The Wildly Fallacious 1 in 5 Campus Rape Stat Isn't A Victimless Lie
Harm is done to those least able to defend themselves when funding and attention goes where it isn't truly needed -- like for all the rapes that aren't happening on campus compared with all the rapes that are happening to poor, inner-city women.
Reading the Federalist, I came upon a December 2014 story about the DOJ sexual assault stats released late last year. I've blogged about them before, but with all the furor about the supposed rape epidemic on campus -- to the point where feminists are starting to deem it fairness when men's due process rights are being removed -- I thought it was important to re-emphasize exactly how "epidemic" this epidemic is.
As The Federalist staff puts it, the report "officially puts to bed the bogus statistic that one in five women on college campuses are victims of sexual assault"
The full study, which was published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division within DOJ, found that rather than one in five female college students becoming victims of sexual assault, the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5). For non-students, the rate of sexual assault is 7.6 per 1,000 people....The higher rate of victimization among non-students is important due in large part to recent accusations that U.S. colleges and universities are hotbeds of so-called "rape culture," where sexual assault is endemic, and administrators and other students are happy to look the other way. The bogus "1 in 5″ statistic, which was the product of a highly suspect survey of only two universities and which paid respondents for their answers, has been repeatedly used as evidence of this pervasive rape culture on college campuses across the country.
Even more striking is that according to the BJS data, the likelihood of sexual assault has actually been trending downward across the board since 1997.
Per a public health paper I proofread for a friend years ago, the women most at risk for being raped are poor women and especially poor homeless women in the inner city.
Sorry, have you heard of any "Take Back The Night" marches for them?
There's a terrific passage in Christina Hoff Sommers' terrific book, "Who Stole Feminism," about where all the money and attention is going -- and the good it's doing:
Having heard about an outbreak of rape at Columbia University, Peter Hellman of New York magazine decided to do a story about it. To his surprise, he found that campus police logs showed no evidence of it whatsoever. Only two rapes were reported to the Columbia campus police in 1990, and in both cases, charges were dropped for lack of evidence. Hellman checked the figures at other campuses and found that in 1990 fewer than one thousand rapes were reported to campus security on college campuses in the entire country. That works out to fewer than one-half of one rape per campus. Yet despite the existence of a rape crisis center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital two blocks from Columbia University, campus feminists pressured the administration into installing an expensive rape crisis center inside the university. Peter Hellman describes a typical night at the center in February 1992: "On a recent Saturday night, a shift of three peer counselors sat in the Rape Crisis Center-one a backup to the other two. . . . Nobody called; nobody came. As if in a firehouse, the three women sat alertly and waited for disaster to strike. It was easy to forget these were the fading hours of the eve of Valentine's Day."
Oh, and interestingly, though there's some disputing of the statistics, it seems the people most likely to be raped are men in prison.
If feminists are truly for equality and equal protection, where are the marches to stop prison rape?
And no, contrary to the disgusting thinking, "Oh, they're in jail; they deserve what they get," we have a justice system that assigns punishment; prison rape should not be a part of it. We have a duty, when we put a person behind bars, to see they are only serving the sentence handed down by the judge; that they are not being sexually tortured by their fellow prisoners.
"... campus feminists pressured the administration into installing an expensive rape crisis center inside the university ..."
Probably done at no cost to college either through an increase in student fees or from tax dollars. Win/Win for them since it shows how "sensitive" they are to the student's "Needs".
Bob in Texas at July 9, 2015 6:18 AM
Lowering the drinking age would do wonders for combating the campus "rape" epidemic. Just saying.
Janet C at July 9, 2015 8:24 AM
One has to wonder, given how often the 1 in 3 or 4 or 5 lie has been debunked, whether or not those who continue to spout it dont also sacrifice animals to the ghost of Joseph Goebbels.
lujlp at July 9, 2015 1:33 PM
But the victims are all male, which is pretty much the same as no victims at all.
dee nile at July 10, 2015 2:47 PM
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