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Rape Statistics: 1 in 4?
By Chris | September 11, 2009
My university recently hosted a forum on rape for female college students. They emphasized that rape is a serious issue on campus using statistics. Fact: 1 in 4 college women have either been raped or suffered attempted rape. At least that is what women’s centers at colleges around the United States claim. That’s scary high. Too high. I was suspicious. I care quite a bit about a few college women. How much danger are they in? I decided to check out the figure.
Fortunately, it is bogus. The number comes from a study of sexual assault on campuses done by Mary Koss in 1985 for Ms. Magazine. I was born in 1985 and I’m a young graduate student. How can this study be relevant to today’s college students born in the 90’s? More notably, I found this interesting critique of the study by Christina Sommers of Clark University. She notes that the study asked students:
Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?
An affirmative answer was counted as rape. In other words, a women who regretted a one night stand after a night of drinking was considered as having been sexually assaulted. The ambiguous nature of the questions and inclusive definition of rape is evident from the following statistics. Only 27 percent of the women Koss counted as having been raped identified themselves as rape victims. Moreover, 42 percent of labeled rape victims, went on to have sex with their attackers at a later date. Clearly, something is wrong. If we just consider women who considered themselves to be raped, the figure falls to a more believable 1/14.
Rape is an egregious wrong. I have no desire to minimize the seriousness of this evil. However, I don’t think women’s advocates advance their cause by using shoddy studies from the 1980’s to make rape seem more prevalent than it really is. We shouldn’t have to lie to young college women to frighten them into taking safety precautions. In fact, making rape seem ordinary is counterproductive. Evidence suggests that young people drink less when they realize that most students don’t binge drink. People adjust their behavior to conform to what they perceive as normal. If women think that 25 percent of their friends have been assaulted, they may be less likely to report it when it happens to them. Moreover, potential criminals may be encouraged. If 1/4 of college women are being raped, that means that a lot of rapists are roaming the streets free. Maybe it’s not that risky of a crime.
So why do journalists, activists, and women’s centers cling to the 1 in 4 figure? It catches your attention. It outrages you. It makes you want to do something. Such responses are good for circulation, donations, and support from the university. But they come at the cost. Sacrificing their credibility for more attention, these “advocates” inadvertently hurt students. That’s a tragedy in and of itself.
September 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
The reality is that rape and sexual assault are still insidious crimes that women “don’t talk about.” The reality that some statistics are skewed depending on your view, is not new. The goal of most, if not all advocates, is to teach women and young girls how to find their voice and be able to fight back. The statistics, regardless of which ones you want to use, are still too high after 25 years of “awareness” and are getting worse.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
I agree that it is an insidious crime and I applaud advocates for educating and empowering women. I take issue that many advocates choose statistics with the biggest shock value, not those that are the most sound. It hurts their cause.
You say that the statistics are getting worse. What is the evidence of that? What has changed? How can we reverse the trend? These are critical questions that depend on the transparent and responsible use of statistics.
September 12th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I hope you don’t mind if I treat your skepticism, skeptically.
1) Using a more recent figure wouldn’t have made much difference. For completed rape, more recent major studies have found that around 10%-15% of women have been raped sometime in their lifetime, which is in line with what Koss found. (For example).
2) I also agree that the wording of that one question, regarding alcohol, was too ambiguous. However, removing that question’s results didn’t make a large difference to Koss’ findings.
Also, later researchers repeated Koss’ study with that question replaced by “Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to but were so intoxicated under the influence of alcohol or drugs that you could not stop it or object?” It didn’t change the results.
3) “Only 27 percent of the women Koss counted as having been raped identified themselves as rape victims.”
73% answered no to the question, “it was definitely rape”; it’s not safe to conclude from that they’re sure it was not rape!
We have to consider context: we’re talking about young women, most of whom were raped by someone they knew (usually someone they were dating and had already been sexually fooling around with), who were in high school over 20 years ago, when discussions of date rape were extremely rare. It is any surprise that most of them weren’t positive that their experience was “definitely” rape?
4) “Moreover, 42 percent of labeled rape victims, went on to have sex with their attackers at a later date.”
