With recent light shed on the horrific sexual assault cultures at schools like the University of Virginia and Dartmouth College, it’s easy to shake our heads at others and pat ourselves on the back for an apparent absence of rape culture. We have ongoing conversations about consent and sexual assault. We are a socially conscious university, and we are better than the schools under investigation for mishandling sexual assault cases. We are not under investigation for Title IX violations. We do not have a rape problem.

Between 2012 and 2013, forcible sex offenses on Washington University’s campus increased by 150 percent, at least in terms of those offenses that were reported. One in four Wash. U. women is sexually assaulted at some point during her time here, a statistic that remains consistent with the national average.

Therefore, 25 percent of women suffer, but very few of these women come forward publicly with their assaults at Wash. U. But we consistently talk about rape culture on a wider scale, even if that might cause us to ignore or implicitly silence the horrific experiences of individuals. So that makes us different from places like UVA. Right?

Wash. U., like most institutions of higher education in this country, has a rape problem. One woman out of four being assaulted is a problem. Assumptions of being better just because we did not get a Rolling Stone article written about us is a problem.

That erroneous assumption, of course, in itself aggravates the larger problem we pride ourselves for consistently discussing: the lack of acknowledgement that sexual assault and rape culture exists everywhere, no matter how “liberal” or “progressive” or “socially aware” a campus may appear to be.

The facts that Wash. U. sexual assault statistics match the national average and that we hear so little about individual occurrences of rape and continue to discuss the problem with broad hypotheticals, combined with our tendency to place ourselves above schools under investigation simply because we don’t have women coming forward publicly with graphic retellings of their own horrific experiences, only serve to silence survivors further.

While we participate in an ongoing conversation about sexual assault on the national level and condemn cases that take place on other campuses as a result of “frat culture” or “state-school culture,” the creation of a language of otherness has the potential to isolate survivors on Wash. U.’s own campus.

Sexual assault, based on a general Wash. U. perspective, doesn’t seem to happen at this school, or at least it isn’t as big of a problem as it seems to be at other institutions. Women who are assaulted on Wash. U.’s campus are treated in these conversations as anomalies, unfortunate individual occurrences in a “safer” system not plagued by the problems of other schools.

And that’s pretty much exactly the problem present at UVA: paying passing attention to individual victims as people who just had unfortunate “bad experiences” and not recognizing that the incidents, far from isolated, are symptomatic of a larger problem. And it’s not the national, hypothetical problem of “rape culture” we discuss at a safe and comfortable distance but rather the real and uncomfortable truth of the sexual assault present on Wash. U.’s campus that fails to be addressed.