Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden have recently cited the statistic that one out of five female college students is sexually assaulted while in school. This statistic is bogus. The best response to it that I’ve seen is this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The major points being:
[ul]
[li]The “one out of five” figure comes from a single online survey.[/li][li]Moreover, it misrepresents the results of that survey.[/li][li]Much other research gives a much lower figure for the occurrence of sexual assault on campus.[/li][li]For instance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found the rate of rape and sexual assault per year, among students, to be just 3.8 per 1,000. That’s slightly lower than the rate in the general population.[/li][/ul]
Obama and Biden apparently see no need no inform the public that the validity of the statistic is in doubt, and they also aren’t hesitating to take action based on it. The administration has moved to monitor how disciplinary committees on campus respond to accusations of sexual assault and recently released a list of colleges and universities who are actively being investigated on the issue. It includes Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley, among others.
Now I’m normally quite willing to believe just about anything bad about left-wing colleges and the people who inhabit them. However, even I find it difficult to believe that the density of rapists at Harvard is several orders of magnitude above that of the country at large. Moreover, as the article by Christina Hoff Sommers shows, the administrations guidelines are against the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights and its protections for those accused of crimes. Really, the President and the Vice President should not be promoting bogus statistics, much less making policy based on them.
Well, silver lining : this should give Republican politicians a lot more opportunities to talk about their favouritest subject of them all in the coming months. Who said February had to be it ?!
Err, why ? They’re segregated and cloistered communities full of stress, liquor and hormone-crazed teenagers/young adults. Many of which are over-privileged and used to getting everything they want. I’d be shocked if they didn’t top the rape charts.
Here is a study (maybe the one referred to, though it was not an online survey) that reports about 1 out of 5 women having been sexually assaulted.
Justice statistics would only include reported and prosecuted crimes (and may only include convictions – that wasn’t clear in your link). There is plenty of evidence, largely in the form of reports from women who have complained of rape to campus administrators, that many universities (like many large organizations) are more interested in protecting their image then in protecting women and prosecuting rapists.
At the very least I’m not even close to convinced that the 1 in 5 figure is bogus.
Heh, when you put it like that, it could very well be that Democrats don’t expect to exploit the issue to their own benefit per se, but to Republicans’ detriment.
Frankly, I just can’t get enough of Republican candidates explaining the rape issue, then having to explain their explanations. Comedy gold.
In this passage, Dr. Sommers commits errors of logic that I wouldn’t give my Critical Thinking students a pass on.
First, she implies that there is a problem with the researchers deciding whether they’d been assaulted rather than the women themselves. But this seems to indicate Sommers has no familiarity with the way social science research works–or, well, you know, just research in general. If you want to find out what percentage of a population has characteristic X, you get really careful about exactly what it would mean to measure a member of that population as having X. A piece of research like this one is up front from the get go about exactly what they mean by “a woman was sexually assaulted.” They’ve laid out exactly what kinds of experiences they intend that term to mean. It’s all right there in the study, and there should be no confusion on the point.
Importantly, they are not interested in measuring the characteristic “the woman characterizes herself as having been sexually assaulted.” That would be a different study entirely.
That should be obvious to Dr. Sommers (and to you, ITR Champion, as you present yourself as a reasonable and intelligent fellow around here) and I would like to know why it is not.
Well, that’s not an error I’d harsh my CT students too much on. It’s a little subtle for many Freshmen I suppose.
But then Dr. Sommers engages in a genuine howler–as in I actually laughed out loud upon reading it, with good reason. She reports that
A) “[t]he survey also asked subjects if they had sexual contact with someone when they were unable to give consent because they were drunk.”
And then says a tiny bit later by way of criticism,
B) “Surely reasonable people can disagree on that. If sexual intimacy under the influence of alcohol is by definition assault, then a significant percentage of sexual intercourse throughout the world and down the ages qualifies as crime.”
