We investigated ethnoviolence with a series of questions that were preceded by the following instruction: "Since classes began in September, have any of the
following happened to you on campus for what you would consider reasons of race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, or sexual orientation." Respondents
were then given a series of events to check off. Question 13, for example, read "Was called names/insulted" and the respondent could check the following options:
no; yes--one time; yes--two times; yes--more than two times. Respondents who checked "yes," were then asked a follow-up question (#14): "Was this because of
your race or ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or gender." The same procedure was followed for seven additional events:

Question 15: "Was verbally harassed or intimidated."

Question 17: "Was verbally threatened."

Question 19: "Was physically intimidated or attacked."

Question 21: "Had property damaged or destroyed."

Question 23: "Received insulting phone calls or letters."

Question 25: "Totally ignored/made to feel invisible."

The responses for each of these questions are presented in Table 2.1. The most commonly experienced event was feeling depersonalized, that is, being ignored or
made to feel invisible. More than 13% of the respondents saying that they had experienced this depersonalization. The next most common event was being called
names or insulted, experienced by 9% of the respondents. The least common event was physical intimidation or attack, experienced by only 1.8% of the
respondents. Taken together, the four types of verbal aggression (called names, verbally harassed, insulting calls/letters and verbal threats) accounted for most of the
victimization that was reported. We will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 5.

Race/ethnicity and gender were the most commonly perceived causes of victimization, although the pattern varied with the type of event (See Appendix Table B2.1).
Race was more involved where the victim was ignored or called names. Gender was the most commonly perceived cause of physical intimidation/attacks. For most
of the other events, race and gender were equally likely to be perceived as causes -- the differences between them being less than 10%. The only exception was
receiving threatening phone calls or letters, where race was first and sexual orientation was second.

Many of the respondents have been victimized repeatedly. For example, over half of those who reported being ignored and two-fifths of those who reported being
insulted said that it happened to them three or more times during the school year. In this chapter, we will focus on the individual people who were victims of one or
more events; we will not discuss the number of events or different types of events these victims experienced.

Types of Victims

We employed three categories for victims of ethnoviolence. Ethnic Victims were those respondents who said they had experienced at least one type of event where
they were victimized for reasons of race, ethnicity, religion or nationality. Gender Victims were those who said they had experienced at least one type of event
where they were victimized because of their gender. Finally, Gay Victims said they had experienced at least one type of event where they were victimized because
of their sexual orientation. We use the term to include male homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals.

We asked each victim to describe the incident where they were victimized. If more than one incident had happened, they were asked to "describe the one that most
affected them." Here are some examples of what the ethnic victims reported:

When I transferred I went to the Visual and Performing Fine Arts building to meet an advisor. The receptionist totally ignored me and was very rude. I
noticed she was very helpful to white students.

Was ignored in business office by black assistant who assisted two other black students and walked away from desk when I attempted to ask for
assistance.

At transfer student orientation (1/95), I was insulted by a volunteer advisor whose name is and he is (was) an major. He asked me why was I taking "all
hard classes." I told him because these classes were what I had left to take. He told me most were closed and never told me of a "hold list." He then
suggested that I take an African-American history class instead of a calculus class and said that he doesn't know why I was admitted to the school with
my GPA. I tried to explain to him my ordeal. He wouldn't listen and started to put down [a well-known black] University -- my former school -- which I
have much respect for. He said that University could not compare to the level of difficulty at UMBC. I tried not to argue but suggested that he was
wrong. He yelled at me and said, "We aren't connecting; what do you want to take!" I felt humiliated and intimidated by him.

An Indian Prof. threatened me for stating the fact that he shouldn't be so petty about one student's problems and get on with teaching the other 100. I
was told to apologize to him or face the consequences. I told him he would have to make me! I received a C when I should have gotten an A. The problem
has not been resolved.

I was packing to go home on the weekend at night when I heard from the apartments above someone making noises. He was drunk and making remarks
that were supposed to be "my language." I felt like making a smart remark, but I left it alone. I think I saw his friend try and stop him, but laughed it off.

I was walking across the UC Plaza and a white male yelled "nigger" at me. It angered me.

