher risk of being raped or sexually assaulted, including people with disabilities, the LGBT community, prison inmates (of both genders), and the homeless.  Undocumented immigrants face unique challenges, because their abusers often threaten to have them deported if they try to get help. 
  A report published in January 2015 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the result of a nine-school pilot to conduct a campus study on "school-level data on sexual victimization of undergraduate students," found that 
  Younger students (between 18–22 years of age) experienced sexual victimization at a rate higher than those 23 or older
  Non-heterosexual students are more likely to be victimized than heterosexual students at the nine schools surveyed
  On average, the rate of victimization for completed sexual assault among undergraduate females was 176 per 1,000 
  On average, the rate of victimization for rape among undergraduate females was 54 per 1,000
caption: Valerie Jarrett official portrait
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