The systemic failure of colleges and universities across the U.S. to accurately report sexual assaults on campus - and hold offenders accountable - demands a comprehensive approach to changing a culture of complacency.

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Virginia's Mark Warner, has pushed a reasonable proposal that would mandate anonymous surveys on campuses and require that the results of those surveys be available to the public.

It also would increase financial penalties for violations of federal campus safety rules and make clear that students reporting sexual assaults couldn't be punished for underage drinking if they were under 21 and had consumed alcohol prior to becoming victims.

Those measures offer a prudent path forward in the effort to treat sexual assault as the serious crime that it is. Congress should approve the proposal and send it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

While that plan is discussed in Washington, however, Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Attorney General Mark Herring have announced Virginia will push forward simultaneously and on its own.

The governor has assembled a task force led by Herring and including cabinet secretaries and officials from higher education, law enforcement, health services and other agencies. It is charged with researching and recommending best practices for campus officials responding to reports of sexual assault, policies related to campus investigations and the development of a "model memorandum of understanding that will delineate respective responsibilities for investigations, sharing of information and training."

Strengthening relationships between college administrators and local law enforcement agencies is a critical component in any plan for changing campus attitudes about sexual violence. Local police and prosecutors have the training and expertise to investigate allegations, and they are less encumbered by institutional loyalties that can influence school officials' handling of cases.

That's essential, given that federal studies estimate that one out of five college women is the victim of a sexual assault or attempted sexual assault. Those findings suggest a shameful double standard in the way society views such violence when it occurs on the property of institutions of higher education compared to the rest of the country.

A report released this summer by Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat and former prosecutor, showed more than 40 percent of national universities and colleges didn't investigate any sexual assault cases, even though many of those schools had notified the U.S. Department of Education - as required by federal law - of reported assaults on campus.

Residents in cities and counties across the nation would be infuriated if local authorities demonstrated a similar inability to pursue justice.

The transient nature of the population on campuses has helped mask school administrators' failures for too long, and a lack of seriousness about effective training, investigations and consequences has undermined public trust in colleges' abilities to change on their own.

The effort under way in the commonwealth paves the way for substantive changes in policy, perception and practice on and off college campuses. It provides, in other words, the basis for system-wide reform and assigns a sense of seriousness and priority status to an issue that demands both.