Thank you for the report you linked to https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/182369.pdf
I’ve only scanned it, but I thought it was very well written although the data is a bit old at this point. You’ve been holding out on us
Personally, when I read these surveys I tend to only focus on the completed rape rate since I think the definitional questions are very problematic for attempted sexual assaults. Here are a few things that I noticed:
The victimization rate of completed rape rate (victims, not incidents) is 1.7% of women over the first 6.91 months of the academic year (pg 11,7). Note though that the survey question requires that force or the threat of force was used, so women may not have responded yes if someone had sex with them while they were incapacitated.
I’d estimate a rate of about 2.6% per 12 months, a bit less than the naïve result since a lot of completed rapes seem to occur first semester freshman year.
The response rate was 91.6% (pg 11), which is very high (almost unbelievably high), but would seem to address concerns about response bias that I think plague many of the other surveys. Still, the survey required women to answer questions posed by a stranger. I can easily imagine victims being reluctant to admit they were raped to a stranger, so I have to wonder if there is an under-reporting problem.
Almost 50% of the women do not consider themselves to have been raped despite the fact that the incidents meet the definition of rape (pg 15). I think this is a huge complicating factor that’s been ignored in the thread and that complicates taking the numbers at face value. There are ambiguities. For instance, I’m a 6’ 2”, 210 pound man. By the technical definition, I was clearly raped in college at least once by a girlfriend, but there’s also no way I’d ever consider myself to have been raped.
Personally, I think a rate of 2.6% / year isn’t so high that it’s “obviously wrong”. But this still implies a rate of around 10% over 4 years.
In the thread, there’s been some discussion about why parents would send their daughters to college if these statistics are even close to true. Here are my opinions -
I think it’s incorrect to assume that it’s because parents don’t know the risk of sexual assault. If nothing else, the mothers of girls know their own experiences with sexual assault (attempted or completed) and so probably understand the real risks of sexual assault pretty well. They might not talk about their experiences even to their friends or husbands but they’re still aware of them.
If you look at page 19, almost 60% of the offenders were friends or (ex-)boyfriends of the victim. I think mothers associate the risk of rape with the reality of being a woman or of dating or of getting very drunk. They don’t associate the risk with attending college. Also, as I highlighted above, a lot of these events are in the “ambiguous” category. Mothers send their daughters to college because women run this risk whether they’re in college or not so they might as well get an education. This is a depressing thought but I think they’re right.
Some evidence for this is that the risk of rape for non-students is about the same as for students, and the rate of completed rape before girls leave for college is pretty high too. One counterargument is that a lot of rapes occur 1st semester of freshman year, which would seem to indicate that there are large risks that are unique to a college environment. But I think this is offset by the fact that college men are higher SES and generally much less likely to be criminals than non-college men.
That makes no sense to me and I find that infinitely sad. I can’t imagine there are that many kids that can’t turn to their parents for support. I’m the first one my kids call…and I distinctly remember my mother (and my grandmother) telling me when i left for college that if anything happened to me like pregnancy or assault to call them and they would be there for me. My kids know the same thing good or bad, I’d always be there for them if they needed me.
I was talking to my son a couple of weeks ago. He is 26. He just told me a story about something that happened in college. I had no freaking clue. Better I did not know.
I have found that as years pass, and my kids’ college years grow more and more distant, I learn more and more about my kids’ college years.
“Almost 50% of the women do not consider themselves to have been raped despite the fact that the incidents meet the definition of rape (pg 15). I think this is a huge complicating factor that’s been ignored in the thread and that complicates taking the numbers at face value.”
We had previously discussed the Loyola/Tulane survey in which the MAJORITY of rapes counted by the study’s author were incidents where the victims specifically said that they were not raped.
You say you were not raped but I say you were. What exactly are we supposed to do/think of that?
