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

Again, here is an example of fuzzy language. You are correct in almost every state (and maybe every state) if an adult is incapacitated, and the states have differing language about what constitutes incapacitated, then yes, it could be classified as a felony assault or rape. However, “drunk” is a subjective word and in the absence of some provable, statistical level as can be proven in drunk driving cases, drunk is simply subjective and we do women a dis-service if we give them the impression that if they have been drinking the prosecutor will charge and prosecute simply because they have been drinking or that the college will believe and expel in the absence of ANY OTHER FACTORS OR EVIDENCE. It behooves young women to go immediately to a hospital or medical facility where they CAN do blood tests to support a BAC if in fact they were “in capacitated” as well as the other aspects of a potential rape that need attention.

@calicash, if someone falls down dead-drunk asleep at a subway station and has his wallet stolen, is that person partially responsible/at fault? I would say yes. Obviously, the person who stole the wallet committed the crime, but the drunk doesn’t get a pass for stupidity. And unfortunate as it may be, the US is not a country where you can fall down drunk and not be taken advantage of (unlike Japan, where both men and women line subway station floors on a Friday night dead-drunk asleep without anything bad happening to them).

You can argue all you want about who’s at fault if you put your wallet on your desk, walk away, and someone takes it, but the point remains that that is a stupid thing to do.

Well, this brings up another question - is it wrong to get drunk?

@albert69, personally, I think it’s stupid to do so without friends (at least a couple who stay close to sober) around.

It might a stupid thing to do to leave your wallet out, but that doesn’t erase or minimize the fact that stealing it is a wrong thing to do and a crime. Whether it was taken off of a table or grabbed out of a purse, it’s still taking something that belongs to someone else.

@eireann, yep, as I stated.

Unwanted, without my consent, too drunk to stop what was happening. That does not describe drunk sex that was consensual at the time. Why would someone say that drunk sex that was welcomed at the time would qualify for this? This is an anonymous survey. What’s the point of lying and saying that you were too drunk to stop the unwanted sex, when actually you were drunk, but not too drunk to stop the unwanted sex?

It makes sense to me that at a college, whatever the number of cases of forcible rape, where the perpetrator forces another person physically, there will be more cases of incapacitated rape, where the perpetrator has sex with a person who is too incapacitated to resist. That’s because at a college, there are a lot of people who become so drunk they are incapable of resisting, and a person who has no compunctions about forcing a person to have sex certainly isn’t going to have compunctions about taking advantage of someone who can’t resist.

That’s why it seems reasonable to me that if the rate of forcible rape is 5.2% per year, then the rate of incapacitated rape would be a bit bigger at 7.1%. Once we have a forcible rape rate, we should expect that the incapacitated rape rate is just a bit bigger.

The point is that it is stupid to get fall down, throwing up, passing out drunk. Period. Could you be raped. Yes. Could the person who did that to you be charged and convicted. Yes.

If you drink a half a pint of vodka in an hour, throw caution to the wind, rip your clothes off and crawl into bed with the nearest warm body, is that stupid? Maybe yes depending on your own moral compass. Would the ensuing sex be rape. Probably not without evidence of force or assault. Could the person who had sex with you in your whoopie state be charged and convicted. Probably not without evidence or force or assault. Like it or not, that is how the current criminal system is set up.

It goes without saying that getting drunk is stupid. But is it really “wrong”? I would say not in the sense that rape is. Rape is criminally wrong. Rape hurts someone else - getting drunk in and of itself only hurts the person drinking. It’s illegal and wrong to get drunk and drive because that can hurt someone else.

Back to the question of whether drunk rape is 100% the rapist’s fault - the rape is 100% the rapist’s fault. Putting oneself in a situation where it it MORE LIKELY to get raped is partially the fault of the incapacitated party. Unless the victim was mugged and drugged (which doesn’t really count under the “drunk sex” scenario), the victim is responsible for making themselves vulnerable to attack (aka getting drunk). But they are not at fault for the rape itself if the victim said no or was too incapacitated to give consent.

Getting out of control drunk is risky behavior. Not wrong or culpable, but risky.

Could someone explain this report’s numbers to me?

For first semester, the report says 4.3% forcible rape attempted, 3.4% forcible rape completed, 7.7% incapacitated rape attempted, 4.5% incapacitated rape completed. That adds to 19.9% for the first semester. But the report reports the aggregate as 11.4% instead?

Double counting? One girl attacked multiple times? Is it 20 incidents per 100 female students, but those 20 incidents being suffered by 11.4 students?

Seems to me like it says there is an incidence rate of 20 per 100. So one in five in one semester. Which is ridiculously higher than the other one in five. Which was for all of college. And which included a lot more types of incidents (like unwanted kissing) rather than just rape or attempted rape.

So Syracuse is the rapiest college on record ever reported. With an incidence rate many many many times higher than the highest numbers ever previously reported. Probably only exceeded by Rwanda. Do you believe that? Or do you think maybe the study is flawed?

