The Senate is moving closer to creating legislation to require stronger responses to sexual assault on college campuses, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

On Wednesday four senators presented a bill to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that would require colleges to provide confidential advisers to help students report sexual violence. The bill would also require campus climate surveys on sexual assault and would create new penalties for institutions that don’t follow federal safety and discrimination laws.

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., one of the co-sponsors of the bill, said during the hearing that a uniform survey among all colleges and universities would allow prospective students and the public in general to compare schools’ safety.

“Congress cannot legislate away sexual assault,” he said adding that passing this legislation would be “a step in the right direction toward combating this heinous crime.”

Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. said the bill has 12 Republican and 21 Democrat co-sponsors so far, calling it “a bipartisan coalition we don’t see every day in the U.S. Senate.”

A June study by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in five college women said they had been sexually assaulted during the past four years.

GW conducted a campus climate survey about sexual assault last year and released the results this February finding that about 80 percent of students who completed the survey did not know how to contact GW’s Title IX Office. Since then, Title IX coordinator Rory Muhammad called for increased sexual violence response and prevention training, which started with programming at this summer’s Colonial Inauguration.