How do you know that @dstark? Do you know that most rapes are not reported? It could be that your area is the most rape-infested in the country but no one knows because of low reporting rates. Women are not safe anywhere in this country as we have a rape epidemic going on due to the rape culture.
Typical blame the victim mindset @northwesty. Vodka doesn’t rape women, men rape women.
Alsimon2,
What does the sbove mean? There is no context here. On its face, the above is meaningless.
I understand where a person lives, which school they go to, surrounding communities, who they hang around with, their behavior, the behavior of others, affects a person’s safety.
“Comparing numbers by socio-economic class would be a good start.”
Not really, when you factor in the dunking partying and hook-up lifestyle in college. This is not happening so much in the off-campus scenarios which are more likely stranger rape and of course easier to prosecute so the problem is different. Also, the language is not so muddy off campus. There are not too many rapes where I live, either. There was a high-profile stranger rape in my previous neighborhood. The victim was an elderly woman who left her back door unlocked. There were no drunken hook-up parties there, either.
"That should be true. Most young people don’t go to college and the number of kids that go to residential colleges is even smaller. Northwesty, my kids were safer at home except for drunk driving.
You should compare apples to apples. Comparing numbers by socio-economic class would be a good start."
Fang and Stark – so are you arguing in favor of a federal policy that directs resources at a small, more advantaged group (richer college kids) who are at lower risk than the less advantaged and more numerous non-college kids? And also a policy that will only help that small advantaged group for a very small amount of time (i.e. the 4 years while enrolled in college)?
And the reason for such policy is this. Richer college kids are at an overall lower risk because, well, they are more well off. But their risk goes up while they are at college. So let’s muster all these federal resources and effort because, even though they are STILL at lower risk than poorer non-college kids, we just can’t have these middle class and higher girls being attacked at all!!! All those poorer girls and non-white girls who don’t go to college, not our problem. We’ll just respond (despite the data) to the cries of those suburban parents and their suburban daughters who adopt advocacy as their primary college extra-curricular activity. Do I have that about right?
For myself, I say let’s focus on fixing the system that everyone uses – rich, poor, young, old, college student, college grad, non-student. And getting the college kids to stop chugging hard alcohol. Problem solved.
@al2simon, I disagree. You can’t cast such aspersions on the professors without first understanding their level of competency. It may be that they simply have no clue, and are not liars. This is the problem with contemporary society. People jump to conclusions when all the facts are not in.
You should believe it. Poor people are more likely to be the victims of all kinds of violent crimes. The BJS has a handy tool that lets you make data tables for crimes. http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat If you look at rape/sexual assault rates by income level, you see that the rate declines as the income goes up. But maybe you meant something else and I’m not understanding?
The question we’d like to answer, which the BJS can’t help us with, is whether going to a residential college in itself is protective. We’d love to look at rape rates for the same women, for senior year of high school versus freshman year of college. Are the high school seniors more likely to be raped, because being at college has a protective effect, or are the freshmen more likely to be raped, because being at college is dangerous? We could look at seniors versus new graduates, and examine the same thing. But we don’t have that data.
And I agree. But you shouldn’t avoid looking at data because you don’t like what you might discover.
The resources we’re directing at the college rape problem are, by and large, not government resources. They’re college resources. And colleges should definitely direct their own resources to their own problem of rape.
Meanwhile, we should also direct government resources to the criminal justice system’s handling of rape. Nobody here has argued against that. Many of us have said that the police handle rape accusations poorly, and should be trained and forced to handle rape accusations better. This will require orders of magnitude more resources than what the government is devoting to the issue of collegiate rape. It’s important and we need to do it.
However, this is a college site, and we talk about what colleges ought to do, and what colleges actually do.
dstark - Well, I think it’s a clear, well-defined assertion. I don’t see what’s confusing about it.
You could break it apart into two pieces: 1) there are X non-college women and Y college women (all 18-25). 2) the rate per woman of rape victimization among non-college women is S and the rate among college women is T. 3) SX > TY.
I think what northwesty’s saying is the following (apologies to northwesty and you for speaking for you guys):
- T < S, and X and Y are in the same ballpark. In fact, maybe X > Y. So let’s help the non college women. Why should rich people have a higher claim on societal resources? They don’t need them as much; it’s once again the upper class taking care of itself.
You appear to be saying two things:
2) X > Y, so just comparing the number of victims is misleading. But northwesty’s saying, so what? We have to direct societal sources at the greatest number of victims too - if there was a 100% rate of rape victimization in 1 particular house, that wouldn’t justify targeting government resources there.
3) T < S, but T isn’t as low as it “should” be. northwesty’s saying that may not matter from a moral standpoint, we shouldn’t care about what the rate “should” be. I’m saying that the analysis you propose to figure out what T “should” be has several flaws that confound the moral issues that most people would agree constitute a good normative definition for “should”. (For example, the increased rate of binge drinking in college shouldn’t be part of “should”).
BTW - I’m not sure X > Y among the current age cohort of women. Have to look it up.
