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

Parents Forum
561

We seriously took into account the rape issue in deciding where to send our daughter to school. She ended up getting an almost free ride to a state school, where we just learned about a horrible frat rape. I did call the school and asked what they were going to do to address the issue, and wasn’t satisfied with what I heard, so we crossed that school off the list. I then reached out to the other accepted colleges, to see what types of prevention and training the school was delivering to students. I spoke with several deans and was surprised at how behind many schools were on this issue. many had no women’s centers, no process to report sexual violence, no intervention process. in the end, We chose a school that has bystander training as part of their freshman orientation. It was a critical part of the decision.

I think that if we raise our voices and ask the schools what they are specifically doing to prevent violence to women, and let them know that how they handle this issue will be factored into our decision, things will change even quicker.

562

Transitmom,
What are the rape statistics at the college your D attends?

563

Thanks @transitmom! Our decision is made but I googled the university and rape prevention and immediately got to lots of information about statistics, freshman orientation programs, definitions, RA training, peer training and all kinds of things. In addition to descriptions of lots of programs and workshops, these data and definitions were provided:

"For most students, the college experience offers a unique opportunity for personal growth, intellectual stimulation, excitement, and fun. It is time to think critically about oneself and to prepare for the future.

As with most worthwhile endeavors, however, the college experience may also present hidden risks. Studies have shown that college students are most at risk of becoming involved in a sexually abusive situation. One in four women will experience rape or attempted rape during her college years (Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Justice. 2000). Many more will experience some form of unwanted sexual contact or verbal harassment. College men also experience sexual assault, albeit in smaller numbers. Strangers perpetrate only 20 percent of all reported rapes. The rest, 80 percent, are committed by someone the victim knows, perhaps a date, friend, or classmate.

__________ is committed to creating a safe environment for all and is not tolerant of sexual violence, domestic violence, dating violence or stalking. Various faculty, staff, and students are engaged in preventative measures: questioning why sexual violence is glamorized in our culture, challenging all too prevalent victim blaming, and discussing non-violent constructs of masculinity. In conjunction, we offer a variety of programs and services for individuals in the wake of sexual violence. The Advocacy Initiative trains volunteers on how to be a first responder (Click here for more information about the program or to locate an advocate). Take Back the Night gathers over 600 campus and community members for a powerful evening of social action. RADS (Rape Aggression Defense System) offers self-defense techniques to women. Counselors provide crisis support including information regarding options for a victim. For more information, contact the University Counseling Center or the Women’s Resource Center.
All incoming first year students participate in a program, “Think About It” which addresses the intersection of sexual violence and alcohol use."

"Sexual Assault is sexual intercourse or attempted intercourse that is perpetrated against the will of another; or not forcibly or against the person’s will where the victim is incapable of giving consent because of his/her temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity (or because of his/her youth). The definition applies regardless of whether the assailant is a stranger or an acquaintance. Examples would include, but are not limited to, forced insertion, oral copulation, and rape by foreign object, or sodomy. Violations of sexual assault will subject a student to suspension, dismissal and criminal charges.

Sexual Battery as defined in the ____________ Student Handbook is the unwanted touching of an intimate part of another person, such as a sexual organ, buttocks, or breast. Violations of sexual battery may subject a student to penalties up to and including suspension, dismissal and criminal charges."

564

For one of a number of reasons. Just off the top of my head: It may have been on the originally approved survey form (and changing that form requires approval from the local human subjects review board) but turned out to have been ambiguous or in some other way unreliable, and so produced data too noisy to be reliably analyzed; it produced reliable data, but nothing of interest to the broader analysis; it produced reliable data, but nothing that rose to the level of statistical significance; it produced statistically significant results, but nothing of an effect size* that rose to the level of being worth reporting;…

  • Effect size! We really would be better off dealing in the sizes of the effects of different treatments than just straight-up percentages. Sadly, I don’t think the reports that are out there let us do that.
565

In addition to the excellent reasons dfbdfb listed, also the researchers might not want the responders to know exactly what they are looking at. If they ask a wider breadth of questions, they’ll get more accurate answers because the respondents won’t be unconsciously tailoring their answers to what they think the researchers are after.

