A New Study on campus rape and the one in five number

I’d put her on the next flight @northwesty.

Actually, now that the federal government has made it clear they’re getting serious about a campus culture which ignores sexual assault reporting (or regularly making it incredibly difficult to bring sexual assault charges in-house) being a violation of Title IX, many universities have set up such systems—not generally via text message, but something equally simple—and many, many more are in the process of rapidly doing so, with the reports going directly to the office of the Dean of Students (or equivalent).

@sahar1811 While we teach our sons ( and daughters) not to commit (pick your criminal activity), some of us also teach them the different between what we/they WISH the world was like and what it IS like.

Hey, don’t leave your wallet, laptop, credit care on the library table unattended…stealing is wrong…but it happens and YOU can make it more difficult for someone to violate you.

Hey, don’t park your car and leave it unlocked with the keys in the ignition…auto theft is wrong…but it happens and you will be severely inconvenienced …so just lock the thing and take the keys.

Hey, don’t leave your purse in the shopping cart and wander away … it’s wrong for someone to take it…but it happens and again, you will be the one stuck with the problem.

Hey…if the environment around you suggest strongly (and that’s the argument on this thread) that you are at a high risk of being personally violated…please use the intelligence, tenacity and skills which allowed you to be accepted to this institution of higher learning and inform yourself as to how to mitigate your risk.

Telling my D that engaging in certain behaviors, dress modes and entering certain areas and situation places her at an increased risk and that the wise CHOICE to not do so does not make the potential criminal activity any less criminal…it just makes her safer.

@TV4caster wrote (numbers reformatted to save whitespace):

No, that’s not right—you’re assuming that if someone was raped forcibly before college, that means that that person is automatically immune to being raped while incapacitated pre-college, or in any way during freshman year. That’s not the way these things work, and the reason you can’t simply add up the percentages for each type to get a total—one individual can be victimized in more than one way and at different times.

And if I told you that there’s a 1 in 8 chance of your kid getting Ebola in the next year if they go work at a particular hospital or clinic, what would you do?

if your argument is that people are good at assessing risk and responding to it, you lose from the start, @northwesty. Remember the panic about that nurse in New Jersey and then Vermont, who didn’t have Ebola or any signs of it, and who had the temerity to go for a bike ride? People were in a panic. Meanwhile many people aren’t even doing obvious risk - reduction like getting flu shots. People are TERRIBLE at risk evaluation.

In another thread, dstark gave the example of a medical procedure he was advised to have that carried a 1 in 100 risk of immediate death. He got a second opinion, but other posters said they’d go ahead without fear ( which is insanity). People just don’t understand how risk works.

@dfbdfb I understand that, but how else are we to interpret the chances if we don’t do it that way? Maybe the real odds are a mere fraction of what was reported (for a given individual) because the same 10 women had all those categories happen to them numerous times. Is that theoretically possible?

Fang – just answer the question.

I doubt you would let your kid work in a place with a 1 in 8 risk of getting Ebola.

I’m sure you would buy a lottery ticket if you had a 1 in 8 chance of winning.

1 in 8 is a big probability.

But no big deal to let your daughter attend a co-ed college where the rape risk is 1 in 8? Absurd.

Where did you get that statistic?

The vast majority of murders in NYC involve domestic abuse and drug dealing. If you don’t have an abusive boyfriend or family member and don’t buy drugs, you’re pretty darn safe here. If you take the extra step of staying out of the most poverty-stricken, high crime areas, you’re even safer.

@northwesty, being raped isn’t the equivalent of dying. At least in my book. Also note that most of them happen when the victim is incapacitated (usually by alcohol). How much you drink is something you can control.

Young women who do not drink to the point of incapacitation face less of a risk of being raped than those who do. Women who order a diet coke- and drink it from the can- at a bar, will face less of a risk of being slipped a drug into their drink than those who order mixed drinks. Women who don’t attend frat parties, keggers, or tail gate parties, and likely don’t belong to sororities (although i don’t know if I’ve seen those statistics broken out) face less of a risk of being raped.

Etc.

The issue to me isn’t the raw statistics- it’s the denial of women and their parents about why certain activities increase the risk factor.

I’m not blaming the victim. The rapist is the person who takes advantage of someone’s inebriation. But getting drunk will increase a woman’s exposure to pathological behavior by other people.

