It is probably highest for first semester freshwomen, before they figure out or learn from others what high risk situations to avoid.
The survey reports that the rate is highest for first semester freshman women, which is consonant with other surveys.
Why is the assumption that all the rapist are men? How many of the survey participants were including same sex sexual assaults or same sex rapes?
I know only men can be rapist.
It will be interesting to see what happens after the analysis of the surveys questions and definitions used is complete.
Here’s what the Department of Justice has to say:
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5176
You can find tons of articles disproving these statistics online.
Because the vast majority of all rapes are committed by men. Not all to women, but mostly by men.
Yes, rape of men by women is a problem and I wish that surveys included that.
I have not read this specific survey but in every survey I’ve ever seen, I’ve never seen language that said “Forced or coerced into sex by men” it’s always “forced or coerced into sex” (or similar language). Thus, it should be capturing rapes by women.
We don’t condition women to rape though. We condition men to rape. We condition women to passively accept advances and condition men to aggressively seek them out.
Side note: public health people have been screaming about this for years. However, our concerns are dismissed as not really “that big” of a problem… or a problem by the women themselves and “not really” a public health problem. Similar situation with guns.
I’m surprised that it’s so high even for colleges like Princeton and MIT. Did ad com make lots of mistakes in admitting these students? Let’s fire the ad com.
The study is at http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/05/20/carey_jah_proof.pdf . Some of the numbers from the study are below:
Pre-college – 28.0% reported attempted or completed
1st Semester – 11.4% reported attempted or completed
Academic Year – 15.3% reported attempted or completed
Summer – 7.9% reported attempted or completed
Age 14 Through End of Freshman Year – 37.1% reported attempted or completed
As high as these numbers are, I suspect it is underreported among the study participants, as I’d expect a good portion would not disclose everything in a survey.
A critique of the study:
"First let me point out that when I emailed the study’s author, Kate Carey, a Ph.D. at Brown University’s department of behavioral and social sciences, about the study’s limitations she acknowledged that it is, “Not nationally representative. Our sampling strategy did not allow for that.”
Beyond all that, the survey’s authors acknowledge at the end of the study that it suffers from limitations, including “reliance on self-report and sampling from a single campus.”
The survey’s questions in this regard (Dr. Carey provided the study, which was included in the June issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, and the survey questions to the Washington Examiner) seemed to elicit the desired finding of high rates of sexual assault."
I’m not saying there isn’t a problem. There is! But I wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable saying this particular study is the Holy Grail.
Every time a new study comes out about the incidence of rape on campus, someone trots out the Bureau of Justice numbers from the National Crime Victims Survey. They trot it out uncritically, without understanding and without question. They stuff the NCVS numbers in their ears and say, La la la I can’t hear you.
But when we have one study that shows numbers one or two orders of magnitude lower than all the other studies, we should wonder what is going on. Neither the people from the Bureau of Justice nor these researchers from Brown are idiots or incompetents. Neither of these studies are fraudulent. So what is going on?
It turns out, the Bureau of Justice also wondered why their numbers didn’t agree with widely reported numbers from other studies. They commissioned a large panel of scholars in the field to examine the situation. Those scholars wrote an entire book on the issue, Estimating the Incidence of Rape and Sexual Assault, Candace Kruttschnitt, William D. Kalsbeek, and Carol C. House, Editors, and you can read it online:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18605
Kruttschnitt et. al. concluded that the NVCS likely undercounted rape, for a number of reasons, including:
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The surveys are conducted orally, in front of other family members. People might not want to talk about their rapes in front of their families.
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Unlike other surveys, the NVCS surveys don’t ask about specific actions. For example, the NVCS might ask, “Were you raped in the last year?” where another survey would say, “Did someone have sex with you without your consent while you were unconscious? Did someone use force to make you have sex when you didn’t want to? Did someone put their sex organ in your mouth by force when you didn’t want them to? etc.” Survey respondents might not, in their minds, count the unconscious rape or the forced oral sex as rape, but they are rape and need to be counted. A good survey is specific and clear about what behaviors it is trying to measure.
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The NVCS is conducted over three years. The panel thought that some of the people most likely to be rape victims are also the most likely to drop out during the study, possibly skewing the results.
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The NVCS is a crime survey, and labelled as such. Rape victims who don’t want to label their rapes as crimes, for whatever reason, (even though rape is a crime), might not report them on a crime survey.