I have unknowingly sat in the "Black folks'" area of the dining hall. I sat down and introduced myself. No one spoke to me. No one looked at me. I have
waved hello to some of my Black neighbors. If they happen to be alone, they talk to me. If they are with a group of black friends, they do not see me.

I had a couple friends my first semester here whom I was close to and spoke to basically every day. This friendship lasted up until they met my husband. I
am in an interracial marriage. After the day they met my husband they no longer spoke to me like before.

Gender victims provided the following descriptions of their victimization:

I was waiting in line for transcripts and ignored, a male student was waited on before me.

Several left wing women verbally attacked me for my views and put me down just because I was male.

After Take Back the Night '94, I was repeatedly threatened, verbally assaulted -- I had to park my car off-campus (for fear of tampering/damage), and I
(and friends) had to walk in large groups everywhere (and virtually stayed in every night) -- I faced angry mobs of people calling me DYKE, BITCH,
WHORE, SPIC, etc. This continued for months and months.

Merely anti-feminist jokes and slurs from "friends."

I sat in 2nd row in class. Continuously raised my hand to answer questions and was ignored by male professor who called on male students instead.

The three following descriptions involved Gay victims:

Being openly gay and an athlete I hear many things, especially rumors being passed by fellow teammates. Jokes about Queers, gay, the things they are
stereo typically suppose to do are all subject to my feeling because, I am gay. A specific incident was brought up about anal intercourse. My name was
brought up several times.

I have been teased about my sexuality by both the straight and homosexual community.

Homos find me attractive because I'm so much of a man. I hate these bastards with a passion. One such fag pursued me for 5 weeks before I told him I
was going to kick his faggot ass. And because these degenerates run rampant throughout this campus (harassing innocent heteros). I am going to
continue my education elsewhere next semester. P.S. If only you liberals knew how it is like (sic) to be harassed by queers I'm sure you would change your
views.

This last description is more ambiguous since this individual is a potential perpetrator as well as a victim.

One of the important questions is how many individuals experienced each category of victimization. The data, which appear in Table 2.2, show that 11.4% of the
sample were ethnic victims. This means that they had experienced at least one event for which they said the cause was their race, ethnicity, religion or nationality. This
is about the same as our findings in 1987 where 10% were victims. This level of victimization is also modest when compared to studies of other colleges.

Almost half of the ethnic victims experienced only one type of event; for example,

they were only ignored or only insulted because of their race. Over half of the ethnic victims, on the other hand, experienced two or more types of events (Appendix
B Table B2.2); for example, they were ignored and insulted because of their religion, or they were ignored, insulted and verbally harassed because of their ethnicity.

Table 2.2 also shows that 6.6% of the sample were gender victims which means that they experienced at least one type of event in which they were victimized
because of their gender. More than two-thirds of the gender victims experienced two or more types of events. Gay victims accounted for 1.4% of the sample.
Almost two thirds of the gay victims experienced two or more types of events. We did not measure gender victimization or gay victimization in 1987 so we cannot
make any comparisons.

These findings still do not tell us the total number of individual students in our sample who were victimized at least once since these three categories are not mutually
exclusive. A single individual could have been both an ethnic victim by being insulted because of their race and a gay victim by being physically attacked because of
their sexual orientation. They could have been victimized at least once in all three categories.

To determine the number of individual victims, we counted each student who reported an act of victimization in any category. As the data in Table 2.2 show, 16.8%
of the sample were victims of an ethnic, gender or gay incident. Most of the victims experienced only one category of victimization, but one-eighth of the sample had
experienced two categories. Fortunately, no one had experienced all three categories.

Who Are The Victims?

We wanted to know how group membership affected victimization, especially race/ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. We did not analyze the "African" and
"Middle-Eastern" categories because of their small numbers and we also excluded the "Other" category for its imprecision. That left us with six racial/ethnic
categories: African American, Asian, Asian American, Hispanic, Jewish and White (non-Jewish and non-Hispanic)..

In comparing different groups with one another, social scientists generally use statistical tests to determine whether the differences are large enough to be considered
"real," that is, likely to have occurred other than by chance. In this study, where appropriate, we used the statistic "phi" and the conventional p<.05 level of
confidence to determine whether a difference was statistically significant. This means that there was less than a 5% chance that the difference would have occurred
by chance if we repeated the study 100 times.

