A new UTC Title IX report on Sexual Misconduct, Relationship Violence and Stalking said reported cases of such incidents among students continues to rise.
There were 42 reported cases in 2014 and 56 in 2015. That jumped to 153 in 2016, 192 in 2017 and 221 last year.
The report says of last year's 221 cases that 120 were allegations of sexual misconduct.
There were 52 cases of relationship violence, 41 of stalking, one of retaliation and seven of sexual discrimination.
There were 52 cases that allegedly involved sexual intercourse without consent and seven of sexual contact without consent. There were 48 allegations of sexual harassment, and eight of sexual exploitation.
UTC officials said of the 120 cases of sexual misconduct that 66 of the complainants identified the person involved, while 44 declined to do so. There were 10 persons involved unknown to the complainants.
The university said it continues to take a number of steps seeking to deter such instances of sexual misconduct.
Officials stated, "Our campus did a few new things this year to draw even more attention to the topic of consent and sexual assault prevention. We conducted poster campaigns in both spring and fall 2018 and a T-shirt campaign during the first six weeks of the fall semester. Students (and faculty and staff) seemed to love the “Obtained & Affirmative & Voluntary & Continual” consent T-shirts.
"Our goal is for the topic of consent to be a continual conversation, and the T-shirts and consent buttons certainly have helped to further that goal. We are continually looking for new, fresh ideas to help us communicate the concept of consent to our campus constituents. If you have ideas, please reach out."
Officials said, "The statistics detail all reports of sexual misconduct, relationship violence and stalking, retaliation and other types of sex discrimination received by UTC, other than those received by completely confidential resources like the Counseling Center and Student Health Services.
"The term sexual misconduct includes sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexual exploitation. Sexual assault includes non-consensual sexual intercourse and other non-consensual sexual contact. The term relationship violence includes dating violence and domestic violence. The term stalking means a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to: 1. Fear for the person’s safety or the safety of others; or 2. Suffer substantial emotional distress. The term retaliation means any act or attempted act taken because of a person’s participation in a protected activity that would discourage a reasonable person from engaging in protected activity. The term sex discrimination includes forms of sex-based discrimination and harassment that do not fall within sexual misconduct, relationship violence or stalking. The statistics in this document include all reports received by the university, regardless of where/when the reported incidents occurred or the identity of the reported respondent. Reports are loosely categorized by type, for example: Reports of cat-calling are included within sexual harassment, although some instances of cat-calling may not rise to the level of a policy violation."