I have a few friends in college and my older cousin goes to cornell where she says that so many guys are really disrespectful towards woman and a bunch of her friends have been groped/raped and have never reported it. I also heard this from another girl I met at a soup kitchen where she said rape is a common thing at her college too.
I wouldn’t say that colleges have “that many” rapists, since I don’t really know what “that many” means. But, the majority of campus sex assaults go unreported, so we don’t know what the real numbers are.
Are the rapists or people that do sexual assaults students or are they just people who choose to pray on others?
I think there are certainly sexual assaults they do go unreported but there is an awful lot of false reporting too. There is a PR movement on the left that throws out crazy data as though makes are raping females left and right with impugnity and it just is not true. A great many of the reported cases have been proven to be false and many others are he said/she said. That doesnt make them true just undetermined.
You have to dig into the stats to know what they’re telling you. Some surveys ask if someone has ever been assaulted during college, while others ask if someone has been assaulted in the past year. If you ask questions about since you started college, you’ll get different responses if you survey seniors vs freshman. Other surveys ask about very specific behaviors, while others may ask about unwanted sexual contact(which might be broadly enough defined to include unwanted kissing). If a girl had three shots of vodka before having sex with her boyfriend, was she raped because she couldn’t consent? The precise wording of the questions is important to understand what the survey measures. Then, there’s survey quality problems. A quality survey should have a large sample size that’s randomly selected, with a high response rate. Many surveys involve participants who are self selected instead of random polling, use inadequate sample sizes, or have low response rates. For all those reasons, you can find numbers all over the place.
This is just absolutely false.
Are there some false reports? Yes. And those should be dealt with harshly.
Most reports that are dropped aren’t because they’re false, but rather because victims are terrorized over and over again during investigations and at a certain point, it’s not worth it for them to continue to re-experience the pain. Or, bluntly, cops don’t believe them or don’t bother to investigate. (See, for example, the thousands and thousands and thousands of backlogged rape kits.)
Most men who rape or sexually assault a woman don’t do it only once. Campuses have serial rapists. So the rape numbers are high, but the number of rapists isn’t necessarily.
@romanigypsyeyes wow you arent biased at all. You are simply bleating some Law and Order nonsense. Read the article I posted. And there are 100s of cases of FALSELY reported sexual assaults. The politics of sexual assault means in general that the victims are telling the truth and the accused is presumed guilty. Your little diatribe may have been true 30 years ago but it is not now. Serial rapists on campuses. Maybe that should go into the US News rankings.
Rape is common on college campuses? I do not believe it is common. It’s likely to be under-reported though.
I am terrible with numbers and am not any kind of researcher or scientist, but I did do a little looking at data.
I compared two sample sizes: Arizona State, population of nearly 72,000, and Amherst College, with a population of nearly 1800. For the school year of 2013-2014, ASU had a reported 27 cases of sexual assault, and Amherst had 7. Any number is too many, of course. In the US, the incidence of rape in the general population is 0.1%. Is rape more common at Amherst than in the general population? Maybe. Thinking about why this could be, it probably has to do with the fact that you have large numbers of students in close proximity to each other, with access to drink and/or drugs. But the numbers of reported rape at ASU are far below 0.1%, so what’s going on there? Are the kids not partying as much, and is sexual assault simply much less likely to happen there? Or is it more to do with students at ASU being less likely to report such incidents?
I suspect there are a lot of different factors at work in who reports rape, and when it gets reported. It’s possible that at a college like Amherst, people are much more aware of the issue of campus rape and are more likely to report it. There could be many other factors too, but I don’t think Amherst has any kind of bad rep for rape being common.
The highest numbers of reported rapes are for Brown and UConn, with 43 each. Is there a rape culture at these campuses? I don’t know, but as to why so many are reported, this article might shed light: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/06/07/these-colleges-have-the-most-reports-of-rape/?utm_term=.fadc678c09e1
U Conn has a much bigger population than Brown, so are we to conclude that Brown has more sexual assault on campus proportionally than any other college in the country? I really don’t think that is the case. It probably has a lot to do with the same factor that I mentioned for Amherst.
It is interesting to note that at both ASU and Amherst, reported incidents of sexual assault increased every year between 2009-2013. That might indicate that there has generally been growing awareness of the issue, causing more women to report such incidents. It might also indicate that there is more sexual assault occurring, and I really hope that isn’t the case.