The data in Table 2.3 show the percentage of students in each victim category -- ethnic, gender or gay. If we look at the group memberships of the ethnic victims,
we can observe that almost one-fourth of the Asian (international) students report victimization. African American, Asian American and Hispanic students display
rates of 21.8%, 20.8% and 16.7% respectively. White and Jewish students display much lower rates. The difference between Whites and Jews, on the one hand,
and the previous four groups on the other hand, is statistically significant.

This is similar to our 1987 findings, with one notable exception. In Table 2.4 we present the UMBC data for the two time periods as well as comparable data from
two other colleges. The data show that the rate of Jewish ethnic victimization decreased by more than one half. In the present study, Jews were quite similar to other
Whites. In contrast, African-American rates are fairly high and may have increased slightly. Although we did not differentiate between Asians and Asian-Americans
in 1987, the 1995 rates are probably higher for both groups. This may well be related to the 50% increase in Asian/Asian-American enrollment during this same
period. There were too few Hispanics in the 1987 sample for any comparative analysis.

Table 2.4 also includes victimization rates from two other college studies that had comparable categories for race and ethnicity. The African American and Hispanic
students at UMBC are less likely to be victims than comparable students at the other two schools.

In addition to examining the effects of race and ethnicity, we also looked at the effects of other background characteristics in the 1995 sample. Men were two-thirds
more likely to be ethnic victims than women (Table 2.3). This statistically significant finding is consistent with our 1987 study and with most other studies of
ethnoviolence.

When we examined gender victimization, however, we see that women are seven times more likely to be gender victims than are men. It appears that neither
race/ethnicity nor sexual orientation is relevant to gender victimization.

For gay victimization, race/ethnicity and gender are not important variables. Not surprisingly, gays, lesbians and bisexuals are twenty times more likely to be
victimized for sexual orientation than are heterosexuals.

We also looked at a variety of other background variables to see if they affected the likelihood of victimization including year in school, attending day vs evening
classes, living on or off campus, citizenship status, disability status, religion and political orientation. We use these same background variables throughout the study
and we only discuss the findings that are statistically significant. The data are presented in Appendix B Tables B2.3 and B2.4 .

Several of the background variables (day/evening classes, year in college, political self-identification, religion and disability) did not seem to affect the incidence of
victimization. On the other hand, those variables which seemed to affect the likelihood of one type of victimization had no affect on the other types. Not being a U.S.
citizen seems to slightly increase the likelihood of all three types of victimization, but only the ethnic victim differences approached significance. Ethnic and gender
victims were more likely than the rest of the sample to live on campus and, therefore, had more exposure to victimization. Gender victims and, possibly, gay victims
were younger than the rest of the sample.

Reporting to Campus Authorities

In the 1987 study, we found that 17% of the victims reported the incidents to campus authorities. In the present study, however, only 10.4% of the victims reported
the incident to campus authorities. This is substantially lower than the 1987 rate. The range of reporting at other schools varies from a low of 6% to a high of 20%
(Ehrlich, 1995). Hence, although few students at all schools report incidents, UMBC students report at a somewhat lower rate.

The University Police keep a list of Race, Religion and Ethnicity (RRE) Incidents that were reported to them. Between September 1, 1994 and April 30, 1995, the
period covered by the survey, the police list only 13 RRE incidents. We know that 153 respondents were victimized at least once, with many being victimized
several times. Since our sample represented 10% of the undergraduates, we can conclude that UMBC had hundreds of individual incidents during the 1994-1995
academic year that went unreported.

Reporting rates differed by the category of victimization. Table 2.5 shows that gay victims were more likely to report their victimization than were ethnic and gender
victims. Although we must be tentative about this finding since there were only 13 gay victims, there is supporting evidence in the RRE Incident list compiled by the
University Police. Seven of the 13 incidents reported involved gay victimization.

We also examined reporting rates of all ethnoviolence victims combined by the type of event that they had experienced. The findings are as follows:

% Reporting

Property damage 32.3%

Physical attack 13.3%

Verbal aggression 11.5%

Depersonalization 9.1%.

