Like any study on campus sexual assault, there is always more to the story than what is reported in the media. The media, especially those committed to the narrative that sexual assault is rampant on college campuses, love to report “shocking” numbers and little else. They certainly don’t like to ask questions or apply even a modicum of critical thinking.
And the headlines and narrative surrounding the latest study are no different. “College Football, Parties and Rape” read the headline at Inside Higher Ed. The Huffington Post was even more dramatic, with an article titled “Reported Rapes Go Through The Roof On Game Day At Big Football Schools.”
The articles by these outlets and others offered little information from the study beyond the introduction, and raised no questions that weren’t already answered in the study itself.
This, of course, leads one to conclude that college football games lead to increased alcohol consumption and therefore more rapes. This is not what the survey found, however. The study focused on reported rapes, and we don’t have any ideaif those reports were substantiated or not. Maybe some of them led to arrests and convictions, maybe some of them were hoaxes. Perhaps most of them were ambiguous hookups where it couldn’t be determined one way or the other. We don’t know and the researchers don’t either — and that’s important.
In an email to the Washington Examiner, Jason Lindoone, of the study’s authors and an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University, wrote that he and his fellow researchers “have not at this point in time” looked into the outcomes of the reported rapes.
The researchers compare the increase in rape reports on or around college football game days to the increase in arrests involving alcohol-related incidents. This is also important, as we are now comparing actual arrests to mere accusations.
The report also looks at the number of rape reports on non-game days, but Lindo stressed that there was more to the study than such a simple comparison.
“If we were to make such a simple comparison, we would be conflating the effects of game days with the effects of Saturdays (the day that most games take place) and the effects of all the things associated with the fall semester (which coincides with the football season),” Lindo wrote. (Emphasis original.)
“We can address these specific issues by considering the degree to which reports of rape increase on non-game Saturdays relative to the rest of the same week and by examining the degree to which reports of rape are elevated during different times of the year,” he added. “The effects that we identify are over and above such day-of-week effects or time-of-year effects.”
Lindo also listed other ways he and his fellow researchers made sure they weren’t simply comparing game days to non-game days, including checking if similar spikes occur at other times of the year (they don’t) and concentrating the research on college-aged students (although the report found only one-third of the reported rapes were from this group).
That being said, the usual problems with campus sexual assault studies aren’t evident in this one. The study doesn’t rely on self-reported surveys, but rather numbers from the National Incident Based Reporting System, which are collected by the FBI. It is a voluntary program, however, so the reports aren’t perfect — but nothing ever is.
Here’s what the researchers found: Reports of rape increased on or around the days when a college football game took place. But the breakdown of who reported and who was accused doesn’t back up the prevailing narrative of campus sexual assault.
Just one-third of reports were from those aged 17-24, the usual age range for college students. The accused were “split fairly evenly” across multiple age groups including 17-20, 21-24, 25-28 and others.
Of the college-aged victims, 60 percent knew the accused. Other studies have found that number to be significantly higher.
The researchers note that their findings still indicate that incidence rates “are low.” The researchers suggest this is due to the many reasons people do not report rapes, such as a “fear of retaliation,” “uncertainty about whether the incident constituted a crime” or “uncertainty about the perpetrator’s intent.” This leads to the possibility that at least some of the reports may have been regretted hookups.
One possible conclusion not addressed by the researchers is that perhaps accusers feel more comfortable coming forward if the incident is linked to a football game, given negative attitudes toward athletes and tailgating events. Because this study looks at reported rapes, one cannot know whether rapes actually increase on game days or if people are more likely to report.
Lindo wrote to the Examiner that could be a possible conclusion, but suggested other factors would lead to decreased reporting.
“It could go in the direction that you describe; however, the increased likelihood that alcohol is involved could contribute to victims’ uncertainty in a manner that leads to reduced reporting,” Lindo wrote.
Another thing not spelled out in the report is the number of actual reports. The percentage increase of reporting during game days is included, but not the actual numbers. One table included in the report displays the baseline reporting numbers from the National Incident Based Reporting System, which amounts to less than 1 rape report per day.
A 58 percent increase among college-aged accusers sounds frightening, but when the baseline is 0.051 reports per day, the problem looks less like an “epidemic.” It’s also far from the “through the roof” claim used by Huffington Post.
Lindo wrote that the calculations were based off of data finding one reported rape every 12 Saturdays. Lindo also suggested his study implied that college football games accounted for 2-5 percent of rape reports to law enforcement among 17-24 years-olds at the studied schools in the fall semester. That’s a fraction of a fraction of reports.
Nevertheless, the researchers provide a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” based on their estimates to conclude that “football games cause between 253-770 additional rapes per year across the 128 schools participating in Division 1A [athletic division in the National Collegiate Athletic Association], depending on the degree to which one attributes the larger effect of home games to heightened partying or to changes in the number of potential victims and/or perpetrators in town or policing efforts.”
A “back-of-the-envelope calculation” is essentially a calculated guess, an informal calculation performed on scrap paper and far less accurate than using a calculator or statistical models. The researchers, despite including a complicated formula in their paper, relied on what amounts to a calculated guess to claim that football is devastating to college students.
They also suggested that these increased rapes (remember, they guessed that football increased the number of rapes, when they were actually studying reports, which may or may not be accurate), led to “an annual social cost” of between $68 million and $205 million. You’d have to buy their “back-of-the-envelope calculation” to believe that. And, of course, unscrupulous media reporters did.
It’s another reminder always to look beyond the headlines, especially when dealing with research papers that fit an already established media narrative.
Correction: An earlier version stated that one rape every 12 Saturdays amounted to “one rape every 84 days or so,” however, since only Saturdays were measured in this statistic, it is not accurate to say one rape every 84 days.
