The Esquire survey that TV4 references asked this question of the women it surveyed:
“If you were sexually assaulted and reported it to the police, do you think they would take your report seriously?”
80% of the women said Yes. But this was not a survey of 2000 women at multiple colleges. It was not a survey of college women at all. It was a survey of American women of all ages, not of women who have just been raped and are thinking about reporting.
Sure, I think that if I were raped and I reported it to the police, they’d take it seriously. But that’s irrelevant. I’m at low risk of being raped, and if I were raped it would most likely be by a stranger. I wouldn’t have been doing anything that put me at high risk of being raped (unless you think mountain biking in remote areas is risky for that reason).
Of course the cops would believe me. But do they believe the women who actually DO get raped, the women who are young and were drinking? Not so much.
Well…there are a lot of problems with the Congo numbers, right?
The survey was in 2007.
Intimate partner sexual violence isn’t counted and is 1.8 times higher than other rapes.
Also women who were displaced from their households aren’t counted.
The numbers from 2007 equal 25 percent of women raped in a 30 year period.
One year equals 25 percent of all all women raped over a 30 year period.
2009 rapes were twice as high as 2008 numbers. I don’t know how high 2008 numbers are.
Many women in the Congo have been raped mutiple times. Women raped mutiple times are not measured in the survey.
The surveyers say their numbers are rock bottom numbers.
I don’t care that lots of folks have made the Congo= campus comparison because the comparison is wrong.
That paper does count intimate partner violence, dstark.
Yeah, that struck me too. 3% of the women said they’d been raped in the last year, and 12% of women said they’d been raped in their lifetime.
If the rate of rape is 3% a year, how could it be that the rate is only 12% lifetime? What could be going on? Was 2007 a particularly rapey year? Do the same women get raped over and over again?
Also, the rate of rape (both lifetime, and in the last year) was highest in the 35-39 age group, and by a lot. What’s going on with that?
Maybe you elaborated on your position in the 91 pages I didn’t read, but I’m very interested in why you think the data is on your side when the 1 in 5 statistic has become one of the most replicated survey findings ever, not only being repeated across multiple institutions and coming from multiple disparate organizations, but also being corroborated by various other methodologies - such as asking the guys if they’ve committed sexual assault and checking the numbers.
Obviously, the third is that the parents don’t fully understand the gravity of the situation, and the fourth is that going to university is still necessary for most people to get ahead in this economy, risks or no. The fifth explanation is that you’re not necessarily less likely to be assaulted if you don’t go to college and end up working in far shadier parts of town and with a greater number of untrustworthy individuals.
This “contradiction” doesn’t make any sense - the parents are sending their daughters to school BEFORE any of them suffer an assault, so it has nothing to do with whether or not the daughters face danger once they get there.
Fixed that for you—and by fixing it I made it match at least the plain text (and, given his politics, I suspect, at least to some extent, the intent) Birch Bayh offered.
Really?? You get caught dead to rights copying something, the sanction is that you fail the assignment, and you’re going to hire a lawyer for that? I mean, I guess it’s your money, but I find that hard to believe.
(Now, I do understand the folks who lawyer up when they’ve done something that means, say, getting kicked out of a program. almost always a very, very poor financial choice, but still understandable, at least.)
Based on the Syracuse study results, it really is College>Congo.
Yet parents like me willingly send their oldest daughters off to campus. And then send their younger sisters off as well a few years later. And the other daughter parents at my kids’ school and my neighborhood and my workplace and my family all do the same. And so do all of you.
And the enrollments of females at U.S. colleges have never been higher and keep increasing.
And incidence of rape in the U.S. (along with other crime) is down over 50% in the past 20 years.
And the incidence of rape among female college students is lower than the incidence of rape among non- student females of the same age.
I do believe in the holocaust. I do believe human activity causes climate change. I believe that Oswald acted alone. But I don’t believe the over-hype on campus rape.
I know this is entirely tangential to anything anyone is talking about at the moment, but I just had a conversation with an individual on this and need to vent a little:
I have also encountered a disturbing number of parents who hold rather reactionary opinions on the topic of sexual assault. It’s especially silly, then, when they try to pin this problem uniquely on the millennial generation, in defense of older generations that didn’t even recognize marital rape as a crime. While the problem of sexual assaults on campuses is an enormous one, we should recognize that for all the trash talking of my generation, we’re the first ones to truly try to do something about it.
/rant
I’m noting this because I’ve met a fair number of older folks who try to blame the incidence of sexual assaults on the “campus hook up culture”. Not only is this “hook up culture” a pretty transparent myth when you look at the numbers, but I think this mentality of blaming rape on people wanting to have sex is precisely the reason why it is allowed to continue.