All we know from the study is that 43% had intercourse with their rapist (or “rapist”) at some later date. We don’t know anything else; we don’t know how many of those later occasions were voluntary and how many were repeat rapes, for example. We do know, however, that the typical rapist is very often a boyfriend - someone the victim is dating before the rape.
So what does this 43% figure really tell us? IMO, it could show that girls who are violently abused (and rape is a form of violent abuse, no less than battery) by boyfriends don’t always immediately break off the relationship. Is that really a shocker, or anything that we should accept as proof that a girl or women can’t really have been raped? (Over 50% of the rape victims in Koss’ study were raped by someone they were dating - and had gone at least as far as “petting above the waist” with them before the rape.) (Also, keep in mind that we’re hardly talking about a group of experienced, sexually confident woman here; over 40% of the rape victims were virgins at the time of the rape.)
This critique of Koss just restates the old “a woman who stays must not really have been abused” myth.
5) “If 1/4 of college women are being raped,”
That’s a misstatement of what the study found. Koss was measuring lifetime prevalence, not rapes that take place during college years. (Also, the 1/4 figure includes attempted rapes, which isn’t clear from how you state it here.)
An more accurate statement of Koss’ finding is “one in four college women has experience rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.”
6) I’m not sure that you know or appreciate the historic context of Koss’ work.
Before Koss, many people argued that rape happened very, relatively rarely — Neil Gilbert argued that the “real” number of rapes was around 1 in 1000 women, for example. Koss’ findings — which have been replicated by later studies — showed that rape was a much more serious and widespread problem than that; that most rapes aren’t reported to police; and that the typical rapist is not a stranger jumping out of the bushes, but a friend, acquaintance or boyfriend.
None of these findings are at all controversial today.
Koss’ studies weren’t perfect, but they were innovative and important, and their major findings have been replicated by later studies. I don’t think calling her work “bogus” is reasonable, or shows much familiarity with the field of rape prevalence research.
September 12th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
@Barry
I think we slightly disagree on the implications of 3) and 4) but overall I think you misinterpret the point of my blog post. I’m not calling Koss’ study bogus. I’m saying that it is bogus to use Koss’ study to justify the claim that 1/4 women are raped by the time they leave college —a claim that is routinely made. You concede that doing so is a “misstatement of what the study found.”
Thanks for your comments. You make some good points about the inexperience of victims and the historical significance of Koss’ work.
September 13th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Barry Deutsch- I think you miss the major part of Chris’s post. He pointed to some very real negative consequences for women when YOU use exagerated figures.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
The one in four rape statistic is nothing but a scare tactic used to accomplish three things:
1. To terrorize young women everywhere that there is a bogey man behind every corner waiting to rape them.
2. To demonize men so that they can more easily be railroaded in the workplace and in custody and divorce disputes.
3. To purport within the popular culture that women are forever victims of gross injustice and as such require special privileges and rights to “protect them”
Why in God’s name can’t the federal government commission a neutral party like the RAND Corporation or some other entity to do an unbiased and thorough scientific analysis on the incidence and prevalence of rape as well as false rape accusations?
Seriously, I hear numbers like “300,000 women are raped every year in the U.S.” and “only one in five rapes are reported.” Almost every time I hear a statistic on rape it comes from some victims advocacy group that gets public funding for their activities and of course they are going to exaggerate the numbers. The press always publishes these stats and purports them to be the gospel truth. And anybody who is not naive enough to believe them and says something about it is immediately attacked and branded as a “rape apologist”, or worse yet, a rapist themselves.
Can’t we have a serious debate about this very important issue that affects both women AND MEN without the hysteria?
September 24th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
[…] Rape Statistics: 1 in 4? […]
September 29th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Perhaps my cynicism toward this phenomena is unfounded. Great footwork.
I felt like a pariah recently when we looked at crime data in a class, when we were supposed to be astounded that there were thousands of sex offenders living in our county. I was met with nervous laughter and strange glances when I commented that it was easy to be a sex offender in America.
