Attorney Gloria Allred and a group of students and activists across the country have come together to file complaints against colleges and universities nationwide who have under reported sexual assault crimes and discrimination to the government.

The charges were filed against Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College,  USC (University of Southern California) and UC Berkeley for violating Title IX (facilitating a hostile environment for women) and federal Clery Act (misreporting campus crimes).

"We are asking the United States Department of Education to open an investigation into these complaints and take appropriate actions to force these colleges to comply with the law or risk losing their federal funding," Allred said.

The USC's Student Coalition against Rape filed the complaint against the university, hoping that the university will be proactive in punishing sexual offenders and publishing accurate sexual assaults cases.

Tucker Reed, the group's co-founder and an alleged rape victim said that the university did recruit investigators, but later informed her it all actions were purely focused on educative not punitive efforts.

In their defense, USC's Division of Student Affairs said that they seriously consider all reported crimes and award penalty appropriately including sanctions and dismissals. They said that they also encourage victims of a crime to approach the Los Angeles Police Department, if not satisfied with the university's verdict.

A UC Berkeley student said she was sexually assaulted in her freshman year by a student leader who is also alleged to have assaulted four of her peers.

Seven months after filing her assault report with a campus group, she learnt that the case had been closed through an early resolution process. Plus, the case was removed from the university's jurisdiction.

Defending the university's approach towards such cases, UC Berkeley spokeswoman Janet Gilmore said that the officials carefully examine each and every sexual case that arrives at their doorstep and constantly strive to prevent such acts from occurring by providing counseling and support services to the campus community.

Allred also accused Occidental College, Yale, University of Texas and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for acting negligently and filed similar charges against some of them.

 Allred said that students will no longer tolerate rapes and sexual assaults on campus, plus, officials' ignorance toward such cases.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) started its probe at Occidental after a complaint was filed last month by the campus group 'Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition' (OSAC), alleging that dozens of female students were sexually assaulted over the past four years and that the administrators overlooked their complaints.

"There are 5,000 colleges and universities in the United States. Every day on these campuses students face rape, sexual assault, sexual battery and sexual harassment," said Occidental professor and criminologist Danielle Dirks.