1 . Last August, Joe and Mary Mahoney began looking at colleges for their 17-year-old daughter, Maureen. With a checklist of criteria in hand, the Dallas family looked around the country visiting half a dozen _________ . They sought a university that _________ the teenager’s intended major, one located near a large city and a campus where their daughter would be _________ .

“The safety issue is a big one,” says Joe Mahoney, who quickly discovered he wasn’t _________ in his worries. On campus tours other parents _________ similar concerns, and the same question was _________ asked: “What about crime?“ But when college officials always gave the same _________ —“That’s not a problem here,”—Mahoney began to feel unsettled.

“No crime whatsoever?” _________ Mahoney today. “I just don’t buy it.” Nor should he. In 1999 the U.S. Department of Education had _________ of nearly 400,000 serious __________ on or around our campuses. That includes 754 homicides(自杀案), almost 6,500 sexual assaults and some 175,000 incidents of theft. “Parents need to understand that times have changed since they went to college,” says David Nichols, the author of Creating a Safe Campus. “Campus crime __________ the rest of the nation.”

But getting __________ information isn’t easy. Colleges must report crime statistics by law, but some hold them back for fear of bad publicity, leaving the honest ones looking __________ . “The truth may not always be serious,” warns S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus, Inc., the nation’s leading campus safety watchdog group.

To help __________ parents, Carter promised to visit campuses and talk to experts around the country to find out major crime issues and effective __________ .