Lauren Spierer from Indiana U? The person who murdered her is at fault. But walking barefoot and drunk down a street alone at 3 am makes her more of a target than a woman walking home from the library at 9 pm with a campus escort.

So this 1 in 8, 1 in 12- whatever. Teach your kids how to protect themselves. And that’s teaching your sons not to get behind the wheel when they are drunk, no means no, etc.

But don’t pretend that the risk of a sexual attack is evenly spread across the entire campus population, and evenly spread between every single activity that takes place on campus.

TV4caster, I don’t want to respond every time a poster gets the numbers wrong.

@Northwesty, my daughter got a brain tumor. The odds of gettng that brain tumor is about 3,000,000 to 1 per year.
Those odds are too high. :wink:

Dfbdfb, I teased you earlier but you know I love your posts. :slight_smile:

Women in sororities have a bigger chance of being raped, on average-- but it might just be that women in sororities on average binge drink more, and binge drinkers are at a higher risk for rape. I’ve not seen statistics that show a higher rate of rape for sorority women, keeping alcohol use constant.

The wording of the MIT survey is, “Experience of unwanted sexual behaviors while at MIT, involving use of force, physical threat, or incapacitation” … “sexual penetration.”

The wording of the Princeton survey is, “A man put his penis into my vagina, or someone inserted fingers or objects without my consent

They are not equivalent wording. One requires force/incapacitation, and the other does not. One clearly includes inserting fingers, and the other does not. That said, there may very well be a significant difference between rate of incident at MIT and Princeton. I wouldn’t expect all colleges and all sample groups to have the same rate of incident.

I wouldn’t send my (hypothetical) daughter to a college where she had a 1 in 8 chance of being raped as a freshman, but if this imaginary child were anything like her real parents and brother, she wouldn’t have a 1 in 8 chance of being raped as a freshman.

Not all women are like her “real” parents and brother: one of my daughters is tough, and the other isn’t. Should I send the younger to an all girls school or expect a safe environment at a co-ed school?

Only you can make that decision about your second D but I think very important points are being made. My parents let me roam the world prior to age 21 but kept my sibling at home at a CC for two years because they felt she was immature, lacking in street smarts and not ready to be dropped onto a Big 10 campus despite graduating at the tippy top of her high school class. Brain smarts don’t equal street smarts and street smarts can trump brain smarts in social situations. I said earlier I thought the numbers weren’t relevant and i still do believe that, not because rape doesn’t occur, but because there are lifestyle choices and beliefs that render the numbers impossible to extrapolate to “all people.” My guess is the comment about multiple offenses and females is true. We know that the concept applies to males. We know that alcohol is a huge risk trigger for women and men so I still contend that the wake-up call is not even that rapes, cloudy consensual sex, coercion, aggressive sexual behavior happens on college campuses, some of it criminal and probably much of it not criminal if you believe the high numbers, but it’s not going to be resolved until the drinking is addressed with consequences applied firmly and consistently to all students male and female.

“I wouldn’t send my (hypothetical) daughter to a college where she had a 1 in 8 chance of being raped as a freshman.”

Ding ding ding ding!! I agree. Every parent probably agrees. Which is my point.

“But if this imaginary child were anything like her real parents and brother, she wouldn’t have a 1 in 8 chance of being raped as a freshman.”

Right. You’d be OK sending your daughter off to college because you don’t believe your kid is subject to that high level of risk.

But saying that the risk applies to all those OTHER kids but not MY kid isn’t very reasonable. What’s so special about the Fang kids as compared to Stark’s kids or my kids? How exactly do you know that your kid is going to be the low risk case when they go away to college? Wouldn’t most/all parents think that before their kids go away?

So I think that what you are really saying is that you don’t believe the risk is nearly that high for your kids. Or for the other kids.

@mamalion, if she is amendable to an all-girls school, that may be a good idea.

A big question with the younger one is “will she drink to excess?”

They don’t drink, and they don’t go to parties with drinking. And they never dated in high school. At least, my daughter is imaginary, so I’m just hypothesizing that she’s like me when I went to college. My son is real, and he still never socializes in places where there are women, though he is straight. I’ve given up on grandchildren.

Well you think wrong, then. I know perfectly well that the Fang family is an outlier in this, as in so many things. The risk for other women students would be dramatically less if they didn’t drink to a stupor, but many of them do so weekly or even more often. And it would also be dramatically less if they never dated.