In recent years South African universities have dominated headlines due to violent student protests, gender-based violence, and even murders.  There is a growing need for these institutions to improve safety on campus not only for students but for staff and security personnel as well.  This paper investigates the possible root causes of an unsafe campus environment.  With the use of primary data, the paper proves the correlation between students’ perceived level of safety on campus and aspects such as their gender, their knowledge of their institutions’ operating procedures and emergency protocols, the type of access control system used by their university as well as their feelings towards authority.  Using this data, recommendations for improving campus safety and security are made and a conceptual framework for enabling a proactive campus security environment is developed.  The framework can be used as a tool for further studies into proactive campus security.