President Barack Obama just delivered a special announcement at the GRAMMY Awards to help curb the epidemic of campus sexual assault.

He specifically called on music artists and their fans to take the "It's On Us" pledge, which is a national campaign aimed at emphasizing consent between sexual partners.  

The stated mission of the campaign is: 

To RECOGNIZE that non-consensual sex is sexual assault. 
To IDENTIFY situations in which sexual assault may occur. 
To INTERVENE in situations where consent has not or cannot be given. 
To CREATE an environment in which sexual assault is unacceptable and survivors are supported.

The President underscored that 1 in 5 women are assaulted in college, dispelling the notion that rape is only "valid" if it involves force or is enacted by a stranger. In reality, 9 in 10 victims of campus rape know their attacker, according to the National Sexual Assault Resource Center.

In addition, a 2007 Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) study found that out of the 5,446 undergraduate women they interviewed, 11% were sexually assaulted while incapacitated, while only 5% experienced physically forced sexual assault.

Here are a few more facts on campus sexual assault: 

• 16-20 percent of women are raped while in college.
• 88 percent of victims do not report rape.
• Eight percent of male students are believed to be responsible for 90 percent of assaults.
• In 2013, colleges reported over 5,000 sexual assault offenses to the US Department of Education, and yet 41 percent of schools have not conducted an investigation of a sexual assault complaint in the last five years.
• Schools permanently expel only 10 to 25 percent of students who are found “responsible” for sexual assault.

As ATTN reported last year, California Governor Jerry Brown signed new legislation that would require all state universities receiving public funds to adhere to a strict "affirmative consent standard" for sexual assault cases. Dubbed the "yes means yes" standard, this new measure stipulates that sex is only consensual when both involved parties voice "an affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement." Thus, silence, lack of protest, or being impaired by drugs or alcohol does not equal consent.

To learn more about the campus sexual assault epidemic, you can also watch and share this brief video we made: