According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college. More than 90% of sexual assault victims do not report the crime to authorities.

I wonder if part of the reason why these crimes go unreported is because of how the media reports them.

ABC ran a story about the recent Stanford rape case, in which a 23-year-old woman was raped by star swimmer Brock Turner. Turner was given a six-month prison sentence, which could be reduced to as little as three months. The case has been heavily covered by news outlets throughout the country.

What made ABC’s article different was how it called out the news media for its lack of direction in coverage of rape cases.

“Daytime talk shows and news programs may provide exclusive interviews with ‘brave’ survivors,” the article reads, “but often these focus on the individual emotional suffering of their experience, without linking their case to larger systemic problems in how our society handles sexual assault.”

Is this true, though? CNN’s recent documentary “The Hunting Ground” talks about the issue of campus rape, but has come under scrutiny by news outlets for pushing an agenda and “ignoring facts.”

The Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus,” a 9000-word piece published in November 2014 that turned out to be a fabricated story, drew attention to rape culture until the story turned out false, and the managing editor of the paper walked out

Our news media almost seems more concerned with discrediting the legitimacy of rape than with trying to tell the stories of the survivors. As stated in the ABC article, survivors are often given very little room to tell their stories.

Social media changed this. It allowed for the victim of the prolific Stanford rape case to speak out in a 12-page open letter to her rapist, which was published online after she read it aloud at his sentencing. The internet let the world know of her experience in a way that would have been impossible even 10 years ago.

Social media excels where journalism lacks. It provides an outlet for stories to be told that are not reported by mainstream media. And the thousands of shares and comments on these types of articles show that people actually read these stories. This way of telling personal stories allows for the media to stop sensationalizing a person’s tragedy.

In the Stanford case, both the victim and the assailant were drinking. But one party was able to say his actions were excused because of alcohol, while the other was basically told she deserved her suffering because of the alcohol consumed. Many media reports on the incident precede the woman’s age with the statement that she was intoxicated, which immediately condemns her.

Stories we tell in the news media seem to often be more focused on finding a person to blame to make the story more interesting. In many reports of sexual assault, this means blaming the woman for the clothes she wears or for the number of people she’d slept with in the past.

The stories we see and tell shouldn’t blame the victim for the attack. They should tell a bigger story. They should put pieces together to tell the larger story of the victim’s survival and of what this case means to rape culture in general. They shouldn’t call out an individual survivor. While there are certainly cases of rape accusations that turn out to be false allegations, it’s more important to focus on why 90% of sexual-based crimes go unreported.

Brock Turner’s light sentence is only one of many, many rape cases where justice will not be served properly. As involved students on a college campus, it is our job to make sure our campus population is well-informed of the dangers of sexual assault and advocate for just sentencing and increased reporting of crimes like this.

The Oakland University Police Department’s Annual Security and Fire Safety Report said there were 13 sex offenses on OU’s main campus in 2014. Today, there are new advancements on campus that allow for students to stay safe at school, including the new Companion app through Oakland University Student Congress and the Gender and Sexuality Center, which has resources available for any student from condoms to information on STD testing.

Hopefully in my lifetime, I can see that campus rape statistic drop significantly, because me or one of my four best friends becoming a rape victim and then being told it was our own fault is something I never want to face in my lifetime.