With the start of the new fall semester, students are gearing up for football season, homecoming celebrations and a new round of academic coursework. Yet the first weeks of the fall term are also a time for caution.

The so-called red zone is the period when college students’ risk of being sexually assaulted is highest. According to a 2019 campus climate survey – one of the most recent studies of its size – first-year women are at the highest risk.

In a survey of nine U.S. colleges, over half of campus sexual assaults of first-year students occurred between orientation and Halloween. Data collected by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance in 2021 and 2024 show that the majority of assaults of first-year women students took place in September or October.

Statewide data on self-reported campus sexual assault isn’t collected, but cases associated with several major universities in Colorado in 2026 highlight the issue. In March 2026, Boulder police investigated a series of sexual assaults of underage women at a popular University Hill bar. The women were allegedly drugged, and the bar lost its liquor license and closed permanently.

In July 2026, parents of an Air Force Academy graduate who died by suicide filed a federal lawsuit alleging the university failed to protect their daughter from sexual assault.

As a researcher who studies domestic and interpersonal violence – and a college professor who works with students every day – I’m well aware that estimates of student sexual assault often understate the problem. Students often do not report an assault because they don’t know where to turn, have concerns about confidentiality, don’t trust the institution to respond adequately or are unable to navigate the institution’s resources by themselves. This parallels vast........

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