Researchers are trying to accomplish the impossible — to determine the “true” number of campus rapes and sexual assaults simply by surveying students. On the one hand, I sympathize: The student responses themselves can be nonsensical and difficult to reconcile with the real world. On the other hand, researchers do themselves no favors by asking terrible questions, while publicists and the press compound the mess by overhyping the results.
A new campus-rape survey released by the Association of American Universities on Monday suffers from all of these maladies. Called a “massive survey,” it compiled responses from 150,072 students at 27 universities, and it was immediately trumpeted as another data point in favor of the untenable thesis that American coeds face a rape threat matched only by women in conflict zones in the Third World. The New York Times headline was simple and stark: “1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus.” A staggering 49 percent of female college students said they experienced sexual harassment. Perhaps the most disturbing number was the 11 percent of female undergraduates who reported “they had experienced incidents of penetration or attempted penetration, half of them saying it happened by force.”
Yet each one of these assertions is deeply problematic. First, the New York Times claim that “1 in 4” women experience “sexual assault” is an outright distortion of the survey’s results. The survey measured behavior from “sexual penetration” to “sexual touching,” which included conduct that most assuredly did not meet the legal definition of “sexual assault.”
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Second, even for the most disturbing finding, that 11 percent of women reported incidents of “penetration or attempted penetration by force or incapacitation,” the report contained this bizarre explanation for low reporting rates:
When asked why the incident was not reported, the dominant reason was it was not considered serious enough. Even for penetration involving physical force, over half (58.6%) of students gave this reason.
In other words, students at some of the nation’s most elite universities said that their own experience of sexual penetration without their consent wasn’t “serious enough” to report. These students are certainly intelligent and mature enough to understand what rape is, and the idea that an actual rape isn’t “serious” is simply bizarre. It’s far more plausible to conclude that these students are speaking of conduct — perhaps a drunken hookup — that wasn’t actually a felony.
#share#Third, the sexual-harassment number is pure fiction. The report included within the definition of harassment things like “sexual remarks,” “jokes or stories,” “inappropriate or offensive comments about your or someone else’s body,” and “continued to ask you to go out, get dinner, have drinks or have sex even though you said, ‘No.’” Given examples that broad, I’m surprised the reported rate was only 49 percent. In reality, according to the Supreme Court, true “hostile environment” sexual harassment on campus exists only when the unwelcome speech or conduct is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.” In other words, mere “offensiveness” can’t constitute harassment.
Finally, the low response rate raises eyebrows. Although the mainstream media called it “massive,” only about 19 percent of students provided a response. As the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow highlighted, other surveys have enjoyed much higher response rates. The bottom line is that even the most well-intentioned researchers working with the most well-crafted surveys face an extraordinarily difficult task: determining the “true” rate of alleged crimes in the absence of any definitive adjudication, much less detailed allegations.
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In the rest of the United States, we generally determine crime rates through the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Why are these measurements insufficient for administrators? Data from the NCVS show that non-students face a higher rate of rape and sexual assault than students do, and a significantly lower rate of sexual assault (6.1 per 1,000) than recorded in the academic surveys. Shouldn’t campus leaders be trumpeting colleges as relatively safe spaces for young women?
But the narrative trumps all, and the narrative is that a predatory class of males is preying on vulnerable college students, and that those predatory males can’t be stopped without a massive sex-assault bureaucracy, wholesale violations of constitutional rights, and suppression of critical speech. Flawed surveys like the AAU’s help build that bureaucracy and advance the narrative. So the “crisis” continues, with truth as a casualty.