College is a special time in the life of everyone fortunate enough to experience it. College gives us the chance to discover ourselves in a shielded environment that is one step closer to “the real world,” without leaving the safety net of home.

But recent violent events have highlighted a deterioration in the sanctity of our college campuses, turning our once protected communities into zones of fear and distrust.

I’m not trying to claim that campus violence is a new phenomenon, especially since the horrors committed in the 1970s by Ted Bundy happened right in our backyard. But the prevalence of such heinous acts has increased dramatically.

Our generation has borne witness to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, a terrible event that shook the nation to its very core.

Before this infamous incident, it seemed unfathomable that a student could impose such horrors on his or her peers, especially at such a young age. But in the last nine years, reckless acts of hate have continued to plague our schools.

The Red Lake High School massacre, the Amish school shooting, the Virginia Tech massacre and the Northern Illinois shooting all occurred in the past three years, and these are just the incidents that made national news and had at least five victims.

Just this past weekend, Brianna Denison, a 19-year-old girl who disappeared from the campus of the University of Nevada, was found dead in a field. But the serial rapist who strangled her is still at large and unidentified in the Reno, Nev. area.

Even here at the UW, the violence has increased. It seems as if the e-mail alerts from the campus police telling of a local mugging or attack have become an almost weekly routine, and it still hasn’t even been a year since the murder that occurred in Gould Hall.

This senseless violence has become an accepted risk and fear that we have learned to live with. We have become so numb to grotesque acts of brutality that we find the words “just another school shooting” escaping our lips when we turn on the evening news.

How has this hate managed to reduce places once considered sanctuaries to harbors of fear and crime? Isn’t good supposed to triumph over evil?

The bottom line is that there is a serious problem not only in our community, but on academic campuses across the nation. We should not have to live in a world where we worry about who might come through the classroom door next.

I wish I could say that there is a quick fix to this problem, that there is a button we can push that would eradicate evil from the world. Unfortunately, our innocence and safety has become more of a game chance than of a guaranteed right.

At this point, it seems as if there is nothing we can really do, except press on with our day-to-day lives, make the smartest choices we can to give ourselves the greatest chance of safety, and pray that somehow evil will recede. Taken together, this approach will give innocence a chance to once again return to our college communities.

[Reach columnist Jeff Dickson at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]