The SES that was used phrases questions in the form “How many times…” for a variety of types of sexual incidents. Persons that appear in multiple percentage groups checked a number that was more than 0 for multiple questions in the survey. So summing all the numbers double counts persons who answered more than 0 to multiple questions, and the 11.4% doesn’t double count persons who are in multiple categories. The combined numbers would be:

4.3% answered more than 0 for attempted forcible
3.4% answered more than 0 for completed forcible
2.5% answered more than 0 for both attempted and completed forcible

7.7% answered more than 0 for attempted incapacitated
4.5% answered more than 0 for completed incapacitated
3.9% answered more than 0 for both attempted and completed incapacitated

2% answered more than 0 for both forcible and incapacitated categories

11.4% answered more than 0 for any combination of the categories above

Because some people were victims of both forcible rape and incapacitated rape. Some people were victims of both an unsuccessful rape attempt and a successful rape attempt.

Why do you persist in saying this, when it’s obviously wrong? They give you all the numbers. The numbers are right there in the chart. All you have to do is look. You can’t just add up the different categories, because some unlucky women are in more than one category.

Do you want to know the number of rapes/attempted rapes per 100 women, rather than the number of women who experienced rape/attempted rape? You can’t determine that from the numbers supplied. And even if you did know it, you don’t have any basis for comparison with other surveys and results, because no other survey reports the numbers that way.

Thaks Data.

So 11.4% of the students reported being victims during the first semester. Got it.

But the number of incidents that occurred would be more than 11.4 per hundred female students. The number of incidents would be 19.9 per hundred? Or maybe even higher if a victim experienced 2 or 3 or more incidents?

If there were 20 incidents per 100 female students in one semester, Syracuse would be shuttered and bankrupt (and rightly so). Such a high level of incidents has never been reported before. It is many times the 1 in 5 which few people still believe.

Just not even minimally credible to me.

No she isn’t. That’s a ridiculous claim. Rom can come in here with the actual numbers, but they’re not 10+ different partners in a semester.

The study’s data doesn’t pin down the number of rapes/attempted rapes per 100 female students in one semester. But it has to be at least 20 if I read the study correctly. Could be even higher. And at least 7.9 completed rapes.

So that’s 200 rapes/attempted rapes per thousand in one semester. And 79 completed rapes per thousand in one semester.

Compare that to US DOJ stats of 0.5 rapes per thousand per year. So Syracuse is 300X higher than the general population??? US DOJ puts rape of college students per year at about 2 per thousand per year. So Syracuse is running at about 150X higher?

Come on…

.

Goodness I hope not, if so I suggest remedial class in sex education coupled with therapy ASAP and perhaps a check on their ACT reading comprehension score for anyone who “experiences” 2 or 3 separate incidents while in college.

Why? What would be the mechanism for this to occur? Say that there are 20 incidents per 100 freshman women in their first semester. What, in your mind, would happen to make Syracuse shut down?

The argument that it’s bad, and therefore it’s not happening, does not persuade me. Many bad things happen. Bad things are particularly likely to happen if the victims do not talk about them, which we know is true in the case of rape.

The DOJ statistics are the outlier here. They are orders of magnitude lower than any other statistics. We shouldn’t believe them. In order to believe them, you have to ignore ALL of the other research. The DOJ doesn’t believe them, which is why they hired WESTAT to develop new survey instruments to better measure sexual assault.

$100 says that when the Bureau of Justice starts using the new instruments, they discover sexual assault rates at least five times higher.

@northwesty, you seem to have a problem with statistics. Actually, it seems to me that you simply want to buy in to self-delusion.

20 incidents per hundred certainly seems credible to me. The vast majority of those will not be reported.

And the numbers will vary (by quite a bit) depending on the questions and circumstance, so you’re not comparing apples to apples.

For instance you’ll get a far lower rate if you ask women in front of their family if they have been raped than if you ask women anonymously if they have been forced to have sex or were taken advantage of while drunk. Some women may not count forced sex as rape if it’s by a partner and they may not count being taken advantage of while drunk as rape. And even if they do, they may not want to state that in front of their families. As I said, I knew 3 women who were raped. Definitely with 2 of them, their parents had no clue that anything happened because they never breathed a word to them (and I don’t know anything about the 3rd one’s parents).

@northwesty, you seem to have a problem with statistics. Actually, it seems to me that you simply want to buy in to self-delusion.

20 incidents per hundred certainly seems credible to me. The vast majority of those will not be reported.

And the numbers will vary (by quite a bit) depending on the questions and circumstance, so you’re not comparing apples to apples.

For instance you’ll get a far lower rate if you ask women in front of their family if they have been raped than if you ask women anonymously if they have been forced to have sex or were taken advantage of while drunk. Some women may not count forced sex as rape if it’s by a partner and they may not count being taken advantage of while drunk as rape. And even if they do, they may not want to state that in front of their families. As I said, I knew 3 women who were raped. Definitely with 2 of them, their parents had no clue that anything happened because they never breathed a word to them (and I don’t know anything about the 3rd one’s parents).