I meant, of course, that the sex offender registration laws cover far too many offenses for the registry to be useful.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
This “1 out of 4″ stat is just messed up. Presuming that 99.9% of rapes upon women are perpetrated by men, are we to believe that 1 out of 4 men has raped a woman? Or, perhaps 1 out of 40 men commit rape, and they each average 10 (different) victims without any overlap of victims? The ability to adequately define “rape” is a problem. The ability to get truthful answers from those taking surveys is a greater problem. One famous example of this lack of truth — or lack of knowledge of the truth — by survey takers is a study of adult males who, on average, claimed to have taken the virginity of two women. Of course, the statistic is nonsense, as the average ought to be one because the population of men and women are roughly equal at the ages that people customarily lose their virginity. The men answering the survey were probably giving the answer they believed to be true. The likely truth is that half the women from whom the men thought they were taking virginity were lying about their virginal status. Another statistic is that men report an average of 7 sexual partners (lifetime), women report 4. Again, this is simply not possible.
How does this virginity issue fit into the question of rape? Simply that accurate stats about sexual issues, be it a voluntary surrender of virginity or a forcible rape, are hard to come by.
If one were to believe that 25% of men have perpetrated a rape, our society would be totally broken down by now. There are some cases of forcible rape. However, those numbers pale in comparison to the number of “non-forcible” rapes that the statisticians give us. If we are to believe that it is rape for the sole reason that the woman is drunk and thus legally unable to consent, then I guess 25% is too low a number. But at the same time, did she not also rape the man? Afterall, he was probably drunk, too, and legally unable to consent to having sex with her. I’ve heard plenty men state that they were totally embarrassed by their drunken “choice” of sexual partner (a gal he wouldn’t even hold hands with if sober), but nobody seems to want to call that rape. Fact is, if they are both drunk, then they should BOTH be arrested for mutually raping each other. Of course that notion is ridiculous, but it seems to be where we are going these days.
My educated guess is that the definition of rape has been so perverted, that nobody knows what it means anymore. Girl A’s rape might be Girl B’s regret. Girl’s C’s rape might be Girl D’s “I shouldn’t have gotten drunk and did a strip tease at a party with a bunch of drunken men around.” Girl E’s rape might be Girl F’s “that’s what happens when I get naked with a guy and get in his bed and stupidly expect he would stop whenever I said stop.” Girls G’s rape might be Girl H’s “I wanted free drugs and he wanted sex in order for me to get them.” Girl J’s rape might be Girl K’s “I really didn’t want to, but I didn’t know how to say no.”
I believe the term “rape” should be reserved for those situations where the woman is clearly not contributing to the occurrence of the sex act that delineates rape from some other form of assault. Please understand that I’m not defending any measure of bad conduct by the men. However, I have a tough time calling it “rape” when a woman voluntarily does everything necessary to put herself in a position to have sexual intercourse, absent her possible “just before he does the deed” objections. If someone teased a dog with food to the point of putting it in his bowl and setting it down in front of him, it would be asking quite a bit for that dog to not eat it based simply on a last-second verbal command as he reaches for that firs
November 19th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Sorry, here’s that last sentence again:
If someone teased a dog with food to the point of putting it in his bowl and setting it down in front of him, it would be asking quite a bit for that dog to not eat it based simply on a last-second verbal command as he reaches for that first bite.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:41 pm
“If someone teased a dog with food to the point of putting it in his bowl and setting it down in front of him, it would be asking quite a bit for that dog to not eat it based simply on a last-second verbal command as he reaches for that first bite.”
All men are dogs?
December 6th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Has anyone heard of “No means No”, even if it is said to your HUSBAND OR WIFE! Many domestic violence situations being or end in rape. Yes, you can be raped by your significant other. A title, such as boyfriend, or a piece of paper that says you are married does not entitle any other person to have sex with you whenever they please.
December 13th, 2009 at 10:54 am
[…] admit they raped a woman, and something completely different to say 1 in 4 women have been raped. Rape Statistics: Are 1 in 4 women raped? Skeptical analysis. | AspiringEconomist.com is an interesting read. Specifically, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn
December 14th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
There is something really wrong with you. Why are you so suspicious of how many women really are raped? You have deep-seated psychological issues and you need professional help. Get help. Now.