No one else may care about this. But the previous discussion of statistics got my dander up. The probability analysis (though not the conclusion) around another accuser in the Columbia case is fatally flawed, and the former professor in me got riled up. I’ll try to sit on him so he doesn’t bother you again - can’t promise I’ll be successful though 
Northwesty, we can afford to direct resources to the campus rape and sexual assaults issues. We can afford to direct resources so there will be fewer rapes and sexual assaults in society as a whole. We are the wealthiest country in the world.
By the way, the BJS data tell us nothing about the rape rates at residential colleges versus elsewhere. It could be that residential colleges are particularly dangerous for rape, and we would not know that from the BJS data even if we believed it. The BJS does not record whether college students are at a residential college, as opposed to the majority of college students who go to commuter schools.
Marie1234, it is a start I said. It is not a finish. We can look at plenty of factors.
This is anecdotal…
We do have drunken hook ups here. Various ages including middle aged people. The community is gettng older. Maybe there are fewer drunken hookups now. I am hanging out with older people. 
Interesting how The Daily Beast discussion with Nungesser and the text messages have re-opened the conversation in the wider media, including the Columbia U paper and the NY Times oped (which I think makes some good points). Hopefully, this will make room for those questioning the process to not be seen as rape apologists and perhaps come up with a system that is much fairer to everyone involved.
We’re not talking about societal resources. We’re talking about college resources. It’s not like if the University of Michigan spends less money on sexual assault discipline, that money is going to the Detroit Police Department. It’ll go to some other college priority.
CF - It’s certainly true that poor people are more likely to be victims of crime, but I think that completely misses northwesty’s point. When I wrote “shield” I was envisioning some sort of Harry Potter-esque magical shield independent of surrounding environment / people. In my previous post I tried to disentangle what’s really going on. I’m sure if you take the time to read it you’ll understand (but perhaps not agree with) what I was saying.
More interestingly, the Krebs study does shed some light on the question you ask. The rate of completed sexual assault for their sample was 13.7% among college women; it was 11.3% before the women entered college.
Very hard to dissect; the women hadn’t finished all 4+ years of college, but had finished their before college experience (tautology). But a 13 year old high schooler is different than a 17 year old in terms of being out at parties, etc. Additionally, some women didn’t go straight from high school to college. Doesn’t break out rape from completed sexual assault for pre-college women.
Still, I thought the pre-college rate was quite high. It made me wonder about methodology, sampling, definitions, etc. But maybe it’s right. I didn’t bring it up several weeks ago since I’m starting to feel like I’m writing books that only I read.
alh (if you’re reading) - The high school thing may be very relevant to issues that you care about. If the rate is that high in the pre-college years, maybe we should be doing much more education before these guys get to college, while they’re still at home, so they don’t become demons in college. Just a thought.
CF - I was using societal in a broad sense; not just referring to the government. The money comes from somewhere - state appropriations, parents, loans, scholarship funds, etc. Even if you think the college budget is a completely exogenous variable (which it most certainly isn’t), the money could be spent on the 1000 other things a college has as part of its mission.
I thought I remember reading that colleges were supposed to be teaching students or something …
Not sure what job skills you learn from mattress carrying (sorry, I’ll duck your thrown tomato now).
Hell, after reading this thread I wonder if we should just make all these colleges single-sex again. We could have chaperoned mixers, etc. Could be fun. We also could try putting saltpeter in the food, like monasteries did.
Maybe the kids would study more 
I’d argue for starting rape prevention education in kindergarten. Of course, that’s not what we’d call it. We would call it teaching respect for all individuals. I am reading along and don’t want to interrupt Cardinal Fang from sharing all the amazing research she has done for us. I’m learning a lot here and don’t want to slow down the discussion. I want to respond to some of your posts but will wait for a more opportune time. I’m evidently here for the long haul.
ETA: It is my impression that rape doesn’t disappear in all male environments. You have merely shifted the risk from women to men, usually the most vulnerable men.
I love your posts, al2simon. Keep posting.
The Krebs study reports that 13.7% of their women respondents have been victims of rape while at college. That’s an order of magnitude bigger than the BJS numbers. Somebody’s wrong here.
If you’re arguing that colleges shouldn’t use their disciplinary processes to expel rapists because college disciplinary procedures are too expensive, you’re on weak ground. If we’re looking for parts of college budgets to re-allocate, I’d argue that we should start elsewhere than the disciplinary process. Taking out loans for $100 million football stadium retrofits, for example.
Alsimon2, First off, I understand what northwesty is saying.
Your equations may be false. You are making it too compilcated for me. The percentage of college women who are sexually assaulted equals the percentage of same age non college women who are sexually assaulted over the last 3 years. I am not going to link this again. i linked this enough. I think it was figure 2.
Are there are formulas that can be used on a macro level that don’t hold true in an individual case?
If we had thousands of data points, could we come up with a formula that works on a macro level? We can’t cover all variables but on a macro level the outliers wash out.
My formula was not accurate. I am not a professor though.
Since you brought it up Alsimon2…
What if the odds are 1 percent that Emma is telling the truth? Odds on another individual independently accusing the same person is one out of 500 on a college campus the size of Columbia’s? Maybe it is even higher?
How do you handle something like this? Or it can’t be done?
I edited the post.