When I wrote about the Association of American Universities’ massive sexual-assault survey last week, which found an assault rate of just under one in four college women, what jumped out immediately was its sloppy definition of “incapacitation.”
For succinctness and punch, the best may come from Stuart Taylor in The Washington Post.
Co-author of a book on the Duke lacrosse rape case and a fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution,
Taylor points out the low response rate (19 percent), the overrepresentation of women among respondents (60 percent vs. half of the student population) and wide variation in assault rates against women among the 27 surveyed schools (13-30 percent).
He points out a startling inconsistency in the data that the survey designers failed to acknowledge:
These tables indicate that about 2.2 percent of female respondents said they had reported to their schools that they had been penetrated without consent (including rape) since entering college.
If extrapolated to the roughly 10 million female college student population nationwide, this would come to about 220,000 student reports to universities alleging forced sex over (to be conservative) five years, or about 44,000 reports per year.
But this would be almost nine times the total number of students (just over 5,000) who reported sexual assaults of any kind to their universities in 2013, the most recent data available, according to the reports that universities must submit to the federal government under the Clery Act.
...Sadly, the only attention these analyses seem to be getting on campus is angry disbelief.
One alleged rape victim went so far as to deny the validity of statistical critiques because, well, it happened to her, and anecdotes beat ambiguous data..."
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