(Yes, I skipped something. I’ll come back to it. The reason for the letter-labels will become clear at that point.)
Notice what she did there? It’s a textbook fallacy, the one called “straw man.” She does it right there in the span of a couple of sentences. The survey asks about inability to give consent because they were drunk. But Sommers immediately mischaracterizes this as involving mere “sexual intimacy while under the influence of alcohol.”
Dr. Sommers has a PhD in Philosophy. She is not by any means a stupid person. She knows exactly what she is doing here. I do not know, ITR, whether you knew what she was doing here, but you should have, since as mentioned above, you present yourself as a reasonable and intelligent person around these parts.
Okay so I know I skipped something and you may be anxious to pick at it, so let me address that. Surely, in between sentences A and B, she did say also
C) “According to the authors, ‘an intoxicated person cannot legally consent to sexual contact.’”
So am I wrong to say that her B) is a Straw Man attack on what the survey said at A)? B refers more directly to C), doesn’t it?
But look at what B says. “A reasonable person can disagree.” With what? What C says is that an intoxicated person cannot legally consent to sexual contact. And that’s absolutely correct. A reasonable person cannot disagree with this claim. There’s no way Dr. Sommers thinks a reasonable person can disagree with this claim (and if she does think so we’ve got much more work ahead of us than I thought).
So what is it she thinks a reasonable person can disagree with? She tells us when in B) she goes on to intimate that it would be unreasonable to call all sex under the influence “assault.” What she quotes the survey authors as saying at C) has nothing to do with the question of whether sex under the influence is assault, or at least, A) has a much clearer and cleaner connection to B) than C) does.
So it seems pretty clear that at B) she is intentionally engaging in a straw man attack against the survey’s argument, and in my view that’s not just sad or unfortunate, it’s downright morally wrong. She is using her powers for evil instead of good. She’s one of the bad guys–and you’re on her side, ITR.
And even if I’m wrong and her reference at B) is more directly to C) than to A), then she’s still committing a straw man attack–given that C) does not say anything about assault or mere sex under the influence. Is it an intentional one? Perhaps not in this latter case. Maybe she’s just really hopelessly confused about how to understand the survey and the logic of its researcher’s argument.
Her with her Philosophy PhD and her prominent, effective and important public voice–unable to understand the very things she claims to be able to assess authoritatively. That’s damned irresponsible of her, and irresponsible people are, once again, the bad guys.
This here article looks at three universities and the rapes reported on campus to the campus authorities, it then assumes a rate of 90% of rapes going unreported, as feminists claim, and no, it’s still nowhere near one in five.
They aren’t against the Bill of Rights because they don’t deal with crimes, you might think rape is a crime that ought to be dealt with by the police and legal system, they would prefer it to be dealt with in a way that should really please no-one, with the innocent being punished and the guilty getting off light.
Frylock. I think if they’d been “really careful” they might have defined what it means to be unable to consent due to intoxication. As you say, a reasonable person cannot argue with the proposition that the law says someone who is intoxicated cannot consent. Hence, whether someone was drunk to unconsciousness, tipsy or sober enough to drive, having consumed but a single unit, it’s still going to be counted the same by the study.
The badly formulated questions and exclusion of male students makes the deceptive intent of the study clear. Well, I say badly formulated, that of course depends on the purpose of the questions, which would then make the questions well formulated for the purpose which I posit they were designed to serve.
Incidentally, wikipedia, crediting Ms Magazine, gives the figure for men as 1-in-7.
The OP’s article does not link to the survey. My post in link #3 does, and if one follows the links within, one can find a link to the report itself.
And you’re just really wrong here (as is the OP’s article). They defined rape with regards to alcohol and consent using the following language: “Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.” (bolding mine)
It’s not just being drunk, it’s being drunk (or drugged/high) and unable to consent. And no reasonable person can argue with this definition. Having had one drink is not ‘drunk and unable to consent’, and neither is even, say, seven or eight drinks and a slurred ‘yes, I want it’ (though the latter might be morally wrong to take advantage of, IMO, but still not rape by this definition). ‘Drunk and unable to consent’ implies the literal inability to say ‘yes’… so someone so drunk they can’t speak or think coherently, basically.