Clearly, those whose property was damaged were the most likely to report the event to campus authorities. Differences in reporting rates for victims who
experienced other types of events were small.

Why don't victims report the incidents? We provided victims who did not report the incident with a checklist of explanations. The most common reasons for not
reporting were as follows:

88% incident was not serious enough;

77% campus officials wouldn't have done anything;

76% there was nothing campus officials could have done.

These findings are consistent with studies done at other schools. Other reasons for not reporting the incident provided by at least half of the UMBC victims were:

68% this type of thing happens all the time;

65% it is a private matter;

58% didn't want to call more attention to themselves;

56% perpetrator didn't understand what they did so reporting the incident wouldn't help.

At UMBC and at other schools around the country, ethnoviolence victims seem to believe that they must deal with these incidents themselves, in part because it is
considered a private matter and, in part, because they believe that the institution can't or won't do anything to help them. One in four did, however, confront the
perpetrator and seven in ten talked about the incident with families and friends. The level of discussion with friends and families does indicate (as our findings in
Chapter 5 will document) that students were deeply affected by this experience.

Summary

The major findings with regard to ethnoviolent victimization are as follows:

1. Approximately 17% of the sample was victimized at least once during the school year.

2. Ethnic violence is more common than gay violence or gender violence.

3. Blacks, Asians, Asian Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be ethnic victims than Whites and Jews; women are more liley to be gender victims than men;
gays and lesbians are more likely to be victimized than heterosexuals.

4. Only one in ten victims report the incidents to campus officials with four out of five saying that campus officials couldn't or wouldn't have done anything.

5. The rates of White and Black ethnic victimization are similar to the 1987 study, while the Asian/Asian American rates increased and the Jewish rates decreased.

Table 2.1: Respondents Who Said They Had Been Victimized by Ethnoviolence
Type of Victimization
Percent
N
Ignored; made to feel invisible
13.2
104
Called names; insulted
9.0
74
Verbally harassed; intimidated
6.7
56
Insulting phone calls, letters
4.8
43
Property Damaged
4.8
43
Verbally Threatened
2.2
20
Physically intimidated, attacked
1.8
16

Table 2.2 Types of Ethnoviolence Victims
Type of Victim
Percent
N
Ethnic Victim

(Race, ethnicity, religion, nationality)
11.4
104
Gender Victim

(Male/female)
6.6
60
Gay Victims

(Sexual Orientation)
1.4
13
Total Ethnoviolence Victims*
16.8
153

*Represents the total number of individuals who experienced at least one type of victimization. Since some individuals experienced more than one type of
victimization, both the percentage and number of Total Ethnoviolence Victims are smaller than the sum of the individual types of victimization.


Table 2.3 Ethnoviolence Victimization Rates by Category of Victim and Group Membership
Group

Membership
Victim Category
Ethnic Victim (n=104)
Gender Victim (n=60)
Gay Victim (n=13)
African American
21.8
5.6
0
Asian
24.1
0
0
Asian American
20.8
8.3
2.8
Hispanic
16.7
8.3
4.2
Jewish
5.9
0
2.9
White, non-Jewish
6.4
7.6
1.4
Male
15.5
1.6
1.6
Female
9.2
11.6
1.5
Heterosexual
11.3
6.5
0.7
Gay,Lesbian,Bisexual
15.2
9.1
21.2

Table 2.4 Reports of Ethnic Victimization (Percent) by Race/Ethnic Background at UMBC in 1987 and 1995, the State University of New York College at
Cortland and at Rutgers University
Race/Ethnic Group
UMBC

1995

%
UMBC

1987

%
SUCC

1989

%
Rutgers

1989

%
African American
22
20
50
33
Asian
24
17
33
18
Asian American
21
--
--
Hispanic
17
--
60
25
Jewish
6
14
25
12
White, non-Jewish
6
5
15
5

All entries refer to the percentage of the Race/Ethnic group on campus reporting Ethnic Victimization.



Table 2.5 Reports of Victimization by Type of Victim
Type of Victim
Reported to campus authorities

%
Did Not Report

%
Ethnic Victim
8.6
91.4
Gender Victim
8.0
92.0
Gay Victim
25.0
75.0
Total Ethnoviolence Victims
10.4
89.6