How colleges and universities confront campus crime changed forever with the April 5, 1986 murder of Jeanne Ann Clery in her Lehigh University residence hall room. Jeanne’s parents, Howard and Connie, soon discovered a history of campus violence and security problems that students and parents had not been told, not only at Lehigh, but at schools across the United States.
The Clery family joined other families who had experienced campus violence to spearhead a successful effort, first in Pennsylvania, then in nine other states, to enact laws that require public and private institutions of higher education to report campus crime statistics. In 1987, the Clerys also founded a nonprofit victim-assistance-and-advocacy organization, Security on Campus, Inc., using money from a settlement with Lehigh University.