The College Fix

This should be the headline on any media report of this new single-university study of campus sexual assault: “Researchers say you’ve been raped if you’re buzzed during sex.”

Here at The College Fix we’re used to seeing sloppy or nonexistent definitions of “incapacitation” in the context of sexual-violence surveys, education and training materials, legislation and campus conduct codes.

It’s not a light matter: Taking advantage of someone who’s incapacitated is not only grounds for expulsion, but prosecution.

But the definition in the new study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which is not spelled out in the paper’s free abstract (you’d have to pay for the full paper to find it), is so ludicrous that it’s amazing it got past peer review.

Ashe Schow at the Washington Examiner obtained a copy from one of the study authors, who readily admitted it’s not representative beyond the one upstate New York university where it surveyed just under 500 freshmen women.

Schow writes:

Where the study is a little different than others is that it doesn’t include fondling or kissing in its definition of sexual assault. Past studies have included such actions to bolster their findings. The study also separates “forcible rape” from “incapacitated rape.” Naturally, the study found a higher rate of “incapacitated rape.” This is problematic because “incapacitated” is loosely defined early in the paper as “when alcohol or other drugs are used,” which would include an exorbitant number of consensual sexual encounters.

“When alcohol or other drugs are used.” When are alcohol or other drugs not used ahead of time when coeds – especially strangers or friends with relationship-boundary issues – hook up?

There’s a good reason that alleged rape victims often have trouble reconstructing a timeline of the incident in question: They’re frequently drunk and perhaps not using their best judgment. That doesn’t mean you can’t easily divine their will from their actions.

One of the first major lawsuits by a student accused of rape that included voluminous evidence of text conversations shows just how determined to have sex even a drunk person can be, before crying rape later.

It’s not a stretch to say that when two partners have both been drinking or doing drugs and the woman later claims to have been raped, the man is much more likely to be found at fault in a campus disciplinary proceeding, regardless of who was more intoxicated.

So by defining “incapacitation” as simply using alcohol or drugs, the study nakedly absolves itself of its burden of showing that a huge chunk of alleged rape victims couldn’t decide for themselves to engage in sex.

Schow lays out the “incapacitation” question in the survey to show how poorly worded it was:

It asks “How many times, when you were incapacitated (e.g., by drugs or alcohol) and unable to object or consent, has anyone…” but doesn’t add any kind of “when you didn’t want to” qualifier. This opens up the possibility that drunk but wanted sex was included in the survey (perhaps on purpose).

It wasn’t the only poorly worded question, as Schow notes: One question (not included in survey results) implies that a partner who “overwhelmed you with arguments about sex” had tried to rape the other person, and it goads respondents into saying they have been victimized by asking “how many times” it happened.

It’s just the inverse of the old loaded question “have you stopped beating your wife?”

None of these caveats appears in Brown University’s release about the survey by one of its professors, who leads its Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies (the study was also supported by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism).

Brown recognizes that other studies have been criticized for laughably broad definitions of sexual assault, so it clearly states that the “study data do not conflate other forms of sexual misconduct such as unwanted touching or verbal abuse with the incidence of rape.”

But it uncritically regurgitates survey findings that should be taken with a mountain of salt:

All told, 37 percent of the women said they had experienced at least one rape or attempted rape between age 14 and the beginning of sophomore year, according to the data.

“In our sample, by the time they were college sophomores, 37 percent of these women had experienced one or the other kind of rape — that’s over a third of female students,” Carey said. “That is remarkable. If I have a class with 25 upperclass women, eight of them may have experienced an event like this and all that can come with it — increased mental health concerns, difficulty trusting new partners, increased risk of substance misuse to cope, and the risk of getting behind and not doing well in school.”

Here’s a good followup research project: in-depth interviews with all 480-odd students at this upstate New York university and full publication of research notes (with respondent names redacted), so the public can judge just what these young women (and researchers) consider “rape or attempted rape.”

I suggest an author without ludicrously broad definitions of rape – perhaps Schow or Reason‘s Cathy Young – lead that followup.

Greg Piper is an associate editor at The College Fix. (@GregPiper)

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