In September 2011, the Bureau of Justice made a competitive award to WESTAT to develop and test two different ways to collect self-report data on rape and sexual assault. Their results were supposed to be available in September of 2014, but I have not seen them released yet. I’m on the phone right now with WESTAT, trying to find out when to expect results.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bjs_amrsa_poster.pdf
What do the questions in this survey ask? Anyone know?
Some of the questions are mentioned in the Examiner link above:
"The survey asked four main questions with multiple follow ups. The awkwardly worded first question, which Carey said was not included in the final results, asked respondents “How many times has anyone overwhelmed you with arguments about sex or continual pressure for sex in order to…?” Reread that again. “Overwhelmed you with arguments”? This is an overly scholarly way to ask whether the person had been pressured into sex by words, not actions.
But the first part of the question is troubling as well: “How many times has anyone…” This is one of those loaded questions. A respondent is practically being told that this must have happened to them and the survey simply wants to know how many times it has happened.
The follow up questions break down the different types of physical activity the “overwhelming arguments” led to — fondling? Kissing? Intercourse? And more. A qualifier is added to the end of each of these questions clarifying that the respondent engaged in the physical activity “when you indicated that you didn’t want to.”
The next two questions follow the same pattern of asking “how many times” someone has forced a respondent into sex, whether by threat or physical force.
But the fourth question, the one that found the high incidence of “incapacitated rape,” breaks the pattern. It asks “How many times, when you were incapacitated (e.g., by drugs or alcohol) and unable to object or consent, has anyone…” but doesn’t add any kind of “when you didn’t want to” qualifier. This opens up the possibility that drunk but wanted sex was included in the survey (perhaps on purpose)."
All the studies rely on self-report, including the Bureau of Justice NVCS crime survey. That is not a way to distinguish this study from others.
This study reports a rape rate (attempted and completed) of 186 per thousand college women per year. The NCVS survey reports a rape rate of 3.5 per thousand college women per year. Sampling from a single campus does not explain that disparity unless you can offer a plausible reason why the rape rate at Syracuse is fifty times the rate at other colleges.
Yes. It is very difficult to create a unbiased and statistically relevant survey. For example - Person A says they weren’t raped, but a tester says “by definition oh yes you were” is somewhat meaningless information. It would be as if I were asked “Have you ever had an upper respiratory infection precipitating a trip to the doctor” and I answered “no I had a cold but I didn’t think it was serious enough to warrant a doctors appointment.” As a marketer it is very easy to manipulate data to say whatever you want to say. I’m saving my thoughts until the BOJ releases their data. It appears they are conducting 2 surveys in an attempt to tease out the differences between a criminal survey and a public health survey.
The wording of the questions seems to make a big difference, however.
There’s likely a big difference in the rate between when you include incidents when the woman is partially or fully incapacitated by alcohol (whether they would have given consent or not) and when you do not.
@bearpanther, @momofthreeboys, @PurpleTitan,
Now that you have explained away the results for incapacitated rape, let’s have your explanation for the 9% of the freshman women who say they were forcibly raped.
My mom heard that sometimes if a college girl says she’s a virgin, then she can become a specific target for rape. Don’t know if there’s any statistics to back that up, but that’s something she’s heard can happen, much to her horror.
i’m sorry but i just don’t buy it. i have a son…who has many friends who are also boys…who then know other boys…and i don’t believe that 20% of them are rapists. I mean, if it weren’t so tragic, I would laugh at this. And if the answer is “well, it’s not 20% of boys…it’s a few boys raping many girls…” well, I find that hard to believe as well.
Let’s at least realize that at this particular college, 9% of women came out of at least one sexual encounter during their freshman year believing that they had been physically forced to have sex they didn’t want. If you’re a parent of boys, you can dismiss this with La la la my son and his friends are not rapists. And you can laugh.
But if you’re a parent of a girl, you shouldn’t be laughing. You need to face up to the fact that your daughter might be part of the 1 in 10. What are you going to do, tell her she wasn’t really raped because all those boys are nice boys?
@SouthernHope, I’m not sure why it’s hard to imagine that there are guys who are essentially serial rapists. I certainly don’t know of any rapists (and unless I’m a really poor judge of character, I’d be really shocked if any of my friends are). Though I reckon that most guys don’t advertise that fact even if they are (even to other guys).
However, I’ve been on a trading floor where there were some guys who I am convinced would murder if they thought that they could get away with it and it would make them some money (long way of saying that there are psychopaths in the world).
I wasn’t trying to explain away any results. You can post a link just to put other information out there, can’t you?
I agree both surveys have issues. Some want to believe the 3.5, some want to believe the 186. Both have issues.