The claim that one in five women will be raped during their time in college was all the rage this year — until it became indefensible. Now, suddenly, statistics don’t matter.
Take this Huffington Post article from last week, in which author Tyler Kingkade tried his darndest to let everyone know that they shouldn’t take so seriously the Bureau of Justice Statistics report that closer to one in 41 women are raped during college.
Kingkade brings up a number of issues in the BJS study, including the fact that the study didn’t ask respondents whether they have ever had sex while drunk. But what Kingkade fails to note about the other studies, which show one in five women being raped in college, is that those studies had low response rates compared to the BJS study. The author of one of those studies, the Campus Sexual Assault study, admitted that the findings were not representative of the population at large, since the study only sampled students from two schools. The National Institute of Justice, which conducted the CSA study, also cautioned that “researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey.”
Indeed, the surveys that ask questions lumping “drunk” and “passed out” into the same question found an astounding number of women had been sexually assaulted — after researchers interpreted the responses, of course. But being “drunk” is subjective, while “passed out” is not.
None of these caveats were mentioned by Kingkade.
Instead, Kingkade found one “expert” to criticize the BJS study – the president of a group called One in Four, an organization founded on the belief that an astoundingly high number of college women are sexually assaulted. His criticisms of the BJS study also apply to the studies he prefers, like the studies being vulnerable because of how people respond, but he doesn’t admit that to Kingkade.
Following this attempt to lend credibility to the studies showing a higher rate of sexual assault, Kingkade assures readers that statistics don’t matter and the point is campus sexual assault needs to be addressed.
I would say the statistics do matter because if the belief is that 20 percent of college women are being raped or sexually assaulted — a rate similar to Congo — and a draconian solution is presented in response of that number — then the solution is an overreaction.
Which is exactly what is happening. Because accusers say their cases weren’t handled properly (i.e., they didn’t get the outcome they wanted), then the system was flawed. And to correct that problem, the solution was to ignore due process rights for accused students and make it much easier to ruin their lives based on a single accusation — an accusation impossible to disprove under new policies.