Everyone who is concerned about campus crime at any given college should take the time to look at the annual Clery Report published by each college. Make your decisions based on your own research, not on hearsay.
You can be disrespectful without being criminal. Don’t conflate the two into one thing.
^This. Campus assaults are mostly committed by guys with a pattern of behavior. Of the roughly dozen girls I know who were assaulted on campus, they all named one of the same 3 guys.
Frankly, I’d sooner trust hearsay than anything a university puts out about itself:
@iwannabe_Brown , do you think colleges withhold or lie about numbers? What is your thought on why Brown has so many reported sexual assaults? I do not trust hearsay about college crime. I agree that there are probably a small number of men responsible for committing multiple sexual assaults on women.
ETA: a couple of years ago, I read a thread about one of the colleges my daughter applied to, in which a student said something along the lines of there being a lot of sexual assault at the school. The school has a good reputation. I chose to do my own research rather than listen to a random person on CC. Any parent or student, at least in my opinion, should do the same. Is the OP’s hearsay about Cornell really more trustworthy than the college’s annual crime report? I don’t think it is.
no
On my campus, I haven’t heard of anything like that ever happening before, but honestly, we probably don’t even know everything that’s going on around our own college.
Unfortunately, it still does happen in college, but it’s obviously done in private.
I’d guess that Brown goes out of its way to make reporting a sexual assault easier than some other schools. I don’t think Brown men are “rapy-er” than those at other schools.
…but to the original question, college is a unique place for rapists to operate. Mostly everyone lives in close quarters, women (and men) have little experience dealing with sexual predators, there is a lot of drinking/drug use without much experience with the effects. It’s a target rich environment.
I’d say about a third of my adult female friends have been raped (who have discussed it with me, that is). For most of us it happened when we were young and not as good at protecting ourselves or knowing how to avoid certain situations.
Are there men on every street corner in college & the nearby town waiting to rape every woman?
No.
But every woman regardless of her age, regardless of whether or not she’s in college, needs to have some street smarts when she leaves the safety of her home/dorm room/apartment. Will using common sense prevent every woman from being raped? No. But if you use a few simple tactics, you can reduce the chances of being raped.
Serial rapists may also lurk at parties to target naive new freshwomen for rape by intoxication (due to victim inexperience with knowing personal alcohol limits, possibly aided by date-rape drugs added to the victim’s drink while she is not looking).
Some stats: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-sexual-violence . Note that most victims do not report to law enforcement, so that any given rapist may continue to rape more victims. But even when rapes are reported to law enforcement, few of the reports eventually result in the conviction of a rapist, according to https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system (not that the record is that great for other crimes either).
False rape reports are actually pretty rare. Even if there are “hundreds” of false reports of sexual assault, there were an estimated 79,770 rapes reported to the FBI in 2013 alone. Even if we take “hundreds” to its logical extreme and and say there were “hundreds” of falsely reported rapes in 2013 alone AND assume “hundreds” means the biggest possible number, 999, that’s only about 1.3% of all rapes reported to the FBI in 2013.
I have the feeling that the OP might be a worrier, like me. This kind of statistic about rape made me extremely fearful as a woman on campus back in the late eighties, early nineties. I often had security escort me to my dorm, which now seems really dumb to me because my college was in this nice rural area and and most rape is acquaintance rape, not stranger rape.
My advice to college women would be not to live in fear. Almost all the men you meet in college will be nice people who would never want to rape anyone. But be aware of your situation and social cues. If something feels wrong or not empathetic about a guy, listen to your gut and avoid time alone with him. Avoid being alone in a room with anyone you don’t know well enough yet to know if he is caring/empathetic or if there is a controlling aspect to his personality. If someone is pushing you to go somewhere alone with him and not responding to your ‘no’ cues, don’t go anywhere with him, and get help from other people around you if needed. Don’t put your drink down at a frat party and then drink it again. No one, male or female, should drink to the point where you lose awareness; alcohol poisoning becomes as much of a risk as rape at that point. Hang out with friends so you can look out for one another. Be an upstander, not a bystander, for other women. Above all, believe in your right to assert yourself and in the power of your voice to keep you safe- whether it is saying ‘no, thank you’ or shouting to get help.
The rate of false reports is completely unknowable because to know a report wasn’t false, you would have to know the truth about what happened during the incident. In many he said, she said cases, it’s completely unknowable to a third party what happened, which makes numbers about false report rates worthless.