The next question is, how does the woman feel about the experience? Suppose a woman thinks, “We’d been drinking. We went to his room. I said no repeatedly but he forced me. It wasn’t rape, because I went to his room voluntarily, but ever since then I haven’t been able to sleep or study.” That’s one thing. She’s not calling it rape, but clearly (1) it was rape and (2) it was bad for her. She might benefit from realizing she was raped, and her rape was the fault of her rapist, not her.
Suppose a woman thinks, “Yeah, I was really really drunk. He was pretty drunk too. I guess I was incapacitated, but we both got what we wanted. No problem.” That’s a different thing. I see no point in persuading her that she was raped (or him that he was raped, or both of them that they both were raped).
I’m not saying rape is in the eye of the beholder. I’m saying a different thing: thinking you weren’t raped when technically you were is sometimes fine, and sometimes harmful.
It’s not just women who will describe a clear rape and insist it’s not rape. It’s also worthwhile thinking about guys who think that forcible sex is not rape, or sometimes isn’t rape, or isn’t rape if they do it. Remember, again, the survey where ~30% of guys say they’d force a woman to have sex if no one would know, but “only” ~15% said they’d rape a woman if no one would know. These guys need to learn what the word “rape” means.
In the same survey, twice as many men said they had in fact forced a woman to have sex as were willing to admit that they had raped a woman. The numbers were a lot smaller, well less than five percent, but again these were men revealing they think there is some way to force a woman to have sex without it being rape.
Yet another study (hat tip to another CC member who PMed it to me), this one from Barnard. The relevant question is more vague than we’d like:
“During the past twelve months, have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because you were pressured, forced, or otherwise did not provide consent?” Yes, 8%.
As other posters and I have said several times, the surveys that you are referencing are measuring different things. You can’t just read the first number in a survey and expect it to be applicable to the first number in completely different survey. I’ll use the Congo and Syracuse studies as examples since both have been linked.
Measurement Method – The “Syracuse” study nested questions about sexual experiences within a longer health survey. The questionnaire was anonymous without an interviewer. The Congo study involved going from household to household, interviewing persons about sexual assault, including assaults with their partner living in the household. The author of the Congo study writes,
It should be obvious that you are going to get very different rates of persons choosing to report their incidents in surveys with these different methods.
Incidents Included – The “Syracuse” study used the SES questionnaire, asking about forced and incapacitated sexual assaults (not using words like “sexual assault” or “rape”) and spoke about both attempted and completed. The Congo study found that 23% reported forced sex with partner and 12% reported rape. This suggests that the rape totals do not include forced sex with partners, which is the likely the majority of incidents. There also does not appear to be questions that talk about incapacitated rape, which was the largest portion of the overall rapes in the “Syracuse” study. If you include very different types of incidents, you are expected to get very different totals.
Measurement Group – The “Syracuse” study only included 18-21 year old women. The Congo study included women aged 15-49, but did not ask the age 15-17 some of the questions. The Congo study mentions notably different rate of rape in past 12 months for different age groups, so one can expect that had they only included women in the “Syracuse” study age group, they would have different results.
I could go on and/or make a similar list for prison, but the point is it is not appropriate to compared the two as you have. If you insist on comparing US sexual assault numbers to numbers in the Congo, the USDOJ study you are fond of would be more appropriate than the SES ones since the USDOJ uses in person household interviewers, asks more similar questions to the Congo survey, and includes results from a more similar age range. And of course, the Congo rates become far higher that US when you start comparing more similar methods/groups like this.
I put this survey up because I’d been wondering when we’d get something from a women’s college, but I agree that without a definition of “pressured” (and they apparently didn’t supply one to survey takers) it’s difficult to conclude anything. I’d take 8% as a ceiling. But the ceiling is so high it’s pretty much useless.
The UC numbers are 7% of female undergraduates experienced “unwanted sexual contact” during their time at the UC. Also, 2% of male undergraduates.
I so prefer the SES survey, where they say explicitly what conduct they’re asking about. “Unwanted sexual contact” and “pressured to have sex” are so vague.
This is apparently the same survey that was given at Cal Poly. The Cal Poly link I gave upthread might be the numbers from this survey, broken down for Cal Poly only.