So the study asked women if they had received any unwanted penetration when (among other circumstances) drunk and unable to consent, and a ‘yes’ answer was counted as rape. As it should have been.
I don’t think agreement with your beliefs is as universal as you think it is. As one self-described liberal and feminist says:
Yes, you can be drunk and have sex. What feminists tend to advocate for is enthusiastic consent - the belief that consent is the presence of a “yes”, not just the absence of a “no”. Throwing a few back doesn’t mean you can’t enthusiastically say yes to sex.
I would naturally interpret that sentence to mean intoxicated or, alternatively, passed out and unable to consent. Assuming people from your culture would interpret it your way, the term “unable to consent” could still mean legally unable to consent, rather than physically unable to say the word “yes”. Certainly your example of someone who has drunk eight alcoholic drinks and can just about slur out a “yes” would legally be a rape victim because they are unable to give consent. That was the whole point, that being “unable to consent”, as I thought everyone on earth knew thanks to various publicity campaigns, doesn’t literally mean physically unable to offer consent.
Well, you know, if it’s true that the Ivy League and other top universities are really bastions of rapists, it sort of raises the question of why society has such a positive opinion of them? Governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year so that kids can go to college. Obama has said that he wants to spend a lot more. People wring their hands about the possibility that high tuitions may be causing people to turn away from college. Vast resources are spent to guarantee that high-schoolers get into college. And all of this so that students can go to a place where 1 in 5 will either rape or be raped?
Incidentally I love your use of this phrase to self-deprecatingly suggest that you’re extending the benefit of the doubt in this case, as though you have no overwhelming desire to ding leftists and feminists whenever you get a chance, as though your true delight here isn’t mocking Obama. Very convincing!
If we’re looking in the same place, the survey did not ask if the contact was unwanted. I read: “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you? By vaginal sex, we mean that {if female: a man or boy put his penis in your vagina} {if male: a woman or girl made you put your penis in her vagina}?” Thus, it does not follow that someone who answered “yes” to that question has been raped.
You are wrong. I was taught in my mandatory training during freshman orientation that any level of intoxication made consent impossible. Whether one agrees with that or not is another matter, but plenty of people are going to answer “yes” to the survey question when they only had a few drinks.
Please show us where the study asks that, because I’m having trouble finding it. I see a similar question on page 116.
Dr. Sommers is right and you’re wrong, at least in some jurisdictions.
It is legally not the case everywhere that when a person is intoxicated, that person cannot consent to sex, and thus anyone who has sex with them has legally committed rape or sexual assault. Intoxication is a condition that exists in degrees, not a yes/no condition. The law is quite specific in some cases that in order to pursue a rape allegation in this context, it must not only be shown that the accuser was intoxicated, but was severely intoxicated to the point where consent was impossible. In addition, it must be shown that the defendant was aware of the person’s being in that condition. In Massachusetts, for instance, see Commonwealth vs. David Blache:
for the Commonwealth to meet its burden of proof on the complainant’s lack of consent by establishing that she was incapable of consenting, the Commonwealth must show not simply that she lacked sobriety or was intoxicated, but that as a result of the alcohol and drugs she consumed, the complainant’s physical or mental condition was so impaired that she could not consent. Commonwealth vs. Martin Urban is also of interest in this debate, and contains basically the same conclusion.
So it is not the case that any person who has sex while intoxicated is legally a victim of rape or sexual assault. Yet the people who conducted the study in question classified anyone who reported having sex while intoxicated as a victim of sexual assault, using that to arrive at the “19%” figure, which in most reporting was bumped up to 20%. Dr. Sommers is right to criticize them for doing so. There were several other flaws in the study as well.