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The 1/5 statistic: reading the source document

The 1/5 statistic: reading the source document

Last updated on: March 1, 2015 at 10:21 pm by Jane the Actuary

The 1/5 statistic: reading the source document 2015-03-01T22:21:07-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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After my first “insta-lanche” earlier today (for those who don’t know, that means that Glen Reynolds, the “instapundit,” links to your piece on his blog and you get a reader count several orders of magnitude higher than usual – in this case, this morning’s “Campus Sexual Assault: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when. . .“), I found the original report, so, now that it’s quiet in the house, I’m going to go all Jane the Actuary-ish on you and read and comment on it.

The report is entitled “The Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study”; here’s the link.

Let’s start with the executive summary. Here’s the basic methodology:

The CSA Study involved conducting a Web-based survey of random samples of undergraduate students at two large public universities, one located in the South (University 1) and one located in the Midwest (University 2). The CSA Survey was administered in the Winter of 2006, and a total of 5,446 undergraduate women and 1,375 undergraduate men participated. Because the male component of the study was exploratory, the data and results presented in this summary represent women only. The CSA Study was reviewed and approved by RTI’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), as well as the university IRBs.

We drew random samples of students aged 18-25 and enrolled at least three-quarters’ time at each university to participate in the CSA Study. Sampled students were sent an initial recruitment e-mail that described the study, provided a unique CSA Study ID#, and included a hyperlink to the CSA Study Web site. During each of the following weeks, students who had not completed the survey were sent follow-up e-mails and a hard-copy letter encouraging them to participate. The overall response rates for survey completion for the undergraduate women sampled at the two universities were 42.2% and 42.8%, respectively.

Note that they specifically say that they asked the men whether they had ever been perpetrators; whether they also ask the same “victim” questions isn’t clear.

The women who responded were of all ages, not just graduating seniors.

Here are there headline statistics:

16% of respondents experienced “attempted or completed sexual assault before entering college.”

19% of respondents experienced “completed or attempted sexual assault since entering college.” Given that women at all stages of their college careers were surveyed, unless this statistic reflects massaging of the data, then this implies that the actual percentage of women who are victims at some point during their college career would be a lot higher.

But then there are more breakdowns.

Of the pre-college assaults, 10.1% were attempted, and 11.3% completed (this doesn’t add to 16% because some respondents experience both). Of the completed, 6.4% were physically forced and 7.0% were based on incapacity (drug/alcohol use) — the attempted assaults aren’t similarly broken down.

Of the college assaults, 12.6% were attempted and 13.7% completed. Again, the attempts aren’t further broken-down. The completeds split into 4.7% physically forced, of which 1.4% were sexual battery and 3.4% were rape; and 11.1% incapacitated, further split into 2.6% sexual battery and 8.5% rape, and further split into 7.8% alcohol or drug use, 0.6% cases in which the women were certain they had been drugged, 1.7% cases where women suspected they had been drugged, and 1.0% “other” — e.g., sleeping or unconscious.

Now, all of these numbers are high — we’re looking at 3.4% of women saying they were victims of “rape rape” during their college years, that is, excluding those who were drinking or high. But consider that women who have been victims are almost certainly going to respond to a survey like this to have their voice be heard, and women who haven’t are more likely to be indifferent, so, for simplicity’s sake, let’s knock that figure down to 1.5%.

And what’s more, what of the 16% who reported being victims before college, or the 6.4% who were victims of a completed sexual assault not due to drug/alcohol incapacity? Why is no one flipping out about this figure?

More interesting figures: on reporting 2% of incapacitated victims reported the incident to police, compared to 13% of those who experienced physically-forced assault. Why not?

For those who were incapacitated, 67% said “they did not think it was serious enough to report,” 35% said “it was unclear that a crime was committed or that harm was intended,” and 29% said they didn’t want anyone to know about the incident. (Note that these figures group rape and other non-rape assault.)

For those who were physically-forced, and didn’t report, 56% said “not serious enough,” 35% said, “not clear it’s a crime,” and 42% “don’t want anyone to know.”

Definitions

In the CSA Study, we consider as incapacitated sexual assault any unwanted sexual contact occurring when a victim is unable to provide consent or stop what is happening because she is passed out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated, or asleep, regardless of whether the perpetrator was responsible for her substance use or whether substances were administered without her knowledge.

Three types of incapacitated sexual assault. 1) drug-facilitated (“slipped a Mickey”), 2) suspected drug-facilitated, and 3rd:

The third type of incapacitated sexual assault considered in the CSA Study is termed alcohol and/or other drug- (AOD-) enabled sexual assault. We recognize that most women who drink or use drugs do so voluntarily and that the vast majority of situations in which a woman is incapacitated because of the effects of alcohol or drugs are not caused by coercive or clandestine action on the part of another individual. However, if a woman experiences unwanted sexual contact when she is incapacitated and unable to provide consent because of voluntary consumption of alcohol or other drugs, a sexual assault has nonetheless occurred. We consider the assault to be directly enabled by the use of alcohol or other drugs. Although it is important to distinguish between DFSA and sexual assault occurring after voluntary substance abuse, we believe that both are clear instances of incapacitated sexual assault and classify them accordingly.

The Survey Itself

The report describes extensively background literature and various correlations in the data, and then gets to the real meat of the report: the survey questions.

One accusation that one often reads of these sorts of studies is that incidents are classified by the researchers as sexual assault when the survey respondent didn’t consider the incident to be any such thing – e.g., by asking, without context, “have you ever had sexual contact with a man while you were drunk?” Is that what’s happening here?

Their definition of sexual assault seems overly-broad in one sense, to be sure, as they include “forced touching of a sexual nature (forced kissing, touching of private parts, grabbing, fondling, rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes).”

And the question about incapacitated sexual contact is this: “Has someone had sexual contact with you when you were unable to provide consent or stop what was happening because you were passed out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated, or asleep?”

Is this a survey question that leads its respondents to answer “yes” for next-day regrets? If I take just the second half of the question, “unable to stop what was happening,” given that this is an anonymous survey, you’d think that this ought to happen infrequently, unless it’s simply the case that women, in their own minds, convince themselves, due to next-day regrets, that the sex they only hazily remember was sex they didn’t want.

But the first part? If they read the question somewhat legalistically, the student could interpret this question as simply meaning “I was drunk, therefore, technically, I didn’t consent.” Is this how a significant number of the students interpreted the question? I don’t know.

The Bottom Line

So the 19% figure isn’t particularly useful, especially since, if you want to take it seriously, you have to pair it with the 16% pre-college figure. Is the right number 1.5%? What, after all, do you make of the fact that the survey was conducted in the winter, that is, halfway through the academic year, and roughly equal numbers of freshmen/sophmores/juniors/seniors participated?

So I’m disappointed, and going to bed. Goodnight!

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