One-in-One-Thousand-Eight-Hundred-Seventy-Seven

Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-12-13 15:34

From 2011, but highly bookmark-able. Send this to anyone who throws the thoroughly-debunked (but not acknowledged as such by POTUS, et al.) 1-in-4 statistic at you. Excerpt:

'You can not have an article on sexual assault in college, of course, without a solemn invocation of that infamous, oft-repeated, almost-as-oft-debunked One-in-Fourstatistic. The Trib does not disappoint:

The National Sexual Violence Research Center in Enola, northwest of Harrisburg, estimates 20 percent to 25 percent of women are victims of forced sex during their time in college.

But where the Trib, like everyone else who uncritically accepts this uncritical notion, does disappoint is in its failure to acknowledge that the numbers do not add up. And, in fact, that they do not even come close.

As a supplement to that same article, the Trib published a Campus Safety sidebar that provided a list of reported sexual assault offenses for eight local colleges over the past three years. All told, there were 65. 

65. At 8 colleges. Among tens of thousands of female students. Over 3 years.

That’s a long way from 1-in-4. And thus a complete repudiation of the now-boilerplate statistic claimed in the article.

Those numbers, however, only represent reported assaults that occurred in student housing. Surely the numbers would be much higher, and much more alarming, once you counted sexual assaults that occurred elsewhere on campus and in the community at large. Surely that would get us much closer to the canonical 1-in-4 wisdom. 

I decided to test that theory by examining the sexual assault statistics at Pittsburgh’s three largest residential universities: the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duquesne University.
...
At the University of Pittsburgh, there are roughly 14,800 female students. If their chances of being sexually assaulted are 1-in-4, there should be about 3,700 sexual assaults each year. In 2009, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, Pitt students reported 4.'

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