Is Marquette Finally Going to Tell the Truth About Campus Date Rape?

Sent out last fall by Marquette: a “Teal Poster” about sexual violence.

It touts the following statistics:

Believe...
“1 in 5 women and 1 in 70 men will experience rape in their lifetime.”
(National Crime Victims Survey, 2007)
“7 out of 10 rape survivors knew their attacker.”
(National Crime Victims Survey, 2007)
“People between the ages of 18 to 24 experience the highest prevalence of stalking, sexual assault an dating violence.”
U.S. Department of Justice (Revised, 2012)
“1 in 4 Stalking victims are cyberstalked”
U.S. Bureau of Justice, 2009

What is missing? Bogus statistics about the incidence of campus date rape.

We have found that our students have been told that 20% of college women are victims of date rape. And indeed, one “training” module that was mandated for all University employees last fall used a somewhat scarier statistic, claiming that 25% of college women are victims of “some sort of sexual assault.”

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We called Susannah Bartlow, director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, which was responsible for the poster. We wanted to ask her whether Marquette is backing off inflated claims about date rape.  We left voice mail, but she never got back to us.

Instead, Brian Dorrington, head public relations guy at Marquette, responded.

(It’s significant that nobody in the Provost’s office will talk to us, but rather gives Dorrington the task of framing an evasive response.)

Dorrington said:

Hi John,

Susannah Bartlow shared your inquiry with me and I’m writing to provide context. This year’s sexual violence prevention poster offers new information and statistics to expand the knowledge base of our university community on this important topic. The information from both posters is accurate and includes widely accepted statistics. We have worked diligently to educate our entire campus community about preventing sexual misconduct. This includes sexual violence prevention and bystander intervention during the past four years and mandatory training for all first-year students.

Dorrington, of course, has completely and entirely avoided our query, which was whether Marquette is backing off of the bogus statistics it has been giving students.  Perhaps he did not understand our query, or perhaps he simply was unwilling to admit that Marquette is backing off something it has been (falsely) telling students.

That colleges (following feminist activists) have been trafficking in bogus, grossly inflated statistics about date rape is not new information.

The first widely noticed article questioning inflated date rape statistics appeared in 1991, written by Berkeley professor Neil Gilbert.

And of course, we have repeatedly blogged on the issue.

Why Inflate the Problem?

The chronic inflation of the problem of sexual assault on campus is the result of the confluence of two forces.

The first is feminism, which casts men as the evil oppressor class. What better metaphor for male evil than the notion that lots of men are raping women. Indeed, why not go beyond that and say that all men are responsible for the prevalence of rape, or that a “rape culture” encompasses all men?

Thus, a certain R. Clifton Spargo from the English Department, in a campus program on sexual violence. . .

. . . rejected the notion that rape is “merely aberrant, deviant behavior,” and told the male members of the audience “you are living in the rape culture.” Where? “On Campus. In the bars.”

The other force is the interests of campus bureaucrats. Hyping “sexual violence” is a justification for programs, and initiatives, workshops, and indoctrination sessions. All which have the effect of inflating the budgets and staffs of campus bureaucrats.

There are a few things that students should be told about rape. The “Teal Poster” is pretty good in this regard. Women should be told that, if a victim of rape, they should not shower, not change their clothes, but go immediately to an Emergency Room. Women should be told to be careful about ever taking a drink if it might possibly contain a date rape drug.

And women ought to be strongly encouraged to report rape. The entire student body should encourage women to report rape and support those who do. This is more likely to happen if Marquette can (honestly) tell students that reports of rape will be dealt with in a sensitive and professional manner.

But it doesn’t help when Marquette makes stupid statements about rape.

This page, for example, says that a women has not consented to sex if she is “Giving in or going along with someone to gain approval.” A lot of women have sex to gain approval. A guy who makes his “approval” continent on getting sex is not a gentleman, but he’s not a rapist either (at least if that’s all he does).

Another stupid statement coming from Marquette was in the “training” module required of all employees and faculty. It flatly asserts that rape is “not about sex, it’s about power.” If that’s true, why is it “sexual assault” rather than “power assault?”

