Another campus survey purports to find that “sexual assault” is a massive problem on college campuses. This one comes from the University of Michigan, and it found that 22.5 percent of undergraduate women were sexually assaulted — at least, that’s how the “rape culture” alarmists in the media framed the results.
But that isn’t what the survey found. The survey found that 22.5 percent of undergraduate women said they experienced some form of “nonconsensual sexual behavior,” which included everything from kissing to penetration. The surveyors then labeled those incidences as sexual assault, even though many would probably not fit the criminal definition of sexual assault. This means that the alarmist headline number — 1 in 5 — likely includes many students who don’t view themselves as victims and don’t believe they were sexually assaulted.
This is a statistic derived from surveyors who seem predisposed to believe that 1 in 5 women have been sexually assaulted and who then set about proving their preconceived narrative.
This is pretty much confirmed by a later survey question, one that will most likely be omitted or downplayed in the attention-grabbing reports on the survey. Large percentages of respondents said that the reason they didn’t report their experiences as sexual assault was that they themselves didn’t view it as such. About 39 percent of respondents (the largest response rate) listed “other” as their reason for not reporting. Fifty-five percent of those respondents gave some version of the incident not being serious enough to report (i.e., not being a “big deal”). Yet these same respondents are labeled as victims by the surveyors.
Thirty-four percent didn’t respond because they “did not want to get the person who did it in trouble.” This indicates that at least some of the respondents may have thought the person was a jerk, but not a criminal. It’s another nuance that is often left out of discussions of campus sexual assault.
The Washington Post used a similar methodology in their recent survey purporting to find similar results. One of the researchers of the Post’s survey acknowledged that the questions were worded in such a way to get “dramatically” higher results.
In a recent article for Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown described this practice as a “statistical sleight-of-hand,” and says these kinds of trumped up numbers result in flawed responses.
“A college where unknown assailants were preying on students via violence and force would approach the issue differently than one where most campus rapes were perpetuated [sic] by acquaintances. It’s not controversial that the theoretical rapist lurking in the bushes and the rapist sitting across the dining-hall table will require different approaches in order to thwart,” Nolan Brown wrote. “So why is it so supposedly uncouth to dare address different degrees of unwanted sexual experience?”
And pretending there are more victims than there actually are won’t solve the problem, but it will create a whole new one: Campus witch hunts.
“It seems as much as anything, we’ve got an epidemic of young people who don’t feel comfortable saying no,” Nolan Brown concluded. “But none of these solutions are furthered by pretending that these sorts of situations are what people are, or should be, addressing when they’re talking about campus rape. Lumping these people into the category of ‘sexual assault victims’ may help make a point, but it doesn’t help people, who require solutions tailored to actual realities and not the blurry-edged propaganda versions of them.”
Indeed, replicating the same flawed study over and over again in an attempt to make people believe a problem requires a draconian solution doesn’t help actual victims. But it does help in expanding the victim class.
