A team of researchers reported on Wednesday that a program in which first-year female college students were trained to avoid rape helped in lowering their risk of being sexually assaulted.

Researchers stated that sexual violence at college level has become a serious hazard. As per estimate on in five female students are raped. They also found that female college students tend to be at the highest risk during their first year on campus.

Seeing some highly publicized campus rapes, the White House in last spring issued some guidelines directing colleges to address sexual assault.

In the study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the first-year students at three Canadian campuses were made to attend sessions on assessing risk, learning self-defense and defining personal sexual boundaries.

They later surveyed a year after they completed the intervention. The risk of rape for 451 women randomly assigned to the program was about 5 %, as compared to 10 % among 442 women that were kept in a control group.

The control group women were only given brochures and a brief information session.

The study authors concluded that only 22 women need to take the program in order to prevent another rape in a single year.

Researchers found that the risk of attempted rape also lowered to 3.4% among women who received the training, as compared with 9.3 % among those who did not

Sarah E. Ullman, a professor of criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago said, "It's an important, rigorous study that shows that resistance and self-defense training needs to be part of college sexual assault prevention. This won't solve the problem, but it's an important piece that has been overlooked".

Experts praised the rail and called it as one of the largest and the most promising efforts in a field pocked by equivocal or dismal results.