Sexual Assault Awareness Month in College

Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), has encouraged many women organizations and crime associations to inform the public of the sexual assault epidemic this country has. You hear about rape issues women have abroad, but somehow it is not considered drastic enough in the US, to announce it nationally.

One particular group called The Campus Advocacy Network in UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago), points out that rapes on campus have a particular pattern that students need to be aware of. First of all, there is a spike in the occurrence of rape in the beginning of the school year (August, September and October). There is also a national pattern that shows May as a month when rapes start to climb and the crime peaks in July and August. By September and October sexual assaults starts to slow down, according to the FBI Department of Justice 2006. It has also been noticed that the freshman women population of a college are more likely to be raped during those first few months of the starting year. Another disturbing statistic is that college women that get raped around final exams, tend not to declare they were raped. This is probably do to the pressures of taking tests, where they push this traumatic experience to the 'back-burner' in order to avoid having their lives completely uprooted. It is traumatic enough to have been raped... This also applies to working women. It has been noted that women who have been under a lot of professional pressure, also put this incident aside.