Campus Sexual Assault is back again: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when. . .

Last updated on: September 22, 2015 at 12:16 pm by Jane the Actuary

Campus Sexual Assault is back again: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when. . . 2015-09-22T12:16:12-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Back a year ago, I wrote a little piece I titled “Campus Sexual Assault: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when. . .” , in which I said, of the “1 if 5” study of the day:

Glen Reynolds likes to say of global warming activists who jet to exotic locales (in private jets, to boot) and have enormous mansions, “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when they act like it’s a crisis.”

This statistic says that, assuming a 4-year college career (considering that some take more, and some leave college earlier, without graduating), every year, one out of 19 women is assaulted. (I did the math.) If that were really true in a real sense of the word, if every year, on average, every female college student knew at least one friend or acquaintance who was assaulted, then the atmosphere would be quite different. An article like Emily Yoffe’s piece in Slate from a year ago, arguing that college women shouldn’t be binge drinking, would be treated as common sense rather than as an insult and abrogation of women’s rights. More significantly, future female college students would be looking, first and foremost, at the safety of their chosen schools, and those with high sexual assault rates would find their enrollment falling. The fact that this isn’t happening is a clear sign that this 1 in 5 figure is bogus — and that the CDC has no business, as a credible organization, promoting it.

Now there’s a new AAU study which repeats the 1 in 5 number, but, again, it includes “rape rape”, sex while intoxicated, sex without affirmative consent, and unwanted kissing and sexual touching. The key numbers are on page 92 of the PDF:

For female undergraduates, 23.1% reported “Nonconsensual Penetration or Sexual Touching Involving Physical Force or Incapacitation.”

This number splits out into 10.8% penetration; 17.7% sexual touching (greater than 23.1% because some reported both).

For penetration the split is 5.7% physical force (includes both attempted and completed); 5.4% incapacitation (defined as being “unable to consent [to??] or stop what was happening because you were passed out, asleep or incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol” p. 47 of the PDF).

What’s more, the response rate was 19%. The report itself tries to suggest that this could mean either that women with experiences were more likely to participate (to make their stories known) or less likely (because they wanted to keep them secret) but it seems far more likely to be the former than the latter, given the anonymity of the survey.

Which means, again, that the headline rate of 1 in 5 is not very meaningful.

Also note that “the higher the proportion of undergraduate females enrolled on campus, the higher the rate of victimization for undergraduate females” (p. 54 of the PDF). Does this make sense? You’d think it’d be the opposite, unless (a) female-dominated campuses are more likely to promote awareness and result in more women perceiving what’s happened as an assault or (b) the climate in such a campus is poisoned by an imbalance in which men, by their scarcity, are more able to be, let’s say, womanizers.

But be that as it may, to whatever extent these surveys reveal problems on campus, the answer is not an endless array of training programs, and subjecting men to reconditioning, to improve their behavior.

Perhaps, though, it is time to rethink the American model of higher education, with its notion of “going away to college” at the age of 18, to live in dormitories full of other 18 year olds, many more eager for parties than a meaningful learning experience. If this artificial experience of living with your peers, partying, having “Sex Week” activities, etc., produces a climate even remotely like what’s reported, never mind the drinking on top of that, because students have seemingly all the free time in the world, then the whole system needs to change. And I say this as a mother of a 15 year old who worries that he could end up in the dorms with exactly the sort of roommate that shows up in these anecdotes, bringing a girl over for sex without regard for the roommate sleeping in the top bunk.

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