The surveys are going to get better and better. There are plans for a survey of up to 20,000 students at 10 to 15 schools later this year.
We will see how random surveys become and whether questions are leaning too much in one direction.
MIT did a survey. Pretty large response.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/rare-survey-examines-sex-assault-at-mit-.html?_r=0
I want an all-female college to do a survey and see what it comes up with. 
Albert69, very nice. 
Right, add GF in with BF/husband as well.
You know @TransferGopher, with the amount of times I’ve seen you downplay the realities of rape on campus, I think it’s very safe to assume that you simply don’t believe rape exists or that it if it does happen, it is 100% the fault of the victim. How about you stop beating around the bush and just come out and say it so that you don’t need to repeatedly defend rapists and predators and condone their actions? Wouldn’t that make your life easier?
You’ll find very different rates depending on both the way the sample is done and the sample group. For example, in the Harvard senior survey, 12% said they were sexually assaulted, but fewer than 2% said they had reported a sexual assault outside of the survey. So if you look at the data for reported incidents, it will be the small fraction of what is reported in anonymous surveys. Even in anonymous surveys, I’d expect a good portion of incidents go unreported. This of course does not mean the national rate is 12% since Harvard is not representative of the national population. The same can be said for the survey at a particular college mentioned in the original post.
Some who are raped by incapacitation (drunk or drugged to the point of being barely able to notice what is going on, much less make a coherent police report and identify the suspect afterward) may not realize that anything happened at all beyond that they passed out after drinking at a party. It is no surprise that alcohol and other drugs are used as weapons by sexual predators.
To illustrate that point, there were four of us growing up who hung out all the time. I was best man in one wedding and part of the wedding party of the other two. I found out much later that I was the only one of the four who had not raped. About age 40 the one with a conscience informed me of what they had done in their late teens/early 20s, Until that moment I would have sworn up and down that they were good, decent guys. If the one had not confessed to me I would have never known.
I am baffled by this report. I would love to see the actual questionnaire to decipher between incidence and prevalence of rape. As a former RA in college, I know that rapes occurred and were often associated with alcohol use. Nevertheless, these numbers would indicate a culture of sexual assaults and secrecy that should inspire national outrage. I am not seeing the outrage and I have to question the data. I wouldn’t keep quiet if this happened to any of my children, no way!
Here is the MIT survey…
http://web.mit.edu/surveys/health/MIT-CASA-Survey-Summary.pdf
You can’t tell anything from these surveys.
For example, the MIT survey indicates that 5% of females experienced a completed rape (not attempted, not sexual assualt but RAPE) over the course of their entire time at MIT. I’d say that’s an extremely high and troubling number if true.
The survey of the upstate NY school (is it Syracuse?) indicates 3.4% of females were actually RAPED (not assaulted, not atttempted but completed forcible RAPE) during first freshman semester. Plus another 4.5% were RAPED while incapacitated during first freshman semester. So 7.9% of the female students were actually RAPED during one semester? Plus another 12% were victims of a rape attempt during that same semester?
One would think such an incidence rate would only occur in a max security prison or Rwanda. No parent would enroll their daughter at Syracuse this upcoming fall if those stats were true or believed to be true. SU would cease to exist if anyone even remotely believed this.
So while the MIT rape number (if true) is very high, we are supposed to believe that the rape rate at Syracuse is perhaps 5-10 times higher?
Come on.
@northwesty Sadly, these numbers are usually lower than what is actually true. Many times, women are pressured into believing that they had in fact given consent when they have not or are pressured into thinking they were both drunk and regret it now. This brings me back to the Price of Sex at USC report. Women felt compelled and obligated to have sex and in my view, that is not consent. The definition of rape is not clear for a lot of men and women.
We are not talking about being talked into unwanted drunk regret sex.
This report says 20% of the female students were victims of rape or attempted rape in one semester. No one believes that. If anyone did, Syracuse would be bankrupt or all-male.
People do believe it. They just feel like somehow they should be able to tell the rapists from the non-rapists by look, or they believe the propaganda that “good girls” don’t get raped and especially not by “good boys”.
@northwesty I don’t believe it either. I also think that we are talking about different things. I am willing to believe that the prevalence of rape victims are 20% by the end of first year. However, I absolutely DO NOT believe that the incidence is 20% during the first semester. That would mean a national conspiracy by college men to commit rape and college women to suppress reporting the crime. That would be massive. I don’t believe all of these women would have remained silent and neither would their parents.
The study doesn’t say 20 percent first semester…and we are talking attempted rape and rape.
Read the study.
Post 26.
Feeling obliged to have sex is not rape. This is where I think women need to get alittle tougher with themselves and what they want and don’t want. If they are answering “yes” to the rape question because they had sex that they felt obligated to have that would account for inaccuracy. If they had sex that they felt compelled to have in the absence of coercion or assault or being passed out that is not rape either. If they went along with it for whatever reason that is not criminal…that is not rape. Perhaps it would help our young women to spend more time defining what is not rape.
With stats as high as is claimed, and along the lines of Momofthreeboys’s post above, one wonders whether many women who were technically raped, are okay with it. In other words, if surveys show so many rapes, but relatively few reported, perhaps many women don’t think rape is that big of a deal for them. (I do think it is but I’m just speculating because the numbers don’t jibe). Maybe many of them think, “ugh, I said no and this guy is so gross but I’ll just get through it and get out of here and never see him again.” And they go on with their lives.
It is very clear in the study what is considered rape.
Read the study.
I didn’t report my assaults, because my initial response was to scrub my skin bloody, not find a pay phone and call police who would likely just give me a lecture as to why I was : dressed like that/ out so late/in a " bad" part of town/naive.
NOT because it wasn’t a big deal, but it was SUCH a big deal, that to protect myself, I had to wall that part off and pretend it didn’t happen because otherwise I couldn’t go on living.