The survey should ask the questions we want to know the answer to. If we want to know whether someone thinks they’ve been raped, then we should ask them whether they’ve been raped.
But if we want to know whether someone has been forced to have sex against their will, whether or not they label that as rape, then we should ask them if anyone has forced them to have sex against their will, for example by holding them down. That’s a survey question I want to know the answer to. I’m less interested in how the person labels the experience than by what the experience was.
The interesting thing about the UC reports is how the campuses vary. Whatever “unwanted sexual contact” is, 18% of UC Santa Barbara women undergrads say they experienced it, as compared to 5% of women undergraduates at Davis. At Merced, 4% of female undergrads say they experienced it, as did 4% of male undergrads.
For those who know how IQ is measured, and the scales involved…Well, let’s just say that this doesn’t inspire confidence, @TV4caster.
I mean, really—I’ve said that nearly all language is ambiguous, which is actually particularly true if you look at things through a linguistic microscope (as you’ve been doing). I’ve offered ethos for that; you’ve asserted otherwise, but haven’t explained any of your grounds for the disagreement except for an attempted proof by repeated assertion. Time to up your game, I’d say—because this is actually a really big deal, in the context of this discussion.
My wife went to UCSB for two years. From what she saw there, she thinks the 1 in 5 number for actual sexual assaults was true when she was there. Of course, this is 38 years ago.
Page 92 of the UCSC report is interesting. The survey still leaves a lot to be desired, but there was a gang rape along with unwanted touching.
@dfbdfb Oh geez. Ethos. Then how can I argue with that. I only unblocked you to see what your reply was and will now go back to blocking you so that you won’t have to worry about any more of my unproven assertions. I don’t have the time or energy to waste arguing with someone so
This thread has run its course anyway.
I was kidding anyway about my cv. I really never graduated from HS and have been unemployed and living in my parents basement for 40 years. I am typing this at a public library and actually have an IQ of 85 (not that IQ means anything, as you pointed out. Stephen Hawking and others actually developed World Class theories through luck and complete randomness).
I could never argue with such an esteemed intellect as yourself. Congratulations btw on figuring it all out! Please run for office so we can start getting some stuff done in this country.
@TV4caster—it occurred to me overnight that, perhaps, we’re talking past each other a bit on the whole survey prompt ambiguity. You may have been misreading me as claiming that communication is ultimately impossible, because language is inherently ambiguous. This is not what I’m saying—I’m nowhere near being a postmodernist. What I am saying is that language is inherently ambiguous, and it’s really only the fact that (in natural uses of language) utterances occur within the bounds of a conversation,* and such conversations provide the bounds within which the ambiguity of language collapses into something that actually works.
Conversation here defined in a technical sense, and thus a very broad one, to include all sorts of linguistic interaction, even to the point of, e.g., someone listening to a radio ad.
This is an uncontroversial position within linguistic. Seriously—it’s pretty much everything semantics and linguistic pragmatics has found over the past several decades, plus the emerging sociolinguistic study of naturally-occurring misunderstandings. There is a massive scholarly literature out there on this.
However, survey prompts are divorced (partially—there’s still the context of the survey instrument) from context, and therefore from ordinary conversational context. This means that they’re inherently more ambiguous than regular utterances would be. This is why reliability is what’s crucial for them, not a perfect lack of ambiguity.
You’ve claimed that I’m wrong on the inherent ambiguity of language—no, I’m not.** You’ve claimed that you’ve pointed out that I’m wrong on “a lot” of other things; aside from the issue of survey prompts; the only one I can recall is the issue of survey prompts needing to be reliable rather than perfectly non-ambiguous—and no, I’m not.*** I’m unaware of any others, but I wouldn’t mind being reminded of them. If I’m actually wrong on any of them, I’d be happy to walk back on them, but I can’t do that if I can’t find them.
** Which a cursory review of the scholarly literature would tell you.
*** Which, again, a review of the scholarly literature would tell you.
