UNC-Chapel Hill reported 16 rapes on campus in 2025, and ten of those were reported from residence halls, according to the university's annual federal crime disclosure. Yet Orange County's top prosecutor says only a small handful of those cases ever landed on his desk as criminal charges, exposing a gap between what colleges are required to report and what actually gets prosecuted.
A Required Disclosure That Doesn't Track Outcomes
The figures come from UNC's 2026 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, a federally mandated document compiled from information reported to UNC Police, Carolina Housing, the Dean of Students, the university's compliance office, the Office of Student Conduct, and other campus units and law enforcement agencies, according to the UNC-Chapel Hill University Compliance Office. That report confirms there were 16 rapes reported in 2025, up from 13 the year before, with ten reported from residence halls, as first detailed by The Daily Tar Heel. Colleges nationwide are required to disclose these numbers every October under federal Clery Act rules, but as the Raleigh News & Observer reported, the figure alone says nothing about how any of the cases were handled or resolved.
That distinction matters because a report counted under Clery statistics is recorded regardless of whether an investigation or prosecution ever follows, per the compliance office's own report. Someone can report to the university, to police, to both, or to neither, and reporting is not required to happen immediately or with a decision already made about what the person wants to happen next, according to Safe at UNC, the university's sexual-misconduct reporting resource.
Prosecutor Says Few Cases Reach His Office
Orange County District Attorney Jeff Nieman told the News & Observer that most of the 16 rape reports in UNC's 2025 federal crime report did not reach his office as criminal charges, and that the number that did was in the low single digits. Criminal investigations and university investigations can run in parallel, meaning a case can move through UNC's internal Title IX process even if it never becomes a criminal prosecution, or the reverse.
Attorney Hugh Stevens said, per critics, that universities prefer to handle allegations internally through the Title IX process rather than refer felony-level cases to prosecutors — a tension that has drawn renewed scrutiny amid the Cornell gang rape case, which reignited questions about how Triangle-area universities handle sexual assault allegations, the outlet reported. North Carolina campus victims generally have multiple avenues available to them: university police, local police, or a school's Title IX office, each of which can lead to a different outcome depending on what the person reporting chooses to pursue.
Other Campuses, Other Numbers
UNC wasn't alone in seeing rape reports rise in 2025. UNC Wilmington logged 17 cases, East Carolina University reported 14, Duke reported nine, Wake Forest reported eight, Davidson reported four, and NC State and NC Central each reported three, according to the News & Observer's review of the newly released campus crime data. Separately, ABC11 reported that Duke's count included nine rapes on campus and one off campus, while NC State's count included three on campus and none off campus.
Figures from other campuses show just how rarely reports translate into prosecutions elsewhere in the state. At East Carolina University, 15 rapes were reported to campus authorities in 2024, and ECU's police chief, Jason Sugg, told WBTV, “Just one of those six criminal investigations resulted in charges.” Nine of ECU's 2024 cases were instead handled solely through university resources such as a Title IX investigation, without the person involved choosing to report to police, per the same account. Appalachian State had a dozen rapes reported in 2024, and none of those cases led to an arrest, WBTV reported.
Rising Reports of Stalking and Domestic Violence
UNC's new security report also showed sharp increases in other categories of campus violence. Stalking incidents rose from 34 in 2024 to 48 in 2025, and domestic-violence reports climbed from 10 to 24 over the same period, the Daily Tar Heel reported. A UNC compliance official cautioned that an increase in reporting does not necessarily mean that more violence is occurring on campus, according to the same report.
That caution echoes a broader pattern UNC has documented in recent years. During the 2021-2022 academic year, the university's Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office received 72 informal reports of sexual assault against students, up from 58 the year before, according to UNC Media Hub. North Carolina lawmakers have also moved to address how disciplinary records are handled through the Protect Campus Survivors Act, a new state law that shields identifying information in disciplinary records from public view.
