Violence against women: the Campus Save Act

The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act, requires colleges receiving federal student aid to disclose campus crime statistics. SaVE's contribution was to expand what has to be disclosed and how schools have to respond, specifically for sexual violence, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking.

SaVE requires schools to report domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking as their own distinct categories in the Annual Security Report, giving students and the public a clearer statistical picture of what’s actually happening on campus, rather than one number.

It also sets minimum standards for how schools handle a report once it’s made. Disciplinary proceedings must be prompt, fair, and impartial, and conducted by officials trained annually on the dynamics of these crimes and the safety of alleged victims. Both the accuser and the accused must have the same opportunity to have an advisor of their choice present throughout the process, and both must receive simultaneous written notice of the outcome and any appeal rights. Schools must also disclose, in writing, whatever evidentiary standard they use to decide these cases.

Finally, SaVE requires ongoing prevention education, not a single freshman-orientation session, but primary prevention and awareness programming for incoming students and new employees, plus continuing campaigns throughout enrollment, covering bystander intervention and how to recognize warning signs of abusive behavior.

How SaVE is enforced

SaVE’s requirements are enforced by the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office, through its Clery Act Compliance Division, which selects institutions for review based on prior violations, complaints, and media reports. As of 2025, the maximum fine is $71,545 per violation, adjusted annually for inflation, and a school found to be materially and persistently noncompliant can lose eligibility for federal student aid altogether .

What SaVE can fix

SaVE can force a school to count and report domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking separately; it cannot make a student who’s afraid of retaliation actually file a report. It can mandate annual bystander-intervention training; it cannot guarantee anyone intervenes. Underreporting on campus remains a documented, persistent problem that no amount of statistical transparency or procedural fairness fully resolves. SaVE changes what schools must count and how they must handle a complaint once it’s filed, not whether a survivor decides to come forward in the first place.

So the honest version of SaVE’s story at thirteen years old is this: it is one of the rare pieces of this legal landscape that has done exactly what it was designed to do, consistently, without becoming a culture-war casualty. What’s genuinely uncertain is whether the institutional machinery built to enforce it survives the current effort to dismantle the agency that houses it.