This is an update of a post that appeared on CD last March.
In a January 2014 report titled “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action” (which led to the creation of the “White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault” headed by Vice-President Joe Biden), the White House made the following two claims:
White House Claim 1. Sexual assault is a particular problem on college campuses: 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted while in college (pages 1, 2, 10, 14).
White House Claim 2. Reporting rates for campus sexual assault are also very low: on average only 12% of student victims report the assault to law enforcement (page 14).
I’ve reported previously on CD many times that there’s a huge, irreconcilable problem here. If the second claim about under-reporting of campus sexual assault is even close to being accurate, it means that nowhere near 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college. As I reported in January 2014 on CD:
The problem is that the two sets of numbers the White House uses don’t work together. If you look at virtually any university in America and take the number of reported sexual assaults, and use that number in conjunction with the White House’s 12% reporting percentage claim, you don’t get one-in-five. Nowhere near. Do the math yourself.
I’ve done the math using: a) the actual number of reported sexual assaults for several major college campuses and b) the White House reporting percentage claim of only 12%, for the University of Florida, Ohio State University, the University of Texas-Austin, Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, and UC-Berkeley, and found that the estimated number of college women who are sexually assaulted while in college is between 1 in 20 and 1 in 79. That’s still too high, but it’s nowhere near 1 in 5.
Let’s do some more math using recently updated crime statistics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for the four years from 2011-2014 (data are available here for 2012-2014 and here for 2011, and those data are summarized in the Table 1 above) and the White House’s reporting assumption of 12%. Over the most recent four-year period, there were 80 reports of “forcible sex offenses” at the University of Minnesota’s main Twin Cities. We’ll assume that 100% of the sexual assaults victims were female and 100% of the offenders were male. Using the White House claim that only 12% of campus sexual assaults get reported, there would have been approximately 587 unreported sexual assaults at UM during that period, bringing the total number of sexual assaults (reported + unreported) to 667 (see Table 1 above).
The University of Minnesota main campus has a total student population of 50,500, and about 26,000 of those students are female. Dividing the 667 estimated sexual assaults (80 reported + 587 unreported) over the most recent four-year period into the 26,000 Minnesota female students would mean that only 2.56% of University Minnesota women, or about 1 in 39, would be sexually assaulted while in college for four years. Certainly that’s still too high, but not even close to the White House claim that 1 in 5 (and 20% of) female students are sexually assaulted while in college.
Bottom Line: Team Obama asked for a “renewed call to action” in its January 2014 report on rape and sexual assault. Just as importantly, I think we need a “renewed call” for the White House to stop spreading wildly exaggerated claims about important issues like campus sexual assault. From a political standpoint, using the totally implausible statistic that “1 in 5 women” are sexually assaulted while in college certainly gets a lot of political traction (and votes). The “1 in 39” statistic found at the University of Minnesota (or the “1 in 79″ previously reported for the University of Florida, or the “1 in 34″ statistic previously reported for Ohio State and used by George Will in his infamous column on campus sexual assault), though not as attention-grabbing as “1 in 5,” are probably pretty representative of college campuses around the country and much closer to the truth than what the White House is claiming. Women attending college today, their parents, and society in general, are all much better served by the truth about college sexual assault than by Team Obama’s misleading, exaggerated, and false claims about “1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college.”
Another Reality Check: For the “1 in 5″ claim to be correct for the 26,000 female students at the University of Minnesota, there would have to be about 5,200 campus sexual assaults over a four-year period, instead of the 667 estimate above (see Table 2 above). That would mean that if there were only 80 campus sexual assaults actually reported to the UM campus police from 2011-2014, there would have to be 5,120 unreported sexual assaults to bring the total to 5,200 and make the “1 in 5” claim be true, which implies a minuscule and unbelievable reporting rate of only 1.54% (and a 98.46% non-reporting rate for campus sexual assaults, determined through a trial-and-error analysis). If there really were 5,200 campus sexual assaults over four years (and 1,300 every year) we would also have to then conclude that there are 3.6 campus sexual assaults at the University of Minnesota every day of the year, or about one every 6.7 hours! If UM really were such a crime-infested campus with sexual assaults taking place every seven hours, and with a violent crime rate worse than the most crime-ridden inner-city neighborhoods of cities like Detroit and North Minneapolis, why would any sane parent even consider sending their daughter to UM?
So we are again led to the inevitable conclusion that either: a) the White House claim of “1 in 5″ is way, way too high, or b) the sexual assault reporting claim of 12% is way, way too high. Either way, one or both of the claims made by the White House about campus sexual assault are false, and inconsistent with the actual crime data at campuses like the University of Minnesota. Young women attending American colleges today, their parents, their college administrators and professors, and society in general, are all much better served by the truth about college sexual assault than by Team Obama’s misleading, exaggerated, and false claims that “1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college.”
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1ONV3Xh
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment