Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., one of the most prominent lawmakers working to curb campus sexual assault, has removed from her website the debunked claim that one in five women will be sexually assaulted while in college, according to Politico.
Using the tracking website ChangeDetection.com, Politico’s Caitlin Emma found that a sentence claiming that incredibly high rate of sexual assault had been deleted from Gillibrand’s website page about her bill, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act. The change was first detected by Inside Higher Ed reporter Michael Stratford.
Gillibrand spokesman Glen Caplin wouldn’t tell Politico why the statistic had been removed, but condemned those who disputed the statistic.
“There are some who attack this statistic to claim that sexual assault on college campuses is not a problem,” Caplin said. “They need to get their head out of the sand. The problem is real and it is pervasive. Without this distraction, their argument has no merit.”
But of course, part of the point of using the real numbers — 2.4 percent of college women will be assaulted over four years — is that the old, incorrect ones suggest a pandemic of campus rape, which is in turn cited in order to justify draconian measures that destroy due process for the accused and make punishments of innocent students more likely.
The use of scientifically defensible statistics makes possible a rational discussion that acknowledges the crime in its proper context and seeks a solution in which accused students are given some kind of due process rights.
The change to Gillibrand’s website appears to have occurred on Dec. 17, about a week after a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the actual rate of women experiencing sexual assaults while in college was closer to one in 41, not one in five.
Gillibrand’s website does still claim that college women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-college women — a claim that was also debunked by the BJS report. One of the authors of that report, Callie Marie Rennison, published an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday discussing her finding that disadvantaged women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted than women who have attended college.