In this particular case, there is no intervention, so there is no effect, so there is no effect size.

566

It’s interesting to see what under-reporting looks like. On campus/residential areas of the year 2013, 10 rapes and 2 cases of fondling were reported to my university. These numbers are pretty low. I wonder why that is, especially when we have lots of preventative services and programs along with various centers for victims.

567

No, I believe that many, probably most of these rapes could be prevented with proactive practices on the part of women. No drinking to incapacitation, keep an eye on your glass at all times, always use the buddy system, only have sex in a committed relationship.

568

What made me wonder about the way the questions were interpreted was the finding that 18% of the entering freshmen women reported having been a victim PRIOR to entering college. That seems higher than other numbers I have seen. One of the articles states that this particular group was more likely to report rape on campus as well. Does that mean these women were more vulnerable or that they counted encounters as rape as others did not?

As Hunt posted above, just because I wonder about the statistics and whether this is an accurate portrayal of the problem, does not mean I don’t think campus rape is real. Whether it is 1%. 10% or 20%, it is a real problem. The solution may differ depending on who is vulnerable and who is perpetrating the crimes, which is why I think real accurate data is important.

Why is it necessarily Syracuse? Is that where the author (now at Brown) went for UG? Or is that just speculation?

569

In my morning news was a frat house rape that occurred last Thursday at the University of Washington. Apparently the buddy system worked in so far as the young woman’s female companion got her out of the house, called the police and took her to the hospital. It didn’t prevent the rape but did get her timely health care and reporting.

570

Every college president and board of directors at ALL colleges in this country should have this topic at the top of their agenda’s for EVERY meeting they have. They also need to have a solid action plan on how to deal with this issue at their respective college. THESE STATISTICS ARE UNACCEPTABLE AND UNCONSCIONABLE!!!

571

scsiguru and what do you think college presidents and boards ought to do? Every state and every jurisdiction in every state has a process for handling criminal sexual assault cases. Every state has drinking laws and processes for dealing with underage drinking. Every campus has rules surrounding behavior on campus. What do YOU think college president’s “ought” to be doing?

I think the bigger question is what are the accusers doing? Are they calling the local police? Are they reporting it to campus police? Are they going to health services? Are they using confidential college resources? It’s one thing to rant and complain and betch and moan, but if people who feel they have been assaulted do nothing, then there’s not much a “college president” can do…and we can survey ourselves until our blood drains.

572

What problem do you want them to address? Violent, forcible penetrative rape? Or sex a woman decides at some later point was non consensual because she was (subjectively) too “out of it” to effectively consent? If it is the first one, then we have a process already, called law enforcement, and the challenge is to get more women to report violent rape when it occurs. If it is the second, then that is a much more difficult problem. But something designed to fix #1 won’t fix #2 and visa versa.

Here is one question from the short form Sexual Experiences Survey, which is apparently the survey used to derive at least some of this data. This whole thread boils down to which subsections, assuming a positive response (which the survey does its best to achieve), would be considered “rape” or sexual assault. Note that the errata to the survey itself says that all positive responses are on the “sexual assault continuum” which should give you some inkling on where the survey authors are coming from.

One further note, the preamble to the short form SES removes the modifier in “too drunk”, and instructs respondents to check box c if they had sex while drunk.

To me, the response to positive responses to subsections d&e are easy, and very similar. The appropriate response to situations under subsection c is education regarding alcohol use as @momofthreeboys keeps mentioning. It is likely impossible to address the situations described in subsections a&b. I doubt seriously that you will be able to “train” teenage boys to not show displeasure when denied sex.

Many of you keep lumping positive responses to several if not all of these very broad questions together and seem to be insisting that they are all the same thing. They just are not.

573

It is interesting to read the responses here. A number of posters seem to a) not read the simple definitions posted by the @“Cardinal Fang” or @dstark; or b) just say, “I don’t care about the data. The date do not accord with my beliefs, largely based upon anecdotal experience. Therefore I reject the data.” They sometimes dress it up by trying to be analytical, but there is an interesting emotional thing going on where data just get ignored. (I guess we do the same thing in the US with respect to the health impacts of gun availability and in many other domains]). It is just interesting how what seems to be a pretty careful survey can be largely dismissed because it doesn’t seem right.

