Mark Fritz

The opening:

The story is powerful, almost mythic, yet tragically true. A young woman goes to a fine university in a rural community and, asleep in her dorm room during her freshman year, is raped and beaten by an intruder. He strangles her with a Slinky toy.

The shattered mother, Connie Clery, stands at the end of her driveway a week after the funeral and tells a friend: Something must be done. A wrong must be righted. She and her husband embark on an epic 13-year crusade that results in two sweeping federal laws and 13 state statutes that compel colleges to collect and disclose the details of every crime committed on every campus.

Mission accomplished? Not yet. Binge drinking and date rape must be stamped out next. And violence at the high schools. "We have the whole country behind us," says Clery, who believes schools remain committed to covering up campus crime. "We're right there with our enemies, in the pit."

Yet the schools say the steady rain of regulation is creating more paperwork than police work. George Washington University, for example, says the latest federal law will compel police on the District of Columbia campus to track crime way out on public portions of Pennsylvania Avenue and the nearby World Bank building.

"We've gotten to the point where we don't know what to report and what not to report," says Dolores Stafford, chief of the GWU campus police. "We've had schools pull officers off the street to monitor compliance."

The Clerys remain undeterred. Theirs is a classic American story of contemporary activism, a wounded family's odyssey endlessly replayed, from Megan's Law to missing children on milk cartons. Thanks to the unlimited power of parental grief to attract media and sway lawmakers, lawn darts in toy stores and drawstrings on children's clothing are banned. A vaccine comes to market earlier than originally intended. A child's sickness is linked to Love Canal, spawning the Superfund.

And at the center of them all so often stands a tragic tale, a family calamity transformed into arresting allegory, a freak occurrence offered up as a terrifying trend.