The University of Arkansas Police Department released crime statistics for 2025 and showed reported rapes more than tripled from the previous year, according to the 2025 Clery Report. Nineteen rapes were reported in 2025, 16 of which occurred in campus housing and one other on campus in Fayetteville. That number is up from six reported cases in 2024.
Mary Wyandt-Hiebert is director of the Sexual and Relationship Violence Center at the UofA, which provides resources for students dealing with sexual violence. She tells Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth the risk of sexual assault is heightened during the first few months of the fall semester and referred to as the red zone.
Wyandt-Hiebert: That period of time, from the beginning of the fall semester up to Thanksgiving, we tend to see about 50% of sexual assaults that are reported among college students during the academic year tend to happen during this red zone period. So this is a time that we typically tend to see increased reporting in general and have increased awareness across the board.
When you think about what the red zone, why it’s the perfect storm, you have a lot of things going on. You have students coming back and returning, a lot of welcome week, a lot of welcome home type parties that are thrown up among students, a lot of welcome back activities in general that are thrown across the community. There’s, you have a whole new crop of students that have come onto campuses with first-year students. First time being away from home often is the case.
Developmentally, students are at a stage where they’re still figuring out things and experimenting with things, and so that a little bit more risk taking when we are younger than opposed than when we get older, we learn from the risks we’ve taken earlier in life. And so we’re not, as we also realize, our mortality a little more as we get older. But so that’s just kind of indicative of the developmental stage of the traditional college student as well.
Then you throw in things like homecoming football, tailgating on Halloween and other festive fall parties. It’s a perfect heightened time of the year that we tend to see a heightened number of sexual assaults, in particular reported on college campuses across the nation.
Caruth: And can you also walk me through, what are some of the barriers to reporting something like a sexual assault or relationship violence? Especially for a college student, maybe someone who is a freshman new to campus. What are the barriers in going from something happening to reporting it and seeking services from you guys?
Wyandt-Hiebert: A huge barrier, whether it be a college student or a person in a general community, is simply the culture within which we live. We live in what we tend to refer to as a rape culture, where there’s various tenets, where we have a lot of myths about sexual violence and relationship violence. Many of those myths tend to blame victims of sexual relationship violence, and then by default, they excuse and sometimes even exonerate the perpetrator’s behaviors and actions.
And so with these myths that are out there and the tendency for these myths to tend to point fingers at the person who was victimized by the violence as opposed to the perpetrator being responsible, that is probably the number one biggest barrier I hear and see throughout my three-plus-decade career.
And then there’s also the fear of, well, who’s going to know if I do say something? Who else will find out about this? And so again, we have a safe space here at the SRVC on campus that our students can come and learn what their options are, to just have those conversations, to put aside any concerns or fears that they may have, to be able to, for us to help them put those concerns and fears aside and give them what the actual information is and resources and support that they need.
Caruth: Yeah. And when it comes to, I imagine trying to address that culture and challenge some of the myths and preconceived notions people have about sexual assault, how has it been to address that? How has it changed over the past few years, I imagine? The way that universities and official institutions address that has probably changed a lot in the time you’ve been working on it, or has it?
Wyandt-Hiebert: It’s really going to depend on where you’re at in the country. And there’s different demographics and different areas and different cultural attributes in addition to the broad-ranging American culture, but you have different attributes and different areas of the country.
Here at the university, we have the challenge of the general culture at large. We live in the southern area in the Bible Belt. That adds some elements to it as well. And then two, we have the extra challenge that our population basically recycles every four to five years. So when we get, we’ll get students who come in new and we educate them.
And we get a lot of students, some of our upperclassmen. I love it when I hear them telling some of the younger students on campus that, no, that wasn’t right there. I had a situation earlier this week already where a student came in and I was talking with them. And this is a common situation. It happens frequently where a student will come in and they’re a younger student and will talk about what had happened to them. And often they’ll say, yeah, I talked with, and they’ll refer to some student that’s in a mentoring position that they know.
And what I love hearing is when they say, yeah, this person, this other student told me, “No, that’s not OK. That’s not right. You need to go talk about this. And here are some options.” And they often refer to the SRVC as the go-to place to come and talk about those things.
And so from that standpoint, that tells me, just observationally speaking, that we are making an impact on our students, that they identify and recognize that those things are not OK and helping them to advise the younger classmen, the less experienced classmen, where to come. So that’s one way we can see a difference in change of attitudes and beliefs over time by looking just at that, again, just observationally speaking.
The other thing too, the fact that more and more students are finding us when something happens. We’ve been seeing a steady increase of more students finding us each year. And so to me, that also is an indicator of the fact that more students are willing to seek out, at least in a very safe, confidential space, a better understanding of what happened to them and what their options are. So those two things alone are really, really encouraging to me.
And there’s other indicators across the nation to the fact that you see a lot of grassroots organizations and movements across the nation where a lot of those among young adults, college students, you see a lot more social media engagement across the board, where students will more openly talk about these aspects of college life that often, in many places historically and still currently, tend to be brushed under the rug in general, where people just have that, again, because of the cultural aspects of not wanting to talk about things in general that relate to sexual assault and relationship violence.
Caruth: Yeah. And I know you guys offer obviously resources after the fact to victims, but can you talk a little bit about ways that you are trying to change the culture, ways that you’re working on campus to address things before an assault happens and to, yeah, to change the culture around this?
