Trigger warning: Rape, sexual violence and sexual assault.

Part of an authentic college or university experience is being able to compare one’s school to those of their peers. Bragging, we bring up the successes of our sports teams, the quality of our parties and where we stand in national academia.We take all of these things into consideration when we decide which colleges best suit our needs. Once we enter the job world, our employers take into consideration some of the very same things.

Very rarely do safety or crime statistics come up, and for good reason. No one wants to talk about violent crimes in casual conversation. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that few people fully know the ins and outs of their campus’s approach to crime and student safety—especially when it comes to sexual violence.

Aside from the occasional scandal, usually in which a high-profile athlete has committed some atrocious crime, college students suffer from a serious lack of conversations about rape and sexual assault.

Former President Jimmy Carter recently published A Call To Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, in which he explores the many ways men around the world reduce women to their inferiors. Carter cites college campuses as among the foremost influential contributors to sexual violence in the United States. On one occasion, he referred to colleges and universities as “breeding grounds” for rapists due to how disproportionately underreported these crimes are.

We cannot blame the victims. Women who have been raped or sexually abused in any way are often met with skepticism or hostility. For instance, some students at UNC-Chapel Hill started an “I Stand With Landen” campaign, as they felt as though the school’s honor court was trying to silence Landen Gambill when she claimed an abusive ex-boyfriend had raped her. Seeing how women in these situations are treated, it makes sense other women would feel compelled to keep quiet about their experiences.

Fortunately, the feminist organization UltraViolet recently started a petition to have The Princeton Review, which frequently publishes college rankings, to include sexual assault rankings in its future publications.

Currently, The Princeton Review ranks schools based on the following criteria: academics/administration, campus life, town life, schools by type, politics, quality of life extracurriculars and social scene.

None of these include anything to do with campus safety or sexual assault prevention or reaction programs, but they should.

According to UltraViolet, “55 campuses are under federal investigation for failing to take rape reports seriously.” The organization asserts that high school students and prospective college students have a right to know which colleges have significant problems with sexual violence.

Ideally, The Princeton Review would rank colleges based on whether they report all known cases of sexual violence, encourage victims to speak up about their experiences without fear of ostracism, and whether the campus has any sort of (well-funded) prevention and response program.

An obvious concern in ranking colleges on sexual violence statistics might be the possibility of encouraging underreporting, as administrators would want to downplay the rates of offenses as much as possible.

However, given that college rankings would include some sort of sexual violence resource for students, such as N.C. State’s Relationship and Sexual Violence Phone Line, it’s possible schools would take the funding of those programs into heavier consideration. Additionally, the people working for those programs would report or publish the statistics, as opposed to other administrators or campus police.

The Princeton Review now includes links to campuses’ security pages on its website, which, according to NPR, it did not previously offer.

Whether or not students feel safe greatly factors into quality of life, and it’s high time schools took rape and sexual assault more seriously. Though including sexual violence statistics in college rankings will not put an end to these crimes, it will at least force administrators to take them more seriously and will offer incoming students a more holistic knowledge of the schools they consider attending.