Newlon and numerous other activists make the bold claim that one in every four college women is a victim of rape or attempted rape. This number is astonishing and no doubt eyebrow-raising. To put it in perspective, in the nation’s most violent city (Detroit), the total violent crime rate was 2.1 percent in 2012. That figure includes murder, rape, assault, and robbery. If the one in four figure shouted at feminist rallies is correct, the nation is willingly sending its daughters to places with a violent crime rate several times that of the most dangerous city in the country.
The number seems even more dubious when compared to
statistics put forth annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Bureau interviews a random sampling of nearly 150,000 Americans about their criminal victimization, and
in 2009 and 2010 they determined that the occurrence of rape of women was 0.23 percent and 0.21 percent, respectively.
So with the figure in mind, it is prudent to see where the one in four statistic comes from. In 1985, Ms. magazine published a study by Mary Koss in which she surveyed over 3,000 college females nationwide asking them ten questions about sexual violence.
When determining whether the female was a victim of rape, Koss did not explicitly ask if she had been raped; rather, Koss used her own criteria. From her survey, she determined that 15.4 percent had been raped and 12.1 percent had been victims of attempted rape.
However, the survey came with a curious caveat:
when directly asked if they had been raped, only 27 percent of the women whom Koss had determined were victims of rape answered in the affirmative. So of the highly publicized (and already exaggerated) one- in-four statistic, 73 percent of those women did not even believe they were raped, and an astonishing 35 percent had intercourse with the alleged rapist again.
The discrepancy arose from a question that asked, “have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?.”
While Koss determined that this was qualified as rape, the overwhelming majority of victims did not agree.
When held up to such scrutiny, Koss’s survey holds as much water as a sieve. If one looks at the actual numbers for sexual assault on college campuses, her results seem almost laughable.
Thanks to the Clery Act, universities in America make public all reported campus crimes. This allows anyone to look at every instance of reported crimes on the campus and, in particular, all incidents of sexual violence. I decided to take a look at
the reported violent sexual crimes for Brown, and fortunately for women but perhaps disappointing for feminists, the result came nowhere near Koss’s figures. For the past three years, the average number of reported forcible sex offenses (which range from groping of private parts to penetration) was 8.66. The number varied from as low as seven to as high as 10. With an estimated 3,141 female undergraduates,
0.28 percent are victims of reported sexual violence each year. This is inconsistent with the one in four statistic, but on par with the national average.
I wondered if Brown was unique in avoiding the campus rape pandemic, and perhaps Consent Day and SlutWalk had managed to temper our desire to rape on College Hill, so I consulted statistics for
Providence Collegeand the
University of Rhode Island. Their respective three-year averages were 0.08 percent and 0.18 percent. It seems that nowhere in Rhode Island are women raped as often as feminists maintain. So what is the problem with the myth of the campus rape pandemic? Even if women aren’t being violated as often as stated, what is the harm in raising awareness? Women are told they are going into college with aone in four chance of being raped, which is no doubt extremely terrifying. It makes the adjustment to college scarier than it needs to be, and it makes women fearful of any guy’s intentions. These absurd statistics make every man a potential rapist.
More dangerous, though, is that when these statistics came out, they frightened elected officials into giving universities vast authority in handling rape cases, thanks to Title IX and other documents like the recent “Dear Colleague” letter. This unreasonable amount of power bestowed on universities led to situations like the
2006 William McCormick case, in which Brown knowingly expelled a student for a rape that he did not commit.