Wyandt-Hiebert: We use our peer educator program a lot to reach out to students. We have several students who are certified peer educators, and they will go out and do some of the basic things, are tabling and walkabouts, just engaging with students one-to-one in a brief educational moment across campus and different spaces. We try to place them in areas across campus throughout the semester, throughout the week, each week in different areas. So we’re making sure that we have the opportunity to reach as many students as possible.
We also have, for example, a campaign program, Consensual Essential. And this is a campaign that we’ve been doing for the past couple of years that we had developed ourselves here at the SRVC. And we do little micro teachings with students about consent. And once they listen and give us a few moments of their time, usually about 10 minutes of their time, to have these very small, intimate micro teachings with a couple students at a time, that will give them a T-shirt that says consensual, sensual and cozy and things like that there.
And with the micro teachings, we are ensuring that they have the language to be able to talk to people if somebody asks them about that shirt. So that’s another way, through campaigns such as that, basic public health initiatives.
We also do presentations that are more in detail and more involved. We’ll do those for student groups. We will do them for classes, academic classes as well. And it’s kind of an on-demand thing if a faculty member wants us to come in and teach a class for them. And we use our peer educators a lot for that, because that peer-to-peer conversation can be very meaningful.
And during these presentations, they address topics such as defining sexual assault, myths related to sexual violence, what is rape culture, identifying it and talking about how can we counter rape culture, bystander intervention, how to help somebody when you’re witnessing or seeing something.
We also collaborate with other organizations through various different outreach and education initiatives. We have our Furst Tuesday, where we have therapy dogs that come to campus from 6 to 7 on the first Tuesday of every month of the academic fall and spring semesters. And it’s right outside of the SRVC.
So it’s to help students to identify where to come when something happens, as well as it helps students relate to us in a different way, not just in, I need to report something, I need to talk to somebody about an incident, but it helps students to engage with us in everyday conversation. We always have some kind of a theme topic, an educational event going on with Furst Tuesday as well as with the therapy dogs there. So there’s a multitude of ways that we reach across campus, throughout campus.
Caruth: And do you guys do anything specifically with Greek life or with the fraternities and sororities on campus?
Wyandt-Hiebert: We will actively engage with Greek life. For example, coming up is It’s On Us Week. And so Greek life was organizing an event for that, and we are actively engaging within that. And then also we have a Campus Collaborative Against Sexual Assault where we bring various different groups together across campus. And a lot of it focuses on Sexual Assault Awareness Month. But we also, if there’s something that we want to address collectively together, we will often use that through the Campus Collaborative Against Sexual Assault, and Greek life is a part of that, a member of that.
As well as, we have different fraternities and sororities that will reach out and ask us to come do a presentation. There was actually just a couple within the last couple of weeks of presentations that were already on the schedule that our student peer educators went out and did. And then of course, the professional staff is always available for consultation and for any more in-depth presentations for any group on campus.
Caruth: And then obviously the Clery Report came out last week that showed there was an uptick in reported rapes. I think it was tripled from 2024. What do you hope? Working in this area, what do you see as the next step or a policy change or something that you’d like to see happen to help curb this or to make headway in stopping sexual assault on college campuses?
Wyandt-Hiebert: Really, the only true way to prevent sexual violence or relationship violence is for the offenders to stop offending. That’s the only true 100% way to make it stop. If offenders didn’t offend, we wouldn’t have sexual assaults. We wouldn’t have domestic violence, dating violence, relationship violence. So that’s the only true way of doing that.
And there’s always going to be, unfortunately, those people out there, no matter what programming is presented in front of them, that are going to make choices to take advantage of people, and that, whether it be related to sexual assault or some other crime.
When it comes to the programming out of the SRVC, our programming is really, again, looking at how can we reduce risk, and with personal risk reduction, how can we engage as bystanders, as a community, to step in as well to help each other out and have each other’s backs? And how can we have a better understanding of rape culture so that we are not feeding into the problem of creating barriers for individuals to come forward? So the more a person can learn about rape culture and debunking the myths that fuel rape culture, the more a person can contribute to becoming part of the solutions as well.
So there’s many different planes and levels that this is approached from, and there is no one-size-fits-all. We continue to evolve our programming as generations change. There’s always things that are endemic to specific generations, the way that they receive information or process information. So we continue to always take a pulse on who are the students of today in order to meet the growing needs and changing needs of students over time.
Caruth: And then for you, just the last question, what is the biggest myth right now that you would like to see combated when people think about sexual assault and rape culture? What is the biggest myth that you kind of have to constantly combat?
Wyandt-Hiebert: Oh, it’s hard to single out any one specific myth because there’s so many. But the common thread to so many of these myths that I would like to point out is that these myths tend to blame victims or survivors of the violence. And I think that if we could just start to look at this as the crime that it is, and not trying to ascribe blame and excusing things without knowing what has happened.
I can’t think of another crime we do this with. Nobody does this with robbery. Nobody does this with murder or anything like that. It’s only with sexual assault and relationship violence that we tend to do this. So I think that’s the common thread among the vast majority of the myths that I would highlight and point out on.
Where are we ascribing blame when we think this way? Where are we ascribing the blame? And if the ascribing the blame is onto the victim, then we need to rethink what we just thought.
Mary Wyandt-Hiebert is director of the Sexual and Relationship Violence Center at the University of Arkansas. She spoke with Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth last week.
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