Graduate student Yuki Sakai was unenthusiastic about having to walk to her home on Sea View Avenue recently, since she lives near where the KCC student told police she was kidnapped and raped by as many as five men.

"I didn't care about safety before that incident happened," Sakai said. "Now I bring a light and try to find a friend, if possible."

That night, Sakai was alone, armed with a plastic flashlight, a whistle and a cell phone.

Sakai expects the fear will abate in time. A rape on campus last year raised similar concerns, but "then I kind of forgot it happened. It's not a new issue," she said.

While they did not want to walk into dark areas of campus alone, most women interviewed on campus recently said they felt safe and secure on the well-lit campus.

But a study released April 4 by P. Jayne Bopp, of the UH-Manoa Women's Center, suggests that the campus is not the haven that women believe it to be, although it's not the rare stranger rapes that cause the most worry.

"I don't think the campus is any more or less safe than it's ever been," she said.

According to Bopp's study, the seven reported rapes on campus in 2003 were only a small percentage of the sexual and relationship violence cases reported in a survey of 435 female undergraduates in the fall of the same year. The crime statistics are by calendar year, not academic year.

While 2 percent of the respondents reported being raped and about 10 percent of women reported partner violence, stalking or sexual assault, only 4 percent of the assaults that occurred on campus were reported to police and 1 percent was reported to campus security.

Most of these unreported crimes are committed by people the women know — boyfriends or ex-boyfriends, dates or friends — which is why they may go unreported.

What's happening at UH is similar to what happens on other college campuses around the country. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Security on Campus Inc., said a U.S. Department of Justice study found that nationally fewer than 5 percent of female college student victims report sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults to police.

When a broader array of violent crimes were studied, students were less likely than others to involve the police, who were only informed in about 35 percent of the violent victimization cases. By comparison, nonstudents reported about 47 percent of violent crimes, Carter said.

At UH recently, the significantly more rare stranger rapes have attracted much attention, prompting rallies and encouraging women to take additional safety measures, such as calling campus security for an escort across campus.

Those security escorts have been in demand since three recent rapes near the campus, including the March 28 attack.

On a normal night, security provides five to eight escorts, and maybe double that if it's raining and harder to see and hear others. "When the weather is stormy, cloudy and wet, I think that some women feel more vulnerable," said Capt. Donald Dawson, chief of campus security.

Since news of the sexual assaults has made its way around campus, however, the requests have jumped to 35 to 45 people a night, a total of about 700 since the March 28 attack, Dawson said.

Graduate student Dietra Myers Tremblay is also aware of the recent rapes but she has no trepidation about walking through the campus at night.

After seven years at UH, which included dorm living as an undergraduate, Tremblay said, "I feel this is the safest campus ever," she said. "I've never really had a problem with anyone."

Unlike many students, Lauren Hansen thinks safety on campus really is an issue. Although the graduate student lives in a dorm on campus, she works as a waitress off-campus and has to park her car in Manoa Valley. When she returns to the university late at night, she calls for a security escort as soon as she enters the campus perimeter. She calls so often she has the number memorized.

"They're really helpful," she said.

Hansen wouldn't be as concerned if the campus wasn't deserted at night. Seeing other students would make her feel more comfortable. "If this campus had more of a night life, more of a community, they could spend less money on security," she said.

On the other hand, after doing her undergraduate work at the University of Florida, she finds it somewhat comforting that rapes are rare enough to still garner attention at UH.

"Rape happens so much, it's not in the newspaper there," she said.