My daughter came home dumbfounded after her first year at how many of her college classmates had not had any kind of comprehensive sex ed in high school. She was amazed at the basics that kids didn’t know. Our school district health program is not only sex ed but bystander training, training and role play about abusive and manipulative relationships, drug and alcohol education that is quite frank, and many more things. Of course it won’t happen, but I believe that this type of education could both reduce the likelihood that a person will be victimized and also reduce the likelihood that a person who is not a hard core predator will fall into a bad judgement or poor communication situation where they are initiating unwanted contact anywhere on the continuum.
Good heavens, PurpleTitan, I was asking a rhetorical question. Just because my younger daughter is petite and a bit introverted shouldn’t mean she is sentenced to a sequestered world.
So…18 percent reported incidents could be legally defined as rape…but only 4 percent of those incidents were reported to the police.
So, .18x.04=.0072 or .72%.
Somewhere between 18 percent and .72% is the problem.
I wouldn’t go with .72 percent. 
Where do you see that? That is not the wording my link has to the MIT survey. I just reread every word of the MIT survey and there is not a reference to “the use of force, physical threat”, etc". In fact, the survey specifically includes things like “telling lies” etc.
http://web.mit.edu/surveys/health/MITCommunityAttitudesonSexualAssault-Survey.pdf
This is what the survey actually says in the question right before it asks how they person accomplished the assault.
@ northwesty, Are you assuming that there are no rapes on women’s college campuses? If so, that’s a bad assumption. Moreover, at least if your D is hetereosexual, the odds are fairly high that she’s going to spend some time on male or co-ed college campuses. Indeed, she -gasp!!!–at least theoretically might go to a frat party and drink at one!
I would suggest BYU for your D.
I wish they would include additional simple questions on these surveys, like, “Did you report the incident? If not, why not?” with some choices. Also, “where did this incident take place? Your residence, outside, etc.” According to RAINN, most rapes occur in the victim’s residence. Also, " how would you describe the perpetrator? Acquaintance, boyfriend, stranger, fraternity man, etc." It would be so simple to do this I don’t understand why they don’t.
Actually, it may well be. These studies (let’s pretend we all agree the numbers are okay, since that’s what this subthread is going with as a starting point for discussion) simply give gross rates across the population—for subpopulations the rates may be higher or lower, and we have no way of knowing that from (at least most of) these studies.
I will say, though, that I live in the state with the highest rate of sexual assault of women in the country (yay, Alaska!), but if you look at the numbers more deeply, while the numbers for people like my daughters (performing well in school, white, highest socioeconomic quintile, living on the road system, and so on) are still too high, they’re at least an order of magnitude lower than the risk for many other groups. So can I say that the risk of sexual assault here applies to other kids but not my kids and be reasonable? Well, maybe not in those precise terms, but it’d certainly be reasonable to say that the risk is really pretty low for my kids, no matter what the rates for the whole population show.
I am basing it on the sexual assault survey report that MIT published at http://web.mit.edu/surveys/health/MIT-CASA-Survey-Summary.pdf… the one that lists the numbers we have been quoting . It states:
Note that the survey you quoted asks the following, so it is straightforward to see how MIT is deriving the forced and incapacitated results:
As someone who was faculty at BYU for a couple years, while the rate of sexual assault does appear to be very, very low at BYU, it is non-zero, particularly if off-campus cases are taken into consideration.
That said, BYU had a zero-tolerance policy for perpetrators of sexual violence long before it became fashionable in higher education, so there’s that, I suppose.
^^More importantly the drinking culture is very low at BYU.
As the parent of three, I think it is a mistake to assume your children will behave the way you did, or raised them to behave.
That said, all three of the women in my family were in sororities, went to fraternity parties and drank alcohol, and none of us was raped.
A child growing up in a home with a gun (whether lawfully owned or not) has a higher risk factor for dying of a gunshot wound then a child growing up in a home without a gun.
So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to assume that when I see the statistics on children being shot accidentally at home that they don’t apply to me and my family. However, for a police officer to think, “the kids being shot live in the homes of thugs and I am not a thug” would be fallacious reasoning. Children of police officers have been known to find a weapon and point it at a sibling not realizing that it’s loaded.
If your daughter plans to spend every weekend at delta delta delta “partying” and playing beer pong, her risk factor for a sexual assault on campus will be higher than a young woman whose work-study job has her operating the help desk at the library on Friday and Saturday evenings.
Hmm, I would agree that a woman who drinks alcohol has a higher risk of being the victim of incapacitated rape than a woman who never drinks alcohol. After that, I don’t think there are any reliable statistics to support your theory.
I wouldn’t want to send MY daughter to a place where SHE has a 1 in 8 chance of being raped (thinking of you, US Army). Risk, though, is not evenly distributed. If my non-drinking, non-partying D has a 1/8 chance then rape rates would have to be near universal, think Thai fishermen or Boko Haram.
As we know from Lisak’s studies, college rapists target individual females by opportunity, looking ideally for some combination of trusting, highly intoxicated and easily overpowered. I am more disturbed by the broadly complicit nature of their apologists, people in power who doubt and punish victims. Think about how they handle it when a military commander rapes one of his charges - the rapist is put in charge of both the investigation and the trial. Who approves of this? Pretty much the whole US.
We as responsible adults get to choose how we participate in this issue; you can silently ignore it, you can help reduce rapes, or you can help rapists persist using the usual mythology (they are lying, she was drunk and misremembers, she chose to do it at the time but now regrets it, she put herself in a bad situation, carrying that mattress is harassment …). Really, what other crime do we re-victimize to this extent?
Special thanks to CF and EK4 for doing the good work.
@Data10 I see that now, and I see the problem. I was reading the actual questionnaire which specifically include things like coercion etc. I made the mistake of assuming all the questions were included (which brings up another point: why ask a question if you aren’t going to include the results?). Anyway, my apologies.
I personally have 3 female friends that were raped at parties in their first two weeks on campus. It’s horrifying. Our high school actually hosted a “Rape Panel” for girls during our senior workshops on our last few days of school. Recommendations included: bringing your own cups to parties, buying mace or a swiss army knife for your keyring, or simply avoiding social events altogether.
Actually, it’s a major reason why I refuse to consider schools where more than 35 percent of students participate in Greek Life. I know that’s painting with very broad brushstrokes, but…it’s my safety, and I’m not about to take any chances. Those three girls I know? They were all at frat parties. No thanks.
Qwerty,
Did your friends report the rapes? What colleges did they attend?
Do colleges with no Greek system have fewer rapes than those that do? Or, does a larger Greek system correlate with more campus rapes? I haven’t seen any data on that.
Posting this with the @ in hopes you will respond to my questions in #557