So the topic of rape on campus has been getting some attention of late. There have been high-profile reports of cases on several major universities, some of which didn’t turn out to be so reliable. There was the oft-cited statistic that one fifth (or one fourth, or one third) of all women who go to college are raped there–a highly dubious claim. There’s a bundle of new policies at universities all over the country, all supposedly introduced to combat the epidemic of campus rape, policies thatviolate the civil rights of the accused.
And then there’s David Lisak, a psychology professor formerly the University of Massachusetts Boston. He wrote this paper, purportedly proving that the great majority of male students who commit rape are serial rapists and violent predators. These facts have been cited by the Obama Administration and used to justify the aggressive policies employed against men accused of rape on campus. Lisak himself has spoken out on the topic, telling universities that “Every report should be viewed and treated as an opportunity to identify a serial rapist.”
Now a slight problem has come to light. Lisak’s research may be very highly flawed, and he may have been outright misleading. Problems with the survey data that his statistics are based off of are apparent. First, Lisak has often implied that he conducted the surveys himself, yet now it seems that he didn’t. When asked directly who conducted the surveys, he gets quite vague. Second, the surveys were don’t by handing out anonymous forms on campus of the University of Massachusetts Boston. No attempt was made to verify that the men completing the survey were, in fact, students. Yet in Lisak’s paper, he says that all the surveys were given to students. Third, Lisak conflates rape and attempted rape. The survey asked the men whether they had committed or attempted rape, yet Lisak sometimes reported the results with no mention of attempted rape. Fourth, Lisak took results from a small sample of men on one campus, and has acted since then as if he’s proven something about the general population of men on all campuses everywhere. That sort of generalization is a statistical no-no; everyone who’s taken Stats 101 should know that. And then there’s the kicker, reported by Linda Lefauve:
There were 1,882 subjects in the pooled data, men ranging in age from 18 to 71… Among these men, 120 had engaged in actions that meet the legal definition of rape or attempted rape, based on responses to an anonymous survey they completed…Of those 120 men, 76 met Lisak’s definition of multiple offenders.
Lisak told me that he subsequently interviewed most of them. That was a surprising claim, given the conditions of the survey and the fact that he was looking at the data produced long after his students had completed those dissertations; nor were there plausible circumstances under which a faculty member supervising a dissertation would interact directly with subjects. When I asked how he was able to speak with men participating in an anonymous survey for research he was not conducting, he ended the phone call.
It seems like a good question, and abruptly ending a conversation without answering a question about your research doesn’t look very professional. Add it all up, and it seems like there are strong reasons to doubt Lisak’s credibility and be skeptical of his conclusions.
Or maybe not. The Atlantic just published a big article of sexual assault on campus, treating Lisak’s claims as proven fact and making no mention of the facts that Lefauve dug up. A good policy for dealing with sexual assault on campus needs to be based on good science. Let’s hope that the truth about Lisak’s paper gets out to more people.