Lori Falce: Why are college girls victims of violence?

College girls and homicide shouldn’t go together the way that they do.

Maybe we should blame serial killer Ted Bundy for the way murderers and coeds have become so linked in the American consciousness. Maybe we should blame slasher flicks that make sorority houses and dorm rooms the location of so many on-screen attacks. No matter how it has happened, there is a kernel of truth to the stereotype that can’t be denied.

The deaths of four University of Idaho students in November are a microcosm of campus crime. Three of the victims — Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, both 21, and Xana Kernodle, 20 — were young women living off-campus with the fourth victim, Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, 20.

Statistics in the U.S. and worldwide show that men are four times more likely to be murdered than women. Many of those are young men whose paths crossed with someone involved in dangerous behavior.

But for college-age women, the likelihood of homicide goes up dramatically. Two factors drive the increase.

One is intimate partner violence. It’s the prime age to be exploring new relationships, and those flip the numbers on their heads, with women the victims 82% of the time compared to 18% for men. This would be the case with Alina Sheykhet, a University of Pittsburgh student murdered by her ex-boyfriend in her Oakland apartment in 2017.

The other factor is stalking — a kind of perceived relationship that can end in the same deadly manner. The difference is the victims might not be aware of the danger. The Bureau of Justice Statistics notes that, for every seven men over 18 who are stalked, 20 women are.

The Idaho case bears those numbers out. Bryan Kohberger, a Washington State University grad student charged with the killings, is reported to have stalked the victims for weeks before entering the home, killing his selected targets and leaving two other roommates unharmed. He was arrested in December at his parents’ Pennsylvania home.

And then there are the ones without answers — the ones that might fall in either category or the black hole of stranger violence. Penn State has two unsolved murders at its University Park campus.

Grad student Betsy Aardsma, 22, was killed by a knife to the heart in the dark corners of Pattee Library over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1969. Her name is less remembered than the urban legend lore of her passing. Dana Bailey, 21, was a senior in health planning and administration when she was stabbed in her apartment over spring break in 1987.

Probably the greatest threat to college-age women is not that there are Hollywood-style ax murderers stalking campuses like rogue lions. It is that they are already prey to other violence.

According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, while 1 in 6 women are likely to be a rape or attempted rape victim in their lives, the numbers skyrocket for the 18 to 24 age group — 300% more for college students than women across the board. It is so common that there is a name for the period when it is most likely to occur — the red zone, the time between the start of fall semester and Thanksgiving.

Perhaps the question is less why murder happens on college campuses. Perhaps it ought to be why we know that so many women are at risk for violent crime on campus — from guys they date or dated to stalkers watching from the shadows to a nameless someone drunk at a party — but little seems to change except the body count.