The Daily Beast did a photo essay with analysis on America’s 25 Most Crime-Rattled Colleges. 

According to a report by Allie Grasgreen via In Higher Ed, stalking is a one crime that isn’t listed in that essay — and one that campus security often takes too lightly until too late.

In 2005, a female college student filed a report with the campus police saying she was being stalked. The department’s only investigator left the next day for six months of post-surgery leave, and the case fell through the cracks. When the investigator returned to work, she checked in on the status of the student. After moving four times to escape her stalker, who would post her address in Craigslist ads soliciting oral sex, she withdrew with only a term left to graduation.

Terrible as that story (from an unnamed institution) is, shared here by one of a few dozen campus safety officials and student affairs professionals at an event Friday, it could have been far worse.

As safety issues go, stalking generally isn’t high on the list of concerns among university police, student affairs officials and health center staff. But it should be a priority, says Gary J. Margolis, a former campus police chief at the University of Vermont who made his case here Friday at a one-day conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Clery Center for Security on Campus.

Consider the surveys and research: More than 13 percent of women report having been stalked in college. Eighty-one percent of victims who were stalked by an intimate partner also report physical abuse. And 54 percent of female murder victims reported stalking to police before their stalkers killed them – while 76 percent of all those murdered were stalked at least once in the 12 months prior to their death.

“The link between stalking and dying is real, and it’s significant,” said Margolis, who is now a managing partner at Margolis Healy, a campus safety consulting firm.

People under the age of 25 experience stalking at the highest rates. And when students do report being stalked, 80 percent of the time they choose to contact campus police – not city or state law enforcement.

“What does that tell you we should be doing?” Margolis asked everyone in the room. “We’ve got to train them.”

But the very nature of stalking – repeated harassing or threatening behavior that puts another person in fear – makes it non-conducive, almost, to police work, in which “You get a call, there’s a problem, you go, you deal with it and you leave. It’s incident-focused, it’s not pattern-focused.”

“This is a problem.”

Grasgreen indicated that social networking created a new type of stalking environment:

These days, much of what a stalked college student experiences happens over social media – threatening or intimidating Facebook messages, tweets, etc. (And the recent trend of “checking in” to bars, restaurants or wherever when students are out and about can actually help a stalker locate the victim.) One official in the room said she never even gets reports of physical stalking anymore, just digital stalking.