Northwesty forgot to tell us that 22% of women in the Congo say they’ve experienced intimate partner sexual violence in their lifetime. 41% in the rapiest province, Equateur.
Note that to be counted as a Yes for intimate partner sexual violence, she has to say her partner rapes her “often” or “sometimes.” Once doesn’t count.
@northwesty I’m trying to find where in your skepticism there’re arguments beyond appeals to personal incredulity and arguments from popular consensus. I can only look at your point about the incidence of rape decreasing, and say that this is probably true - that doesn’t mean the rate isn’t still high!
RMIBstudent, you must look further into northwesty’s argument. There you will find a desperate appeal to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victims Survey (NCVS). This is one survey, which gives rape rates two orders of magnitude less than all the other surveys, of which there are many. The sponsors of this survey acknowledge that it is undercounting rape, and have paid to have a new, better survey developed that will get better numbers. But it’s northwesty’s favorite, and gets dragged out at all opportunities. For northwesty’s dear NCVS, no skepticism needs to be applied.
In a heatbeat dfbdfb, in a heartbeat. A quarter of a million + in college tuition payments and as a parent I would do everything in my power to protect my money which presumably is the price we now have to pay as parents to untie the last apron string in a responsible manner. Lawyers are chump change compared to writing college tuition checks for over ten years month after month year after year…chump change and I’m no chump.
RMIBstudent, not sure where your experiences lie, but hooking up is a pretty prevalent thing with the younger high school and college set. Hooking up may or may not be conventional missionary style sex, young people define it in different ways and depending on what they want to share or not…but it’s real and could be as innocuous as “making out.” Kids use the term exactly because it doesn’t define what they did (or didn’t do together) We did it to some extent back in the day, but we called them one-night stands or simply making out. i think there is a certain nebulousness to hooking up that lends itself to the discussion because the relationships involved in hooking up are nebulous at best.
@momofthreeboys I don’t know what the “nebulousness” has to do with sexual assault, unless if you think that these incidents are just “accidents” rather than intentional acts (seeing as how most confessed campus rapists are repeat offenders). I guess we use a different terminology than you did, but there is evidence that we actually have less sexual partners - we just have more permissive attitudes towards it because it really shouldn’t be frowned upon.
@momofthreeboys: “RMIBstudent, not sure where your experiences lie, but hooking up is a pretty prevalent thing with the younger high school and college set.”
Actually, if you look at the numbers, hooking up (under any conceivable definition) has been decreasing over the past couple decades. The pop-culture conventional wisdom may be that today’s high school and college students are busily sleeping with anything that breathes, but the conventional wisdom is wrong. Dead wrong.
It’s a ridiculous comparison. The “Syracuse” study found that 5.2% of female students aged 18-22 reported physically forced oral/penetration during the academic year and 11.0% during lifetime on an anonymous type health survey. The Congo study found 23% reported physically forced sexual activities with their partner and 42% in one particular province. Furthermore the Congo study was based on household interviews instead of anonymous type questionnaires, which are known to dramatically underreport in US studies. If we compare in person interviews in US to in person interviews in the Congo, then the difference gets tremendously larger. Of course most Congo studies focus on things like gang rape by soldiers and being forced into sexual slavery. Obviously the rates of such activities are also tremendously lower in college. How is college worse?
No, one particular survey that dramatically underreports found a decreased rate. Another survey that dramatically underreports (the USDOE numbers) instead found an increase of 126% between 2001 and 2013 (no numbers beyond 2013 are available). Most crimes had large decreases, yet forced sexual assault increased in 9 of the past 12 years in the USDOE survey. I’d expect that both trends are not accurate, and the actual numbers are somewhere between these 2 extremes. Using a biased sample that includes only a small portion of incidents like this often leads to very inaccurate trend rates.
RMIB - yes I think some of the accusations are rather nebulous. Some of them certainly aren’t “criminal.”
dfdbfb - I hope you are correct that hooking up is losing favor - as i said my oldest is over the age of 25 and my youngest is 21 so time is passing quickly from what I observed in the late teens and early twenties - almost a decade now. I think hooking up is a lose-lose rather than a win-win.
RMIB I don’t think the 70s and early 80s were “good old days”…I made a whole lot less money than my fellow male graduates doing the same thing and I had to do it in pumps, nylons and these ridiculous little bow ties. People were dying from heroin and LSD and ODing on ludes - lost a few friends that way. AIDs came onto the scene and I lost several very good friends and Looking for Mr. Goodbar was the tone of “sexual freedom” so not sure if your quote was directly to me, but for me your comment means nothing because it was not the “good old days” by any standard for women.
I did not come of age during the disco, big hair, life is good, 80s, i was getting engaged and contemplating children and turning 30. I was mature when the interest rate on buying a new house was 21%. Not so “good old days.”
