#MeToo collegiate accounts on Instagram

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As students return to college classes around the world, hundreds are sharing stories of alleged campus sexual assaults on Instagram. Anonymous accounts have been set up at more than two dozen academic institutions in the United States, England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and they're being flooded with student allegations of rape, harassment, stalking, and other forms of sexual abuse by fellow students.

On July 4, a similar account at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, called CWRU Survivors, posted its first story of alleged sexual misconduct on campus. Just 25 days later, it said it had shared over 400 allegations made by current and former students.

Anonymous survivor Instagram accounts went live at dozens of universities in the U.S. over the summer, including American University, Bard College, UC Berkeley, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, George Washington University, Gettysburg, Northwestern, Rollins, Tulane, the University of Alabama, the University of Texas at Austin, Vassar, Washington University, and Wesleyan.

In Scotland, similar accounts were created at St. Andrews, Edinburgh University, Robert Gordon University, Stirling University, and the University of Aberdeen. In England, accounts were created at the universities of Durham and Lincoln. In Northern Ireland, an account was created at Queens University Belfast.

Over 23% of undergraduate female students and 5.4% of undergraduate males in the United States experience sexual assault or rape through physical force, incapacitation, or violence while they're in college, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN). In the U.K., 75% of respondents to a 2019 survey conducted by the National Union of Students said they had experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact while on campus

In general, reporting rates are much lower when the perpetrator is someone that the victim knows. And because most campus assaults fall into that category and often grow out of social situations, the reporting rate for campus assaults is quite low," Berkowitz said.

All of the account administrators that CBS News spoke to say they were survivors themselves.

We're trying to give incoming students and prospective students a more realistic image of what they're getting into," said the co-founder of Gettysburg Survivors.

"I think a lot of people come into this school with the naive expectation that the school is going to fight for you no matter what. If somebody hurts you, they will stand up for you. And that's simply not been the case for so many of us that we're trying to not necessarily scare them, but give them this knowledge so that they know to be wary of these situations and understand that they're not alone — that if something happens to them, it's not their fault. That this is a systemic issue that is campus wide. That it's not just you."