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Details of campus sexual assaults hidden behind legal loophole

A local college is using a loophole in the federal law designed to alert college students to crimes on campus to withhold details on crime.
Students walking on campus

NORFOLK - A 13News Now investigation has found one local college using a loophole in the federal law to withhold information about sexual assaults on campus from its daily crime logs.

A federal law known as the Clery Act requires colleges to track and report crime on campus. Under the law, schools are required to submit annual statistics on campus crime each October for the previous year and are also required to maintain a daily log of crimes that are reported to campus security and police.

"A public crime log is really important because at any given time, any individual in the community can request it, look at it--many schools have it online--and you can look at it and get a sense for how safe or not safe the campus is," explained Laura Dunn, an attorney and advocate who founded the non-profit SurvJustice.

But a 13News Now investigation has found administrators at Virginia Wesleyan College are keeping sexual assaults off of the daily crime log by not reporting the crimes to campus security.

Monday night at 6 p.m., watch investigative reporter Nick Ochsner confront Virginia Wesleyan's president, William Greer, about his school's practice of not reporting sexual assaults as they happen on campus.

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