The College Fix

National Review Online’s Kevin Williamson takes on the conventional wisdom that is the “one in five college women get sexually assaulted” claim:

Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.

This is a matter of concern because a comparison between the NIJ’s estimates of college-campus rape and the estimates of rape in the general population compiled by the DoJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey implies that the rate of rape among college students is more than ten times that of the general population.

Williamson points out that even the Dept. of Justice acknowledges that this may be because survey questions pertaining to the issue are framed “so loosely as to include actions that ‘are not criminal.’”

If you are having a little trouble getting your head around a definition of “sexual assault” so liberal that it includes everything from forcible rape at gunpoint to acts that not only fail to constitute crimes under the law but leave the victims “unclear as to whether harm was intended,” then you are, unlike much of our culture, still sane (emphasis added).

Bureau of Justice statistics state that instances of sexual assault have dropped by two-thirds since 1995.

Williamson concludes by noting how ridiculous it is that we really don’t seem to want to know what the real figures for sexual assault/rape are: “We’d never accept that the National Bureau of Economic Research didn’t know whether the inflation rate were 1.6 percent or 17 percent.”

So, why all the ambiguity about rape statistics?

Because of the interest in “quasi-criminalizing opposition to feminist political priorities,” Williamson says. And don’t forget The Narrative, of course … a Narrative made even more powerful by a White House and celebrity media blitz, among other things.

Read the full article here.

h/t to Instapundit.

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