1 in 4 Women: How the Latest Sexual Assault Statistics Were Turned into Click Bait by the 'New York Times'

Article here. Excerpt:

'As someone who has worked on college campuses to educate men and women about sexual assault and consent, I have seen the barriers to raising awareness and changing attitudes. Chief among them, in my experience, is a sense of skepticism--especially among college-aged men--that sexual assault is even all that dire of a problem to begin with.

"1 in 4? 1 in 5? Come on, it can't be that high. That's just feminist propaganda!"

A lot of the statistics that get thrown around in this area (they seem to think) have more to do with politics and ideology than with careful, dispassionate science. So they often wave away the issue of sexual assault--and won't engage on issues like affirmative consent.

In my view, these are the men we really need to reach.

So enter the headline from last week's New York Times coverage of the latest college campus sexual assault survey:

"1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus."

But that's not what the survey showed. And you don't have to read all 288 pages of the published report to figure this out (although I did that today just to be sure). The executive summary is all you need.

Here is what the authors of the survey--prepared on behalf of the Association of American Universities (AAU)--had to say in their introductory remarks:

`[E]stimates such as "1 in 5" or "1 in 4" as a global rate [are] oversimplistic, if not misleading. None of the studies which generate estimates for specific IHEs [institutes of higher education] are nationally representative.`

They go on to highlight that only 19.3 percent of students who were contacted actually responded to the survey, despite incentives--a low response rate for these kinds of surveys--and that even they were not likely to be representative of the student body within their own schools.'

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