I think that respondents must have been able to list more than one reason. If that’s true, I think you need to focus on the most commonly given reasons.
And if there were 657 assaults, and only 37 of them were afraid of being treated poorly by the justice system, how big a problem is fear of being treated poorly by the justice system? This is commonly portrayed as a huge reason for the failure to report, but these stats don’t really bear that out.
I see now that they could list more than one reason (because otherwise the numbers don’t add up).
But the numbers here to focus on are 657 assaults and 27 reports. That’s 4% of the assaults being reported to law enforcement, including campus security, which may not be an actual police force. With such a small number of assaults being reported, there is low-hanging fruit to be had, even if you eliminate the non-rape assaults and the assaults that the person didn’t think were serious enough to report, which categories probably have a substantial overlap.
To double the reports, one just has to get 27 of the 630 non-reporters to report. I’d go after the categories of Victim thought she was responsible (educate victims that their assailant is responsible for their assault, not them-- publicity is already helping here, with other accusers coming forward), Fear of being treated badly (don’t treat victims badly), and Did not think police would think it was serious enough (police should treat sexual assault as the serious crime it is).
Low-hanging fruit. Start by going after the low-hanging fruit.
The other thing to think about is which two large public universities were surveyed. I’d venture to guess that police/prosecutor attitudes toward rape accusers vary more across the country than rape rates at campuses. That is, I’d guess that the rape rate at Yale and at UVa (to pull two colleges out of thin air) is probably pretty similar, but the justice systems at the cities the two schools are in might be very different and perhaps neither justice system is representative of the entire country.
Here is an update on one the cases in the book:
@hunt:
Why should you be surprised they would be reluctant to report sexual assault? With forced rape of the stereotypical kind, even now with rape shield laws (barring the victim’s name from being mentioned, despite the fact that some sleazeball lawyers still try to leak names, or threaten to, to get the victim to shut up), despite the fact that lawyers are no longer allowed in court to try and discredit the victim by asking about her sex life, what she was wearing and so forth, and despite the fact that not unlike places like Pakistan, there once was a culture in this country blaming the victim, that she must have 'asked for it, that has changed, there is still a lot of reluctance for victims to come forward if they have been raped or sexually assaulted (non consensual sex while drinking), there is still shame out there and fear that keeps those crimes from being fully reported.
In the case of sexual assault when the girl had been drinking , there is still the attitude out there that it is her fault (I am using her, because most cases of sexual assault are a man against a woman, though same sex ones do happen). When the animals in Ohio sexually assaulted the girl in the Steubenville case, or Glen Rock in New Jersey where a bunch of jocks sexually assaulted a mentally handicapped girl, a lot of people blamed the victim for ‘putting herself in that position’, and the lawyer for the garbage who did it tried to argue it was consensual, since the girl went willingly with the boys…
So there most definitely is a culture that still allows these things to be underreported.A girl from a conservative family might be unwilling to report it, especially if she was sexually active and it was a case where it got out of control or something, there are a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t be reported. Among other things, victims need to be reassured their names won’t be out there publicly, or be allowed to be dragged through the mud, and schools have to establish severe penalties for those who out the names of victims, which especially when it concerns athletes at big name schools, is often a tactic used to keep victims quiet.
Yes, there is a difference between forced rape, and non consensual sex (either the victim was unable to consent, or where they tried to say no in the middle of consensual sex and the other person didn’t stop), but both are real problems, and most of all, it takes convincing victims they are not to blame, that ultimately it is owned by the other person if something bad happens, that like with rape, is never the victims fault.
[quote[it takes convincing victims they are not to blame, that ultimately it is owned by the other person if something bad happens
[/quote]
i agree with this in theory, but I do not think it does women as a gender any good to absolve them of all responsibility. You can’t have it both ways…laws to protect your right to your body your rights to be equal and then on a dime try to promote the concept that women bear zero responsibility for any actions they might choose to take and need protectionism.
This is kind of an old discussion, and I had to refresh my memory, but I was focusing on the study of reasons for non-reporting. They are different from what people seem to assume, that’s all.