Staying Safe on Campus: A Guide for Families

We are excited to announce the release of Staying Safe on Campus: A Guide for Families. This guide, which is free for anyone to access thanks to our sponsor, GradGuard, is a way for us to share the many years of knowledge we have gained working with a network of thousands of campus safety specialists.

Clery Center’s mission is to partner with colleges and universities to create safer campuses.  Over the past 37 years, we’ve gathered a lot of useful insights for students heading off to college and their loved ones who may be nervous to see them go. We’ve collected the most crucial of these insights to consider before your child begins their college journey in this new guide.

In Staying Safe on Campus, you’ll learn about:

• How to stay engaged and informed while your child is on campus
• Common concerns on campuses like sexual assault, hazing, property crimes, and more
• Where to find crime statistics for specific campuses
• Different laws that affect campus safety, like the Clery Act and Title IX
• Safety tips for students
• Questions to ask administrators
• Where your child can seek support if they need help on campus

Safety can mean different things to different people: what makes a campus feel safe or not depends on each individual student, their identities and lived experiences. Our goal is to provide you with a framework for thinking about safety on college campuses and a foundation for building your knowledge about campus safety.

Dr. Sylvia Gray, Title IX Coordinator and Senior Director of Equity & Equal Opportunity at Sewanee: The University of the South, and inaugural member of our National Advisory Council highlights the importance of this guide: 

"I’ve met thousands of families and students throughout my career in education. Rarely have I ever met anyone who is not concerned with or doesn’t have questions about campus safety. Most often, the concerns that a prospective or current student has about campus safety are not the same as that of the parent. Further, the lack of knowledge of what to ask or who to talk with may be a barrier for many during a college search. The Staying Safe on Campus guide can be an incredibly useful tool to help bridge those gaps. In addition, it encourages the creation of conversation between families, students, and campuses on the most important questions to ask, the answers that are best to know, the availability of support resources, and which measures to take to remain safe."

We hope you refer to Staying Safe on Campus both during the college decision-making process and once your child is on campus, and that this guide will encourage ongoing conversations about safety all throughout their college experience.

Get the Guide