Magnetron – we were discussing rape incidence per year. And rape means only penetration.
I don’t think any study has claimed 1-in-5 for rape.
Looks like the AAU study in table 3-11 says that 13.5% of females undergrads will be “raped” over the course of 4 college years. That would be 1-in-7.4 over 4 years. Or a 3.4% chance in any one year.
I think these surveys could be quite useful if used for baselining. Do the same exercise apples-to-apples in a few years to see if a school’s efforts are moving the needle.
Not really useful to debate whether the percentages cited are the real/actual percentages. This survey, for example, had a 19% voluntary response rate. It isn’t based on a statistical random sample like is used for politcal polls
So no one can know if the experience of the 19% self-selected responders is representative of the 81% who did not respond. Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn’t.
Let’s be completely accurate: this latest survey shows about 1 in 10 college women report having been penetrated sexually without their consent, either by force or while they were incapacitated.
About 1 in 5 report being sexually assaulted, including assaults that no one classifies as rape. This new survey is consistent with at least a dozen previous surveys of college women.
Some people say, carelessly, that 1 in 5 college women are raped. We don’t have any statistics to bear out that claim, and those people need to be more accurate.
CF: Which figures are you referring to? I am a little confused by the tables, as in 3.2 it reports 7.3% of women experienced completed penetration. in the rest of the table, completed and attempted penetration are lumped together. 18% reported completed penetration OR sexual touching. Is that table per year?
Table 3-20 is for seniors, which reports that about 11% of women reported completed penetration since starting college. Is that what you are referring to? That seems consistent with some other data. I am not sure why “attempted” is included in some of the table entries.
I looked at Table 4-1 and thought that it was referring to University-associated people (thinking professors, supervisors, coaches, advisors etc) when the study reports 75% of students have been harassed. However, the detail farther down reports that the vast majority are strangers, friends, or acquaintances. Only 12% are teachers or advisors. Still too high, but certainly nowhere near 75%.
I heard a news report that said many women did not report because they thought the incident was too minor.
Fang – right. 11.3% over the course of 4 years (not the 13.4% I wrote above).
I’d agree that 10% rape is the number that comes up in a lot of these surveys. How that compares to actual no one knows, since none of these surveys use random samples.
This thread was started about the Syracuse study. Which said that 7.9% of female freshman at the college studied were raped during first semester. The AAU study confirms the syracuse study as an outlier.
Look at the second graph, labelled Percent of Undergraduates Surveyed Experiencing Nonconsensual Sexual Contact Involving Physical Force or Incapacitation Since Entering College. Look at the blue line labelled Female. If you click the radio button for All Contact, you see that ~22% of female students reported sexual assault. But I was interested in penetration, so I clicked the button for Penetration. A bit more than 10% of female students reported nonconsensual penetration. Hovering over the graph, I see it’s 10.8%.
That’s the bottom line number. About 10% of women students in the study report that someone has raped them using physical force or incapacitation while they were in college. And that’s not including the trans women, who are lumped into TGQN.
The chart is hard to understand, or at least I had to stare at it for a while. But what it says is that 8.2% of freshman women at Penn say they’ve been raped at college. Each class year, fewer and fewer women students report being raped: 8.2% as freshman, 6.3% as sophs, 5.0% as juniors, 3.8% as seniors. And anecdotes suggest that the majority of those freshman rapes happen in the first few weeks of college.
Notice also that while the percentage of students who say they’ve been raped at least once barely budges between junior year and senior year (13.9% to 14.7%), the percentage of students who say they were raped in their senior year is not inconsiderable (3.8%). That suggests that the women raped as seniors generally aren’t experiencing their first rape.
AAU also says considerable variation over campuses. The Syracuse numbers, while high, may not be outliers if one considers all of the campuses surveyed-- it’s difficult to tell looking at the AAU report.
I thought we were talking about the experience of college women here. The number you want is 23%, not 19%. 23% of women responded. Still not a majority, but 23% is pretty good.
But as you know, the question isn’t whether the 23% is a big enough sample size. It is how much the self-selected 23% are representative of the 77% who did not respond.
Would you expect victims to be more or less likely to respond to the survey request than non-victims?
Once again: What exactly rape means, if it in fact has any particular meaning at all, varies (legally) by jurisdiction, and (colloquially) by individual.
Hard to say. Maybe victims are reluctant to think about their assaults, and are underrepresented in the survey. Maybe victims are eager to report their assaults in an anonymous survey. We don’t know.
DFB – When Fang and I refer to rape, we are talking about exactly what the report reports on. Which is penetration as defined in the report. It isn’t vague.
This (quite wide-ranging, really) thread deals with more than that one report.
And even limiting it to the report, the authors of it themselves said that they avoided words such as rape in the survey, because it’s not uniformly defined (see, e.g., p. vi). And yes, the report does use rape to mean unwanted penetration, but every so often it allows that that’s not a actually a universally-accepted definition (e.g., p. 22).
Basically, I stand by my statement that rape isn’t a well-defined-enough word to merit using it as if it is.
I’ve been using rape as a shorthand for nonconsensual penetration involving force or incapacitation, which is one of the types of incidents asked about in the AAU survey. I believe @northwesty is using the same shorthand in our discussions. We now have a lot of different surveys that have asked about that same type of incident.
I suppose we could use NPIFOR instead. I just don’t feel like typing nonconsensual penetration involving force or incapacitation all the time.