The Hunting Ground Uses a Striking Statistic About Campus Rape That’s Almost Certainly False

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Hunting Ground, a documentary that aired on CNN Sunday night after garnering a great deal of publicity on the festival and campus circuits, tells some horrific stories about sexual assaults on college campuses, and in doing so it raises a number of important, damning questions about how campus administrators handle rape allegations. Unfortunately, it also presents some extremely questionable research about campus rape in far too credulous a light.
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This gets to the heart of why Lisak's viral zombie statistic is so damaging: It simply leads people astray. No one is arguing that serial sexual predators don't exist in college settings. But there's startlingly little evidence for Lisak's claims that they commit the vast majority of rapes on campus. Rather, it appears that for whatever reason — and this is where further research is so crucial — many men in college are capable of committing rape in a "limited" (for lack of a less terrible term) manner. And yet for years, Lisak and Miller's paper has served as a flashing neon light pointing researchers and activists in what is very likely the wrong direction. This could go down as a major scientific misstep.

The Hunting Ground's producers aren't the first people to have become morbidly enamored with David Lisak's serial-rapist theory, but it's unfortunate, given the reach and influence of their film, that they did.'