In a January 2014 report titled “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action” (which led to the creation of the Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault headed by Biden), the White House Council on Women and Girls made the following two statements:
1. Sexual assault is a particular problem on college campuses:1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted while in college.
2. Reporting rates for campus sexual assault are also very low: on average only 12% of student victims report the assault to law enforcement.
But there’s a big problem here. Taken together, those two claims above from the White House, if both are accurate, mean that nowhere near 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college. As I reported in January on CD after the release of the White House’s “renewed call to action” report:
The problem is that the two sets of numbers the White House uses don’t work together. If you look at virtually any university in America and take the number of reported sexual assaults, and use that number in conjunction with the White House’s under-reporting percentage, you don’t get one-in-five. Nowhere near. Do the math yourself.
So let’s do some math using actual crime statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the four years from 2009-2012 (summarized in the table above) and the White House’s under-reporting assumption of 12%. Over that four year period, there were 137 reports of sexual assault on the Madison campus, in university residence halls, on nearby non-campus property, and on public property adjacent to campus. We’ll assume that 100% of the sexual assaults victims were female. Using the White House claim that only 12% of sexual assaults get reported, there would have been slightly more than 1,000 unreported sexual assaults at UW during that period, bringing the total number of sexual assaults (reported + unreported) to 1,141 (see table).
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a student body of 43,275 students, of which 51.6% are female. Dividing the 1,141 sexual assaults over a four-year period by the 22,329 UW female students would mean that only 5.1% UW women (or about 1 in 20) would be sexually assaulted while in college. Certainly that’s still too high, but nowhere close to the White House claim of one in five female students being assaulted while in college.
An analysis of crime data from the University of Michigan shows a similar 1-in-18.5 chance (5.4%) of a female student being a victim of sexual assault during four years in Ann Arbor. At the University of California-Berkeley, crime data suggest that the chances over four years of a female student being sexually assaulted are only 3.1%, or one in 32 women. Do the math yourself (and share with me if possible) with crime statistics from any other college campus, along with the White House under-reporting assumption of 12%, and I’m confident that there’s no college campus in America where anywhere near 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college.
Bottom Line: To paraphrase my AEI colleague Christina Sommers, victims of sexual assault are best served by the truth. Team Obama asked for a “renewed call to action” in its January 2014 report on rape and sexual assault. Just as important, I think we need a “renewed call” for the White House to stop spreading wildly exaggerated and false information about important issues like campus sexual assault. I think it’s time to call upon Washington Post Fact-Checker Glenn Kessler, and ask him to investigate. I’ll forward this post to him.
Related: In her latest “Factual Feminist” video below, Christina Sommers debunks the frequently reported CDC claim that 1-in-5 US women will be a victim of rape in their lifetime, a figure that is wildly inconsistent with Department of Justice crime statistics. The CDC’s exaggerated rape numbers get in the way of genuine solutions to the problem, and calls for accurate data and real solutions to help end the scourge of sexual violence.
“Unfortunately, it’s another White House effort with good intentions – to help women – but is a campaign that is based on inaccurate, misleading and false data about the frequency of campus sexual assaults.”
It is NOT an “effort with good intentions.” It’s a deliberate, political LIE. More of the “war on women” nonsense to get votes.
Again, they’re not well-intentioned people. They’re diabolical trash. Like all marxists throughout history.
That is correct.
The problem is, this IS effective at buying women’s votes. America is now at the point that no election will ever again have any dominant theme other than buying women’s votes with tired old lies (‘pay gap’, ‘rape culture’, ‘lean-in’).
This is why democracy has a life-cycle, after which it devolves into a feminist police state.
Dividing the 1,141 sexual assaults over a four-year period by the 22,329 UW female students would mean that only 5.1% UW women (or about 1 in 20) would be sexually assaulted while in college. Certainly that’s still too high, but nowhere close to the White House claim of one in five female students being assaulted while in college.
Makes me wonder if someone didn’t transpose the numbers when writing the speech
Transpose? No, it is simply a lie. And the former news media will ignore it.
While I’m sure some sexual assaults go unreported, the notion that 90% of them go unreported is simply unbelievable.
There are some feminists who believe all sex with males is rape. Who knows how the numbers are contorted. I would not be surprised if most of the 90% didn’t even realize they were raped.
well, it depends upon how ridiculous a standard one uses.
my freshman year they changed the “sexual assault policy” at the university to specifically state that anyone who had been drinking was unable to give consent.
now, i’m not sure how everyone else’s college years went, but based on what i saw, this made a sizable portion of intercourse rape, often mutual rape. you both have a few beers, and opps, everyone got sexually assaulted, had no idea, and mistakenly thought they were having a good time.
if you twist the definitions enough, you can get to damn near any outlandish stats you like.
The report itself indicates why the contradiction exists: each statistic is from a different report (both from 2007, incidentally).
The “1 in 5” stat was based on “data [collected] using a web-based survey from undergraduate students (5,466 women and 1,375 men) at two large, public universities.”
The “only 12% report” figure came from interviewing “5,000 U.S. women aged 18-86. Of these, 3,001 comprised a national sample representing all U.S. women
and 2,000 comprised a national sample representing women currently attending U.S. colleges
and universities.” (Incidentally, the study says “only 16% of all rapes were reported to law enforcement.”)
Looking over the statistics in these reports, you see some really unbelievable numbers. From the 2007 study (“only 12%”):
“During the past year alone, over 1 million women in the U.S. have been raped: over 800,000 who have been forcibly raped, nearly 200,000 who have experienced drug-facilitated rape, and about 300,000 who have experienced incapacitated rape.”
Wikipedia (sorry, don’t have time to track down anything more official) suggests that 2006 had 94,472 and 2007 had 92,999. That matches the 12% reporting, but good gravy that’s a huge difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Rape_statistics_by_country
The rape question could have been quite leading. Having sex with your boyfriend even though you really didn’t want at the time but you didn’t object is frequently defined as rape by the feminist crowd. If they define rape that way in the interview – quite a few women would have to say they were raped when they didn’t think so before.
It is the Lincoln – if you call a dogs tail a leg – how many legs does a dog have conundrum. (As a computer scientist I would say 5 because we do stuff lime that all the time -,others would say 4 using the rose by any other name would still smell as sweet principal.
Note that the one in five statistic is over a lifetime, if true, and not what is claimed to be during college.
Using the same stats as the White House, from the Department of Justice for 2012, there were 346,830 rape/sexual assaults out of an over age eighteen female population of 120,000,00. Of course not all assaults are on females.
The White House is assuming that all assaults are women, and that the total female population over eighteen is in college during the very same four year period. Even then, the chance of sexual assault is ~1 in 100(4×346,830/120,000,000).
I don’t discount any assault on even one female, but I do the statistical contortions of the White House Task Force.
Here is a quote from the L.A. Times article that Mark has linked to:
“Three senior White House officials, who briefed the media in advance of the announcement, said that 1 in 5 women is sexually assaulted while in college, usually in the first two years and usually by someone she knows.”
This “while in college” quote has been changed from “in their lifetimes”.
Here is the original quote, before it was contorted for useful political fodder, from the first line after the word “Introduction”, in the White House report “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action”, January 2014(p.7):
“The numbers alone are stunning: nearly 1 in 5 women – or almost 22 million – have been
raped in their lifetimes.”
Again, I don’t condone or discount assault on anyone.