@northwesty asked how these statistics about colleges could possibly be correct if parents kept sending their daughters to these schools. Well, women have not reported rapes in the past at a high rate, and if they actually do so in careful surveys, people like @northwesty try to obfuscate the results. If the obfuscation is effective, parents may not get a clear read. @northwesty, perhaps it would make sense to consider the possibility that the data actually may be accurate and your prior beliefs are based upon past non-reporting and misleading anecdotal evidence. And, again, as people have pointed out, the fact that X% of college women are raped does not mean that X% of college men are rapists (especially not your sons) if indeed, the perpetrators are serial rapists.

When I sent my son to college, I sent him with three rules regarding sex. Treat your partners with respect (this rules out non-consensual activities). Always use condoms. And know that their are some arbitrary rules regarding rape at schools – sometimes pretending it doesn’t exist and sometimes arguing that any time a woman has alcohol, she is incapable of consent. So, just be careful that you don’t do anything that can be interpreted as non-consensual.

Before I sent my daughter to college, I enrolled her in a self-defense class for women (more or less against her will). I gave her rules numbers one and two (Treat partners with respect and always use condoms) as well as cautions about alcohol and own glasses, etc… She was speaking last winter on a panel of college kids talking about rape at colleges. She pointed out that while the old image of rape was the guy jumping behind the bushes and using threats of physical force or physical force, date rape is a lot harder to define and a lot harder to prove (he says it was consensual, she doesn’t or she was incapacitated but demonstrating that may be difficult). In such cases, there will often be a “he said she said” problem in a legal or other judicial context. Therefore, really carefully defining what is unacceptable behavior is something the schools should do. And then they should make consequences clear. But, given the difficulty that courts and university proceedings will have about “he said she said” cases, she also said that female students should take a variety of precautions including taking self-defense, which she said she is grateful that her father made her take.

Following her thoughts, @momofthreeboys, university presidents could define rape clearly (as the Brown survey does), share this definition with all incoming students in an effective way, and then mandate expulsion for any student who is found (by the courts or college) to have raped and perhaps mandate suspension for anyone charged with such an offense until a legal or college evaluation has been completed (I don’t love this as innocent males can be charged but it is something they could do).

574

@northwesty, if your reasoning is correct and parents don’t send their kids to dangerous schools, how then do you explain parents still sending their kids to Gunn High School in Palo Alto? Kids there keep throwing themselves in front of trains. It’s awful, and I don’t want to pick on Gunn because the suicides are horrible and the community is doing everything it can think of, but the fact remains that for years, Gunn High students have been throwing themselves in front of trains, and yet parents keep sending their kids to that school.

575

shawbridge,

What are the rape statistics at your D’s college? Does her college carefully define unacceptable behavior and make the consequences clear? What are the reporting mechanisms at her college? Does she know why (based on data, not anecdote), why so many victims do not report their rapes to the administration?

576

@Bay
Two of the girls attend UVM. The other attends Union College in New York. Although it pains me that they aren’t taking action, all three of them are too afraid of being marked as killjoys for calling attention to rape in fraternities, so all three declined to report their rapes. They honestly feel that reporting it will lead to their being ostracized/excluded by other people on campus. The girl who attends Union is planning on transferring, though.

577

As others have stated, my problem with the statistics is the excruciating lack of information we have to understand what they mean. In the OP study, we don’t even know whether the perpetrators were students. All the education in the world for a college’s male students won’t make much of difference if most of the perpetrators are not recipients of that knowledge.

578

@mom2and: We think it’s Syracuse because the survey school is a large private university in upstate NY, with about 2000 freshman women, which is true of Syracuse. Plus one of the co-authors is at Syracuse.

579

@Qwerty568,

Your friends can report the rapes without providing the names of the perpetrators. Having accurate statistical information, even without prosecution, is helpful to the administration. If your friend transfers, perhaps she will report the incident at that time.

580

There are quite a few links why victims don’t report. Here is one.

http://time.com/2905637/campus-rape-assault-prosecution/

I know of 4 rapes that occured over the last several years. Two were campus rapes. None were reported.