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Another stupid statement is found in the “Teal Poster.” It tells students:

Consent. If you want to have sexual contact with someone, it is your responsibility to make sure they consent...enthusiastically!

No, grudging consent will do. A guy who gets only grudging consent from his date really ought to back off. But he’s not rapist if he fails to.

Making stupid statements about rape encourages students to blow off the “training” that Marquette offers as politically correct indoctrination, rather than good advice and information.

Marquette Compromised

Then there is the fact that Marquette is badly compromised in dealing with campus rape, having covered up two serious cases of sexual assault during the 2011 school year. Both were reported by the Chicago Tribune. Here is one report. And here is the other.

Conclusion

If Marquette is backing off of bogus claims about campus date rape, good. But it would be better if the University admitted that the numbers it has been giving students are badly inflated, and that a sober view of the situation requires good data.

The Feminists’ Bogus Rape Statistics

We recently took the “anti-rape” activists on campus to task for the general lameness of demonstrating against something that everybody is against, and especially for their use of bogus statistics about the incidence of rape.

The activists cite a 2000 Justice Department report as showing that a quarter of American college women have been victims of rape. The study, of course, is online, and can be easily analyzed — at least by somebody used to the labyrinthine structure of reports like this.

The authors struggle mightily to jack up the numbers of women who have been victimized by rape, but end up far short of the numbers they need.

The report claims, for example, that 1.7% of college women had (as of the time of the survey) been victims of rape since the beginning of the school year. They then add another 1.1% who had been victims of attempted rape. Of course, attempted rape is a bad thing, but not nearly so bad as a completed rape. We would not like to be the victim of an attempted murder, but . . . well, you get the point. (See page 11 of the report.)

So the authors, by combining the two numbers, get 2.8%. They then note that this is for a period of (on average) 6.9 months and the extrapolate and say that this is really 4.9% per year, and that with five years (on average) needed to finish college, “the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions might climb to between one-fifth and one-quarter.” (p. 10)

But of course, their own report admits that women in college are more likely to be raped than women who are not, and it seems questionable to assume that over the summer months, when many women are working, living with parents, away from the party atmosphere of the campus, etc. that they would face nearly the same threat of rape (or attempted rape, remember). The report concedes:

College campuses host large concentrations of young women who are at greater risk for rape and other forms of sexual assault than women in the general population or in a comparable age group. (p. iii)

Yet another problem is that multiplying the yearly victimization numbers by five makes sense only if no woman is a victim more than once. If particular women are victimized in the first year, and again in the following years, you have fewer new victims, and the total number of women who have been victimized is not so high as it would be if each woman had been victimized only once. Indeed, the study admits:

Consistent across the models, it was found that four main factors consistently increased the risk of sexual victimization: (1) frequently drinking enough to get drunk, (2) being unmarried, (3) having been a victim of a sexual assault before the start of the current school year, and (4) living on campus (for on-campus victimization only). (see page 23)

We might add dating frequently, dating scummy guys, and going to venues where the guys view the women as sexual prey.

But even worse, the authors do a comparison study, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, and find that the rate of rape to be only 0.16% for completed rape, and 0.18% for attempted rape (see page 14).

The massive discrepancy between the two studies should create huge skepticism.

In the main study, women where asked why they did not report the rape (95% did not report it). A broad range of possible answers were suggested, most of them plausible and reasonably socially acceptable — for example “did not want other people to know” or “afraid of reprisal by assailant or others.” Yet 65.4% of the victims of “completed rape” and 76.5% of the victims of “attempted rape” said that they “did not think it was serious enough to report” (pp. 24-26).

Among the 86 incidents that the researchers classified as “completed rape,” the women, when asked “Do you consider this incident to be a rape?” answered “no” 48.8% of the time (p. 15).

Worse, the authors report that “Victims in the sample generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries.” (p. 22)

These findings suggest that the definition of rape used by the researchers was too broad. We can’t imagine results like this among women victimized by real rapes.

Findings like this ought to make any social scientist hesitate to make any strong assertions about the exact incidence of rape. But latching onto an outlier that produces the highest possible incidence of rape (but still not high enough to support feminist claims) is not responsible.