Sexual Violence in Public Schools in the United States

In the United States, sexual violence in K–12 public schools saw a 55% increase in incidents from the 2015–2016 school year to the 2017–2018 school year. These incidents included sexual violence by school employees against students and peers against other peers. The current study estimated the overall weighted average number of sexual assault/sexual battery, rapes/attempted rapes, and overall sexual violence within districts and across the states using the 2017–2018 data gathered by the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). The two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results showed that the average number of incidents of sexual assault/sexual battery per district across states was 3.74, with a variance of 61.81 per district within the states. The average variability in the average incidents of sexual assault/sexual battery between the states was 265. Finally, future studies should use moderators to explain the variations in sexual violence within and across states.