Misusing Data On Campus Rape

Article here. Excerpt:

'Students across the country have just started the fall semester, and undoubtedly some parents are worried. Perhaps they heard of the Department of Education’s 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, which called the statistics on sexual violence, “deeply troubling and a call to action for the nation.” Or maybe they read Vice President Joe Biden’s recent letter stating that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted on college campuses. If those numbers were true then we would have a crisis of terrifying proportions. As it turns out, that epidemic is false.

A 2014 Department of Justice study found just 6.1 per 1000 (.61%) women in post-secondary institutions were the victims of rape or sexual assault between 1995-2013. While any sexual assault is to be abhorred, these findings do not support claims of rampant sexual abuse. A few weeks ago, ninety law professors issued a white paper in support of the Dear Colleague Letter. Neither the Department of Education, nor Vice President Biden, nor the authors of the White Paper bothered to mention the Department of Justice figures. Instead they point to a 2007 National Institute of Justice study that looked at just two large public universities. The lead researchers were so troubled by the misuse of their findings that they “felt the need to set the record straight” and published a piece in Time Magazine stating “(t)he 1-in-5 statistic is not a nationally representative estimate of the prevalence of sexual assault...” Another oft-cited study is the 2015 Association of American Universities Campus Climate Survey, which found 1 in 4 women surveyed from 27 Institutes of Higher Education had been raped or sexually assaulted while in college. Once again, the authors explicitly wrote that the results were not nationally representative and stating otherwise, “is at least oversimplistic, if not misleading.” The authors also acknowledged that because they had such a low response rate their results were likely biased and thus their estimates of sexual assault too high.'