Oct 27, 2006  |  By: JOSHUA LYNSEN  | COMMENTS     

Sara Jaye Sanford readily admits that her campus, the University of Maryland in College Park, has problems.
 
“College Park, to be perfectly frank, is not the safest school for anyone,” she said. “We do have a problem with violent crime.”
 
The FBI last month announced that the University of Maryland at College Park campus had the third highest number of violent crimes reported among colleges in the U.S. in 2005, behind the University of Medicine & Dentistry in Newark, N.J. and Arizona State University’s main campus in Tempe, Ariz.
 
There were 38 violent crimes reported on campus last year, including two rapes, 18 robberies and 18 aggravated assaults.
 
But Sanford, a 21-year-old queer woman and the school’s Pride Alliance president, said neither she nor other openly gay College Park students are scared.
 
“It’s not my sense that any LGBT students on campus go around fearing for their safety,” she said, “or anything like that at all.”
 
Luke Jensen, the school’s LGBT equity director, said openly gay faculty and staff share that sentiment.
 
“I think that they feel as safe as anyone does. In other words, I don’t think our LGBT staff and faculty feel a greater threat than any of our other staff and faculty do.”
 

 
Attacks on gays rare
 
Jensen, who is gay, said he couldn’t recall anyone on campus being attacked because of his or her sexual orientation since he joined the university in 1988.
 
“I’m not aware of any incidents along those lines in the past several years, and to be honest with you, I can’t think of anything before then.”
 
Gay students said they may dodge violent victimization, but they are sometimes targets of more passive forms of homophobic aggression.
 
Sanford said she and other students have been verbally harassed. Others have received hateful messages left on their dorm room doors.
 
“It’s definitely not unheard of,” she said, “but it’s not something that happens on a frequent basis.”
 
Kyle Wheat, 21, a self-identified queer man and the Pride Alliance vice president, said the school’s last major homophobic incident occurred three years ago when someone scrawled homophobic graffiti outside the school’s equality office.
 
Since then, he said, campus gays have only been harmed by the occasional insult.
 
“I don’t feel particularly unsafe,” Wheat said. “I don’t know anyone who feels particularly unsafe.”
 
Nonetheless, he said the university encourages gay students to report any harassment or homophobic incidents to the school’s public safety department.
 
“There’s an atmosphere that if something like that happened, you should report it. It’s important to foster a positive campus environment.”
 
But victims of minor transgressions, such as Sanford, who said he was once verbally harassed on campus by a handful of men, might not take that step.
 
“A lot of people aren’t going to spend their time dealing with something like that,” she said. “They’re just going to want to move on.”
 
Gay activists, however, cautioned students against ignoring insults.
 
“I think that people need to be cautious,” said Meredith Moise, a former field organizer for Equality Maryland who now works for the National Black Justice Coalition. “It’s hate the one day, and violence the next.”
 
Jensen said that’s partly why College Park officials have placed a new emphasis on campus security.
 
“There’s been a lot of improvement on campus in recent years to help with general safety issues,” he said.
 
Jensen noted there are an increasing number of cameras monitoring campus grounds, and new emergency stations allow people to summon help by striking a panic button.
 
“I’d have to say that while our campus is far from perfect,” she said, “people do generally feel safe.”
 
And despite the school’s FBI ranking, Sanford, Wheat and Jensen all asserted that College Park remains a safe place for gays.
 
Jensen noted the ranking can easily be misinterpreted. The high number of crimes doesn’t mean the school experiences more crime; it simply reports more.
 
“I think that the University of Maryland does an extremely outstanding job in gathering and reporting crime data of all kinds,” he said. “And there is an effort to be transparent about that data.”
 
Jensen said other colleges downplay crime data, especially tallies of violent crimes like rape and assault, “to look better.”